{Post 1,769} Another Quilt Show?

 Yes, I was fortunate to attend another quilt show yesterday. This one was 10 minutes from my house. It was put on by the local quilt guild. I went by myself and enjoyed meandering about the show as well as visiting the boutique and the one vendor that was there. Lovely time! Here are some quilt pictures I took, some for inspiration, and some because they were eye candy!

The first few days of the week had me working on this quilt. It is just one fabric on the top and one fabric for backing. My friend said it reminded her of a shirt her father used to wear. She asked for it to be quilted in white thread with Wonky Feathers. She also asked me to bind it.

This quilt is one I worked on today. I had a number of my own quilt tops hanging in my laundry room upstairs. I finished piecing the center of this a couple months ago. I absolutely loved piecing these blocks. Each fabric is the background in one block and the tree in another. I got a Christmas layer cake somewhere that provided most of the fabrics. I added some from my vast stash to get it to this size. 

Today I added the 1-1/2” inner cream border and a 5-1/2” outer green border. I will start the quilting next week. It is hard to get a good picture because my sewing room is so narrow. I have to take the pictures from an angle from the side. The pattern for the blocks can be found on www.diaryofaquilter.com. Search for modern Christmas blocks. So fun and easy!

I have been cooking for the last 4 hours, and I still need to clean up the kitchen. We are having 4 college young men over for lunch tomorrow. I make so much from scratch that it takes a long, long time. I haven’t even started cleaning up the house yet. I made all of these things homemade: ham/potato soup, chicken/rice soup, iced tea, and pumpkin pie squares. Looking at the list, I’m wondering what took so long!

Have a healthy and wonderful week. What quilty thing are YOU working on?

{Post 1,768} Quilt Show

 I don’t get to go to many quilt shows. There is a big one a little over an hour from my house that I look forward to all year. To be honest, I’ve been down in the dumps off and on the last month. So my usual enthusiasm for the show was down a little. Here are some pictures from it. The first one I took because I could not find my car last year for the l-o-n-g-e-s-t time. I was so excited to get there (and I was alone). Once I came back out, the huge parking lot was packed, and I could not remember where I parked. I figure the cars around me in the photo would come and go, but those trees in the background weren’t going anywhere! I was parked catty-cornered from the bright blue car.

As has been the case for the past couple of years, there were lots of what I call art quilts. Where they look like a picture instead of traditional piecing. It is not that I dislike them, but the pictures usually don’t connect with my life. I find that I’m liking modern quilts (but not necessarily modern colors) more and more. They are so much faster to make for one thing. Here are a few I did like. They are all patterns by Bonnie Hunter. I sent them to her since I thought she would get a charge out of seeing her patterns in public.

I also took pictures as reminders of machine quilting or patterns that I like. I have had a red and cream feathered star for many years in my project drawer. After I pieced it (as the beginning of a queen-sized quilt), I decided I didn’t even want to make a second block. I might use a couple borders from this and make it into a wall hanging for our foyer.

I have seen this Gypsy Wife Quilt online and asked a woman on IG if I could buy her pattern because I did not want to pay full price. She just sent it to me for free. I would pick different colors, but I like this.

This picture was taken to give me some ideas for how to machine quilt my Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt. Mine has been all hand-cut and hand-pieced so far.

There was an area of older fabrics, books, etc. I think it was called “Gone, But Not Forgotten”. I bought all the 4” I Spy hexagons they had. I plan to sew vertical rows by machine, then hand piece the edges on an upcoming road trip. Here is mine laid out. 182 hexagons. I am going to move a few around before stitching them together. All these cost me $5. I was so surprised that I only had ONE of the prints out of the unique 182 in my stash. The black horizontal thing on the right is the arm of our treadmill. My design wall is behind it.

In the last week, I also machine quilted Oakish Leaves on this large Churn Dash quilt. It measures about 72” x 82”. This is the most dense pattern I have used in a while, and it seemed like it took forever. I used a light gray thread that matched the linen-like background fabric very well. The quilting shows up best in the last picture. Notice that the gray is alternately the background on one block, then the Churn Dash on the next.

{Post 1,767} Weekly Update

 

I have already forgotten about posting weekly. I wonder what my readers do for extra-curricular activities? Besides cooking, cleaning, and sleeping, here are some of mine:

Church services

Babysitting

Public school assistance

Teaching sewing and/or quilting to folks

Making meals for needy from church

Quilting for guild charity quilts

Decorating for holidays

Having college over at least once a week

Sewing as much as possible…

I have numerous customer quilts as well as some of my own to quilt. I love every minute of it. With the holidays coming, I’m sure more quilt tops will be coming in.

Here are a few pictures from the week. Two different customer quilts. The black one is an antique.

Here are some quilts of mine I want to sell. If you’re interested, send me a message.

We have extra choir practice tomorrow, then we are having a college student who is new to our church over for lunch, laundry, and laughter (hopefully). I usually ask the students what they want me to cook, and this one picked ALL my favorites…seriously—my favorite meal!! Are you curious? Blackberry cobbler and vanilla ice cream (most important first), Salisbury steak, mashed potatoes, and green beans. I made the Salisbury steak, gravy, and mushrooms tonight. I cook them on a George Foreman contact grill and put it all in a crock pot. It won’t take long to heat them up tomorrow.

{Post 1,766} Piecing Just Recently

Many of you are long-time readers of my blog. I am going to purpose to post at least once a week. My husband and I are empty nesters after a whirlwind of years raising our 8 children. I don’t think I have sat around and rested much, and I don’t even know what it means to be bored. Our lives are filled with vastly different activities. We have changed much in some areas of life and none at all in others.

I have been quilting for 30 years. My tastes have changed so much. I love every part of quilting. At the beginning of the year, I started following Susan Smith (Stitched by Susan on all social media, including podcasts). My love of and skill for machine quilting has forever been changed. In the past few years, I have started machine quilting for customers. I am so grateful to have sold many quilts I have pieced and quilted in the past few years as well. Not making a huge profit (because if you quilt you know the cost of materials and the number of hours of labor), but making my hobby worth it to me.

Here are a few quilts I have pieced recently. I love getting comments and questions, so fire away! If you want to know fabrics or pattern names, email me. I am also on Instagram as shelby_stitcher. Shelby, NC is my hometown.

Today I had one of our cars at the mechanic’s, and I cut another of the Twist N Shout Rectangles quilts (that’s the one above with the black border, 3 quilts up). I got the pattern at a quilt shop in WV a couple weeks ago. The one above was sold before I even had the center finished. I had mailed a finished quilt to a customer. She texted that she received it (it was the one right above this with the blue border). Then she asked if I had any new quilts in the works. So I showed her the TNSR, and she bought that one, too. I have a friend I’d like to make one for, so I will start on that soon.

Bye for now! Drop me am email and say hello!

{Post 1,765} More Kids, Cooking, and Quilting

 ***I had started this post back in July. I don’t even remember what was going on with the kids and cooking part. I finished the few paragraphs I have started. I miss blogging. I will try to post at least once a week from here on out.***

My life is not anything extraordinary or even varied much. Lately I have started doing a few new things though. I am branching out socially. I have started taking out ladies from my church one at a time for a snack or a meal to get better acquainted again. I used to do that regularly but stopped recently. I also have started sewing with two different groups of ladies…one on Monday and a different group on Wednesdays.

I made lots more grocery bags. These are lined. The pattern is by michellepatterns.com. I made some to give away. We have two birthdays for ladies in our family this month. I think I’ll mail them two bags each.

 

One of my customers brought a quilt top over yesterday. She said she cleaned up her sewing room, and did I want to look through her scraps (her words)?? I said sure. To me a scrap is a 2” square. She brought a super nice tote bag that had over 16 POUNDS of fabric in it. Not JUST fabric…a finished quilt top, 3 sets of 12” blocks already pieced. A ginger shot cotton collection, 8 charm packs (four sets of two different collections), a Bali Pops stack, two large FQ collections from FQ shop, a layer cake, over 50 six-inch squares, and a few small pieces of yardage. I could sew on just the contents of that bag for years. The above grocery bag was made from one of the blocks in the bag she gave me along with fabric my sister gave me. I gave the bag to my friend when I finished her quilt top as a thank-you for the “scraps”.