Going a little Crazy

I haven't had much to blog about lately. I hadn't been in the studio for 3 weeks. I caught a bad cold, was quite sick & had no energy to spare. I stayed home from work 3 days last week, & did nothing but watch TV. UGH!  Finally I'm starting to feel better. Yesterday we went & saw "Oz". It was a really fun movie. A good nod to the original "Wizard of Oz". We loved it. We also "Jack the Giant Slayer", another fun movie. I expected it to be pretty hokey, but it was great.

Today I decided to work on my Round Robin piece. This was my own to begin with, & the Calendar Girls added to that light green block that I had hand printed, there in the upper right.  I felt something else needed to be done with this, & decided to take a page out of Rayna Gillman's book, & here is what I did....

 I started cutting, & sewing, &...

this is where I ended up. The size is a better size for me, & it's more my style. Plain crazy!

Here is another scanner image of the Crazy quilt project. I did a little beading & embroidery on it last night. I used an old lens from Aunt Ethel's glasses to cover an old-fashioned picture, then captured the whole thing with beads. To the right of that I did a row of satin stitching with Pearle cotton & a big needle. My hands were cramping when I got finished with that. To the left is a row of bumpy yarn that I stitched down & added a row of stone beads.

We spent a quiet evening watching DVDs, as the Chinook wind was blowing & the satellite dish is useless in the high winds. It looks like tonight will be more of the same.

We have gone from sub-zero temps, to 49 degrees. The hill was an icy toboggan run yesterday. I went to go down the hill, creeping out of my driveway at under 5 MPH, slid into the ditch on the right, managed to pull myself out..spun 2 full circles, ending up in the ditch on the left, then backed out into a neighbor's driveway. She has it plowed like a large parking lot, so I pulled in, & (thankfully I was smart enough to wear my crampons), & I hiked back home. I called the hospital & let them know that I wasn't going to make it in. Warren had to hike a mile from the bottom of the hill to get home. It was a good thing he didn't have to work last night too.

Getting back in the groove

On Friday I cleaned my studio. I hadn't been able to get in there & do anything since I finished the few small Christmas projects I had done. It was too messy, & I just couldn't get going, so I cleaned. I sorted. I tossed out old junk mail & Christmas cards from 2 years ago. It felt good to get things in order again.

Saturday I was able to put a quilt on to Lily. It is a small Grandmother's Flower Garden, that my oldest sister Vicky made, several years ago. It is the first quilt she ever attempted. All hand pieced. She didn't know how to finish it, so I brought it home with me, & quilted it for her. I'm going to send it to my other sister Em, & let her bind it. If my camera gets here before I send it out, I'll post some pictures.

I also had plenty of spare room on my backing fabric, so I added a 17"x17" square of Warm & White batting, & put together a crazy quilt for the Alliance For American Quilts 2009 Crazy for quilts contest. It's all Allie's fault. She made me do it.

I had been kicking around an idea, of doing the actual piecing & quilting at the same time on Lily, so I thought a small size like this (actually it's 16x16, I trimmed it down), would be a good size to try out. I started with the back & batting, then laid the first piece in the center, & quilted it in place. I then placed & quilted each piece until it was done. Now I will bind it, & hand embellish the seams.

I used my flat bed scanner to show you what it looks like right now. The white center piece was cut from an old blouse, the embroidery was there, all I did was quilt around it.

I think this is going to be fun!