A Work in Progress

I'm finally getting around to posting pictures of the quilt I made for my daughter for Christmas. This one was finished in November after I put in a solid day of shop-hopping and I took it to the longarm quilter the very next day. The pattern is Check It Out from Pressed for Time patterns. This is the second time I've used the pattern. It's a fun and easy one. The inspiration came from a bundle of fat quarters I chose because of the Eiffel tower fabric. I later found yardage of that and used it in the border. I think its' a Michael Miller fabric. My daughter took French in high school and got to go to France on a school trip (I haven't been yet. . .) so I thought this would evoke some nice memories for her. As I mentioned in my post about the Boy Scout quilt , I'm trying to learn something new with each project. For this one I learned that it's OK to dive into your stash and include a fabric that wasn't in the fat quarter bundle. I didn't think th

As some of you may know, the Woodlawn Plantation in Alexandria, Virginia is the site of an annual needlework show. A local group, Nellie's Needlers, organizes the show each March. Although I have submitted pieces in each of the last three years, I have only been able to attend once in that time. Now that my daughter conveniently goes to college in DC, I decided that taking her back to school after spring break would be a perfect time to see the show and enjoy a weekend break. So we set off much earlier on a Saturday morning than my daughter would have liked. We had only one small glitch on the trip when someone misread the directions, which was fixed by using the GPS on her iPhone and we arrived safely. (Note to self: Must stop being so cheap and get a smartphone.) My daughter is not a needleworker, so she wasn't impressed by the show. She did enjoy looking at the furniture in the house. I, on the other hand, was enthralled by all the lovely stitching and so happy to see tha

Last week, my good friend and I went to the AQS Quilt Show in Lancaster, PA. We're quilt show veterans so we arrived with shopping totes and bag lunches. We had a plan for which floor of the hotel to visit first. We had short lists of items we were looking for and vowed to spend some time actually looking at the quilts on display. There were some lovely Baltimore album quilts that were both hand appliqued and hand quilted. I love to look at them, but don't think that I'll ever attempt one. I recently bought Rosewood Manor's Baltimore Quilt crossstitch chart, though. My plan was to buy a specific ruler and a bundle of eight fat quarters from one of my favorite vendors. That went out the window when I saw this cute, cute, cute potholder at the Traditions of White Swan booth. I snapped up the pattern (Hot Cakes! by Susie Shore Designs) and one of the kits. This project requires 2 10"x9" and 2 9"x6" pieces of fabric along with some InsulBrite and Warm a

I was a little surprised to find that it's been nearly a month since I last updated this blog. I've been busy with a little of this, a little of that--tax forms, paperwork for school--and I've recovered from a cold, but those things really shouldn't have kept me from posting. Anyway, I'm back with pictures of the quilt I made for my middle son who is an Eagle Scout. I've been trying to learn something from each quilt I make and boy, did I learn a lot from this one. First of all, I learned how to "fussy cut" all those badges. Then I struggled a bit with how to piece the horizontal sashing so that I didn't have a vertical seam. I checked in with the experts at my quilt guild and they assured me it was OK to do a bias seam. I learned how to handle directional fabrics in a border. I was pretty proud of my work on this quilt and I loved the fleur-d-lis design the longarm quilter used to quilt it. But this quilt wasn't done with me yet. Af