Some Finished Projects

I promised to post some finished projects, and I am getting a little better about loading pictures to blogger. I am learning a little more about quilting, too, by my practicing!! Our mothers always told us that practice makes perfect, and I think of that when I am sewing and see all my imperfections! Anyhow, this is my completed baby boy quilt and I am very fond of it. I showed it at a quilt gathering on Saturday, and some people even wanted to take pictures of it! It is very simple to make and very similar to the gingham girl quilt I showed before. The backing of striped shirt material seems to go with it. All part of my stash reduction project!

Look at the quilt and not the hands and feet! DH and I need some more practice at taking quilt pictures! And, again, the red in this quilt is a cherry, Christmas red.

Here is my zigzaqg quilt, all put together, and you will see more of the red and shirt material. This one was more challenging to put together. It comes from crazymomquilts blog.

Ya gotta chop off some of the zigs or zags, whatever you want to call them, to make a straight edge. Since I don't like bias edges, I cut more of my bountiful red on the straight grain to put a border around it. And, I have kept all those zigs and zags, and will do something funky with them, you can be sure!

I have started to machine quilt this but ran out of red thread. Small wonder since I have been doing so much sewing with red!!

Ah, my musical quilt. It sat for a week or so. I went to the fabric store to find something to put on for borders and binding. I loved this green batik fabric with it and it seemed an excellent match in the flourescent lighting of Joann Fabrics. Now at home and on the camera, it seems less than perfect to me.

I also bought a yard of this brick red with gold stars, which is an excellent match even under our home lighting. If only it were musical notes instead of stars!! I am hesitant to introduce the stars to the musical quilt, but I have decided to use it as binding.

Here is the quilt, with all the blocks put together, hanging over my ironing board. I decided to put a narrow green batik border around it. The coordinating musical print that I bought in the beginning is not going to show up at all in this quilt. The design is busy enough and the green batik border seems to be just right to frame it. This will hang on the wall over our bed.

I have it made into a quilt sandwich with muslin as backing. This quilt is not part of my stash reduction project!

But this one is!! This is a dolly quilt, or called a ticker tape quilt on crazymomquilts blog. The gingham scraps from cutting the five inch squares for my baby girl quilt are a fun idea for this quilt. You just sew the raw edged pieces onto a quilt sandwich! I also did some loop-de-loop quilting between the patches to practice. It was fun to make this little quilt and my grandkids will enjoy it with the dolls when they come.

I bound it with some bias pink gingham that I had a roll of from my rug weaving days. More stash reduction!

This is the holiday hexagon, again from crazymomquilts.com. I made it two strips bigger than the pattern shows. It fits nicely in the center of our kitchen island and shares the same fabric as our crazy quilt valances and our mixer cover. I practiced my loop-de-loop free motion quilting on it.

Now, back to my autumn fabric. I had posted a table runner that I made using the fabric from our fat quarter exchange at Chat & Sew, plus a couple of pieces that I had. I had some fabric left over, so thought I would cut 5 inch squares out of it and make some disappearing nine patch blocks. Here is the table runner I came up with--it's a little long for a table runner, but we have a big dining room table, so it is fine.

I learned a couple of important lessons from this runner. 1. I did more loop-de-loop quilting on it and had lots of fun doing it. However, now that it sits on the table, it looks about as flat as a tortilla! Of course, I am using 4 oz. batting which is not super-lofty anyways. But, too much dense quilting takes away the softness. 2. There are good reasons why we put borders on quilted items, and it is not just because of looks. When I sewed the binding on, I had one area that was a little stretched because I was attaching it to a seam that was weak. Binding is easier and does a better job if you are sewing it onto an unseamed border.

I had some five inch squares left over. I sewed some of them into half-square triangle blocks and made two potholders! These also got rather stiff because of my dense ldl quilting! Usually I give potholders away (they make nice hostess gifts!) or sell them, but these went to my drawer because they are so pretty! Plus, I enjoyed putting the same squares together in a different way.

Oops, I still have two five inch squares left over. How about a pincushion? I seem to use and need lots of them since I go to a quilt group, and also sew upstairs and on the dining room table.

This little guy is rather cute.

One square left. Since the pincushion above it rather small, and I use lots of these quiting pins to sandwich quilts together, I decided to put a border around the remaining square to make it a little bigger. This is a great size---

So, that ends my autumn fabric creations. I still have a nice piece of the fall fabric strings sewn together, but I have put it on the back burner. Other things have taken my creative ideas!!

In looking over my post before publishing, I discovered that my musical quilt it at the bottom of it! I thought I had lost this picture from this posting, but here it is! It shows the narrow green binding sewn around it. Now to get it quilted!

Musical Quilt and other WIP's

I had to get some more of the striped fabric to complete my musical quilt. This time I decided to tak a picture of the fabric before I started cutting it up!

Paper plates work really well to sort out quilt pieces. These triangles have some bias edges and I want to handle them with care!

This is a great tool from Fons and Porter. Jill got this one to make her quilt and I also found mine invaluable for cutting these triangles accurately.

Now, to the sewing machine! I have pinned several of these triangles together. Making this quilt is a lot like sewing plaids. If you don't cut it out right, there is no hope of it matching when you sew it together!

And I am handling these bias seams carefully!

Some of the blocks all nicely pressed, sitting on my big board ironing board.

Then I added more triangles to the squares. These are the triangles I cut from the cross-grain of the fabric. They will make a design of their own when I put the quilt together. Then off the squares go to the WIP category. I need to get some more fabric for borders, backing, and binding.

One of the promises I made myself is that I would reduce the size of my stash. When I was weaving rugs, I bought a lot of fabric. One older woman sold me her stash of fabric, and I got boxes of cotton fabric, enough to fill the floor of a pick-up truck, for $100. She worked at Joann Fabrics, and also made, or intended to make, shirts for her husband. I much preferred polyester double-knit fabrics for my rugs, so I stored this clean, cotton-type material upstairs under a bed.

I have found several very interesting quilting blogs. One of my favorites is crazymomquilts, and I have adapted several of her patterns for my stash reduction projects. The first one is a baby girl quilt, made from the under-the-bed stash of gingham. I believe crazy mom called this fair and square. She staggered her rown, but I like my lined up, so her it is:

I actually did NOT like this quilt after I got the top sewed together. It wasn't until I quilted it that it won me over! The quilting just seemed to bring it to life!

I also used a striped fabric from the same stash for the backing. I have more of this fabric and I think I will put it with the gingham on the front for another quilt.

The next stash-reduction quilt I made is a boy's baby quilt. I used red for the sashing on this. It is actually a true red, even though the pictures show up as having an orangey tinge to it. I used the darker men's plaid for the five inch squares. Here it is as a quilt sandwich, all ready to quilt:

The next posting will show a picture of the finished quilt. I also wanted to try the zig-zag quilt pattern from crazymom's blog. Once again I used the red fabric as the main color. Here is a picture of it on the ironing board after I string-sewed it together. I have completed the sewing of it together. Next I want to put some red borders around it. Without borders, the quilt would have bias edges, which I consider a no-no. It looks like this one is also going to turn out baby-quilt size.

I am very excited to say that I have registered to go to my very first quilt retreat/camp! It is in two weeks time, and I will stay there four days! I can't wait!

Quilting Adventure

My daughter, Jill, found a picture on the internet of a lovely quilt and printed a picture of it out, and cut the picture up. She figured out that the quilt had been made with a striped material, and went to town to buy some and try her hand at it. She told me about it and posted pictures on facebook so I could see her progress on her creation. I was in awe of what she was doing and decided to try my hand at it. Above is a picture of the two yards of striped material I bought along with a coordinating print. Below is a farther away view of the same thing. And--I have discovered that I must have a smudge on my camera lens. This is my old digital camera.

Below is a close-up with a yardstick to show the repeat across the fabric.

After doing some quilting engineering I determined that I want to make my first triangle cut of fabric with a dark red violin in the center of it. I bought a Fons and Porter triangle to help me do the cutting. If I were better at quilt blogging, I would have taken a picture of it to show you.

I also put a brand-new blade in my rotary cutter. Wow, did it work nice. Why do I ever use dull, knicked blades?

But first I must cut a straight line through the bottom of the area below the violin. I am rather nervous about making a mistake, so I decided to use scisssors.

Here is the section I cut off. Now to get those violins centered. They are about 11 inches apart, so the size of this triangle will determine the size of the other triangles.

And, eureka, I have cut a triangle! What was I so afraid of?

Methinks the picture below is out of place. It happens to be one of the other blocks.

By putting four of my violin triangles together, I have come up with a block that looks like this:




And here is another block:

I should have taken a few more pictures. The main blocks are the ones that have the base of the triangles cut on the straight grain of the fabric (parallel to the selvedge--were you listening in home ec. class?) Then there are triangles that are cut from the areas in between the main blocks that have their base on the cross-grain of the fabric. The stripes on them run up and down, and I managed to cut them as mirror images of each other. When you add them to the original four squares, they end up looking like this:

I discovered that there is a certain order to adding the outside triangles, and the block above is wrong. In the next pictures you will see that by doing those outside triangles right, you get more designs between the squares.

When I laid these out on my kitchen island, I really began to get excited when I saw the designs forming between the blocks! Out of my two yards of striped fabric, I got ten main square blocks, but only enough other triangles to add to five of them. So, back to Joann Fabrics, where I bought another 1 1/2 yards so I would have enough of those triangles to finish them off. I will get some main blocks out of it, too, which I will probably put together a different way with sashing or something.

The quilt I want to make will hang in the area above the headboard of our bed. We have had a green pinwheel quilt hanging there for nearly ten years, so it is time for a change!

I will be updating you on my progress! I have been so thoroughly intrigued by it!

My thanks is to my daughter Jill for discovering a picture of a quilt on the internet, and figuring out how to make it, and sharing the idea with me. Here is what I have so far:

Where were you Sept. 11, 2001?

2001 was an eventful year in our lives. My oldest brother, Ben, died from complications of cancer surgery on Jan. 19. In May, our oldest son, Roy, came home with burnout from his almost ten years of preaching the Gospel. I could write a lot about both those experiences, but we all know that the events of September 11 shook the whole world.

I was actually prepping for a colonoscopy on that fateful day--a liquid diet, then at 4 PM I was to begin drinking the clean-out stuff. Since my brother Ben had had colon cancer, it seemed like a good idea for me to be checked to see if my colon was in good shape.

So, Tuesday, as usual, I made a trip to Reynoldsville to sell my rugs at the farmer's market. Two of our workers, Cindy Peter and Karen Richardson, were at Doretha Murray's and I had something to give to them--mail, I think. I left home earlier than usual and stopped there to give them whatever it was. Donna Crawford and I had just come back from convention at Madisonville, KY, and I had a picture of the workers there. I was showing it to Cindy and Karen when Doretha's phone rang. Her niece, Rhonda DeBlasio, was calling to tell her that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. A few minutes later, she called with the news that a second plane had hit the other tower. Yikes! What was happening anyways?

Well, I moseyed down in to town for the farmer's market where we were all nervously setting up our goods. I remember looking up often, and wondering about things flying over. The man set up next to me had his radio going in his car, and I listened with him some. There were more reports of planes, but the information at that time was rather sketchy.

Business was certainly poor. Before long, the streets were clear of people. I expect most were glued to a televisions somewhere. I remember a man walking up the street with a Bible in his hand. He was a preacher and was inviting people to a prayer service that afternoon in his church.

I decided to go home early. Others were, too.

At four o'clock I began my prepartation for the colonoscopy, wondering if this was really necessary since I really wondered if we would be blown off the map by morning! President Bush had cleared the skies of all air traffic, and it seemed almost surreal to look up and think that the sky was empty of planes.

The next day I had my test at the hospital. For the first time, I saw on the television what so many people saw repeatedly--the planes going into the towers. We had survived another day...

Saturday morning after that was another farmer's market in DuBois. That day I had some red, white, and blue woven trim that I made into little bows, put a pin in it, and gave them out to people. I did not charge for them, but many people wanted to pay me a dollar anyways...

So, how did it change me? For a good while I felt that life as I had known it was surely over and that war would just break out everywhere. I believe that the fact that our country has held together since that day is because God's purpose for this old world has yet to be accomplished. He is ever merciful to give us the time we need to get to know Him better.

I think that it changed the way people in our society relate to those we love--we are more communicative about our love. Cell phones have come into common use, and we often overhear people saying "I love you" or "Love you, bye". We realized that life could be snatched from us at any time.

Whether the lessons learned from September 11 have continued to this day is debatable, but it certainly affected our society.

We Did it Again!

Well, we did it again. After Freedom convention, our cup was running over, but we went to Newry two weeks later for more of the same! On Saturday evening at Newry, I was wondering if I really could take any more in, but Sunday was another day of very helpful meetings! Convention is such a rich experience, and I came home with a great desire to spend more time reading the Bible. After having eight days total of convention meetings, the Bible is more open and understandable than ever before. As I read I find myself asking, "How do I do that, Lord?" and little by little, He begins to show me.

And now it is back to ordinary life, lived with a purpose renewed. Ken's job of eleven years is getting increasingly unstable--they got new management there about a month ago, and are replacing somebody every week or so. We wonder what Ken's future is there, but do not worry much about it. Whatever will be, will be. Ken turns 62 on Sept. 18, and has thoughts of retiring next spring.

Now that conventions are over, and summer is drawing to a close, I am more open to the idea of a part-time job. Some weeks ago, I applied at a flower shop in DuBois, but did not hear from them. Last week, I applied at Joann Fabrics in DuBois. I would really like to work there! Perhaps it is a dangerous place for this fabricholic to work??!!?? DH says that maybe I would get tired of fabric--like people getting tired of doughnuts when they work in a doughnut shop! We shall see what opens up for me. I also continue to volunteer Friday mornings at Hahne Cancer Center, and keep my eyes open for opportunities there.

My little garden did fairly well, and DID NOT BLIGHT! After last year's disappointment, I anxiously watched it this year. I did not spray for it because I don't really like to put poison on my garden. I planted most of the garden plot in buckwheat, which grew very well. When it went to seed in July, we cut it down and tilled (or tried to till!) it under. It reseeded itself nicely, and we got another stand of it. Since convention, Ken has mowed it, and I intend to till it one day soon. I have beautiful tomatoes on my four Big Boy plants, and lots of cherry tomatoes on the other two plants.

Ken's mother, Martha Grady, turned 96 on August 29. We had an open house birthday party for her that Sunday afternoon over at Jane's. It was lots of fun! She is such an amazing woman. Nobody in her family that we know of has ever lived this long.

The Labor Day picnic at Cook Forest was great fun. Brian Hildebrand and Jim Eaker and some of their family usually go out early to reserve the spot. They cook breakfast there. We decided we were ready for the adventure, too, so we left here at 7:15 and got there about 8. It was COLD, in the 40's! I took some freshly baked cinnamon rolls, and we had blueberry pancakes, ham, sausage, bacon, and eggs. Around 9, Ken and I decided to take a bike ride up the river road, and Brian, Rachel and Jenny came with us. We did a little over 5 miles, round trip. Traffic was light on the road that early.

Pretty soon, in came son Todd and Otto Herr. They are trained bicyclers, and had ridden from Brockway and DuBois to come. Their ride was about 30 to 40 miles.

We had a delightful day of fellowship, food, and fun! Some of us just didn't seem to want to leave, and stood around and talked on our way to our vehicles!!

Now what? Labor Day is past, too. I have determined that I am going to do lots of sewing, unless I get a job. I have lots of fabric and ideas. I have dreams of getting a Handiquilter 16 quilting machine but the over $6000 price tag is holding me back. I have leftover "rug money" for part of it, but kinda hate to beg the money from our joint funds with Ken's job being uncertain. In the meantime, I plan to make some more quilts in readiness for owning one. We have also been watching Craiglist and Ebay, so perhaps I can get a gently used one.

Ken also watches Craiglist and Autotrader for Mustangs! Our dream is to have another one. He had one when we were courting and we honeymooned in it and brought home baby Roy from the hospital. It turned into a rust bucket, so we traded it on another car that was totally without distinction! So, his retirement dream is to get another one, but I guess it will be a third vehicle for us, because they are rear wheel drive and not much good in the wintertime.

A Laugh at Myself

I really have been out of touch with my own blog!! Yesterday after I posted about convention, I was reading some of my prior posts and discovered I had written a similar analogy last year about convention! So, I chuckled at myself, hung my head in embarrassment lest someone reading would remember, but then, oh, well, repitition helps us learn anyways!!

Today's agenda is to mix up cookie dough and freeze it. I will bake them next week for Newry. It seems really muggy hot this morning, but I had better get off the computer and get started!!

Ah, Convention--Before, During, and After

A dear friend told me at convention that she missed my blog, so I decided I needed to put some effort into posting to try to lend some cheer and encouragement to others!

We have just returned from a rich four days at Freedom convention and look forward to going to Newry, too. So, what is convention like? What does it do for us? How is it that we are drawn there, year after year?

Days spent at convention are the very best days of the year for me/us. After I turned 50 I figured out one day that I have probably spent a year of my life in convention meetings. It was a very comforting, cheerful thought to me!!

You may chuckle some at my analogies of what convention is like, but if convention has been your experience you will probably nod your head, too!

One of the things I enjoy doing in my kitchen is mixing up a batch of buns--some have called them the Grady buns, made famous in the family by Martha and Jane before I even married into the family. The recipe calls for about 15 cups of flour, and that is the last thing you stir into the ingredients. You stir and stir, and then you get to the point where you put flour on a clean counter, and dump the dough on top of it. It is a sticky, gooey mess. You add some flour on top of it. You put your hands into it, and they get sticky, gooey, and messy. You begin to knead and after a bit, you get into a rythym of it, and the dough gets nicer and nicer. Soon it is no longer sticky, but smooth and a joy to knead. Then you plop that beautiful dough into a greased bowl to rise.

Convention is like that process to me. It doesn't seem to matter whether the year preceeding convention has been fairly smooth or if it has been a rough one--when it comes to convention time, I feel like that ooey-gooey sticky mess, dumped out and ready for God to work on. And, meeting by meeting, things come together with lots of comfort and fresh hope. God's hand has been good upon us and we are glad for his hand working on us to get our priorities lined up again.

Going to convention is like going to a huge grocery store. God's provision for us is far grander than we can ever anticipate or imagine. We know the wisdom of beginning with an empty cart, and strive to go emptied of self. We begin to push our cart in the store, and God loads it up for us. "You need this, Alma. Better get some more of this, I think you are running out at home." And on and on we go through the store.

Meeting by meeting, our cart is filling up. By the time the four days are coming to a close, the cart is filled to the point where we wonder whether it can possibly hold anything more. Still, God piles more on. With great effort, we push the cart to the door (there are no check-outs at convention, it has all been bought and paid for), load it up and make the journey home.

Our cart is so full, we can hardly remember what is in it. But as we get home, we unload it and examine those things more closely and read the Bible verses that meant so much to us when we were at convention. We sort out our treasures. It comforts us to have those things now in our possesion where we can make such good use of them.

And, once again, we rejoice because we have had the experience written about in Luke 24:32 "Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way, and while he opened to us the scriptures?"