Friday's - On the Needles

When it comes to knitting, I'm a real beginner.  I've made long skinny wool scarves for winter coats and a few very simple stocking caps.  Oh yes, I did an afghan using 2 yarns together, big deal, right?  I thought that was pretty neat at the time, and the needles were only the size of a small tree limb!

Well, last year I saw this cute ruffled scarf that uses a soft fish net type yarn called Rozetti and as you knit, it does the twisting and ruffling on it's own. You can cast on 6 to 10 stitches depending on the width you want and then just knit these same stitches until you run out of yarn or you reach the length you want.  This sounded easy enough for me, so off I went to buy some skeins and try it.   Here's my first one about half done.  It's turning out fine even the colors are not my favorite.  It was all they had at the time.

The picture is not very clear, but as it gets longer, maybe it will show the ruffles better.  It's really very easy, but you have to stay focused or you will end up with more stitches than you started with.  I've had that happen several times, but I caught it quickly and fixed it before too many rows were wrong.

I'm connecting up with Judy's On the Needles for the first time.  Check out what more experienced knitters are doing.

Design Wall Monday - August 27

I did make a little progress this week on my design wall.  I got all the log cabin star blocks sewn into rows and the rows into a top.  Now I am auditioning some of my blues from the stash to add 4 small borders to the top and right side of the top.  Then I plan to put a small tan border all around the 4 sides followed by a larger dark blue final border.  That should make it large enough for a QOV quilt.  Wish me luck that I can get that accomplished this week which looks to be very busy with other activities that are demanding my time.  If you see the light on after midnight, that's me working on this quilt!!

Jump on over to see other design walls at Patchwork Times.

Stash Report & Pillowcases - Week 35

This was a good week for my stash busting efforts. Although most of it was in the form of giving fabric to a friend, it still counts as decreasing my stash -- right???  I did take some time to make two more QOV pillowcases to go with the tops that were donated last week.   The fabric of the body matches the backing of one of them.

The rest of my quilting week was spent finishing up a couple of quilts for others.  Unfortunately, their fabric did not come from my stash, so I can't count it out.  Too bad, because that would be BIG numbers of fabrics used. :)

Here are MY numbers for the week.

Fabric Added this week - zero

Fabric Used this week - 6 yards (2 for pillowcases, 4 gifted)

Fabric Added YTD - 20.25 yds.

Fabric Used  YTD - 57.83 yds.

Overall busted for 2012 - 37.58

To see what others have done this week, go to Judy's.

Free Motion Quilting

Earlier this month I was fortunate to spend a day with Angela Walters who is a fellow Missourian and phenomenal quilter.  Her first book Free-Motion Quilting includes 28 step-by-step designs for quilting on  domestic or long arm machines.

She gave us a trunk show of her quilts from this book, plus we got a sneak peak of the quilts that will be in her second book coming out soon.  Angela is a great speaker and teacher. She spent time drawing many of the designs on a dry erase board then later quilted them out on the long arm.  Two lucky ladies in our group won the samples at the end of the day.  If you are looking for a very enthusiastic young speaker for your guild who is really good at what she does, you'd love Angela.  This lecture and class was her free motion quilting for the modern quilt    It got me all fired up to rush home and make a modern quilt just to try out some of her designs.  Here are some of the examples she showed us.

Tiles w/basic swirls inside

Concentric circles with pebbles

Flower Power

feather

Plume feather 

Angela drawing out some of the designs - in slow motion so we could follow more easily.

She would do them as many times as we needed until we all got it!

Angela  has a lot of patience for beginners.  Her advice is "to just have fun with it".

Some ladies brought their modern quilt tops to get advice from Angela on how to quilt them. 

Now just to find time to make more tops and practice my quilting designs.  Oh, if only there were 48 hours each day!!

Stash Report - Week 34

This week was very busy in my little corner of the world, but not much decrease in the stash busting department, I'm afraid.  I received two QOV tops this week and one was a bit too small, so I found some navy blue with little stars in my stash to add a border to enlarge it.  Thank you Mary and Carol for your donations.  They will be so well received by one of our American soldiers returning from combat.

Even though I did some sewing every day, my stash does not show it.  The only way you can tell I was sewing at all is to look at my sewing room!!!  It's a total disaster.  Looks like someone came in and was searching for that needle in the haystack and didn't leave anything unturned.  Ugh!!.  What a mess!



My usage so far this year has been less than stellar and I had so hoped to use more than last year. Sigh.  Thank goodness fabric doesn't spoil!!  Here are my totals this week and for the year.
Fabric Added - 0
Fabric Used -  1 yd.
Fabric YTD Added - 21.25 yds
Fabric YTD Used -  51.83 yds
Net Busted for 2012 - 31.58 yds 

Jump on over to Judy's and check out other reports.

Eye Candy

It's been quiet on my blog since Monday, but trust me, I haven't been sleeping.  I've been watching some of the Olympics, spent one day quilting with QOV, worked at the quilt shop and finished up a couple of quilts for friends.

Overall Sam goes Fishing

This is a wholecloth cross stitch baby quilt that was made by a mother and her daughters for a great grandchild.  Since it was pre-marked, I quilted it as indicated.  The backing has blue, tan and brown dots and I hand sewed a chocolate binding.  The embroidery on this quilt was excellent -- the best I've seen in a long time. I think it turned out cute.

Backing

You've all heard of the Jellyroll Races.  Well this was a batik jellyroll that one of my friends made.  She LOVES batiks.  She also loves these colors, which also happen to be some of my favorites too.  It's fun working on quilts with pleasing colors and much easier on the eyes than looking at something that doesn't appeal to you.  The requested quilting pattern she wanted was a simple curvy meander, which turned out perfect with all of the straight lines on the front.  It's a gift for one of her grown daughters.

I only got a couple of shots of the finished QOV quilts from our quilting yesterday.   This was a pretty patriotic sampler. These are so much fun to quilt because every block is different.  You don't get bored at all!

This one will appeal to a race car fan. The orange logos say Winston Cup in them.  From a distance I first thought it was a Halloween quilt with pumpkins.!  I didn't realize my eyes were that bad! ha ha.  The back was a checkered flag with race cars on it.

We had a very productive day and the host church served the best lunch -- a large variety of all kinds of salads and wonderful desserts.  You know, quilters are the best cooks and we were a large group to feed..  There were 110 women and we finished 7 or 8 quilts by the end of the day.

Design Wall Monday - Aug. 6, 2012

My design wall is looking pretty cluttered these days.  I keep putting things up there and then switching around to different projects and not finishing any of them!!  Here is a UFO that I will donate to QOV when it gets finished.  I made more blocks to enlarge the center. When it's put together like this, it has 4 red borders on the left and bottom sides automatically.  I'm trying to decide how to make it bigger and does it need to have equal border widths on top and bottom to make it balanced?

 Still trying to decide what else to add to it.






I started working on two UFO's back in March, and have managed to finish both tops. But trying to get the backs pieced with the leftover fabrics of those projects is taking a bit longer than expected.   I did complete one back and am working on the other one, Winter Friendship Stars.


I was able to make 7 blocks from the leftover scraps, plus I found a tan colored piece in my stash that measures 42" x 108". I'll have to put on my thinking cap and figure out how to piece all these parts into one whole backing that measures around 85" x 95".  I may need some more stray fabrics to get the size I need, but it will be using stash.  YES!











Check Judy's site here to see other design walls.

Stash Report - Week 32

Didn't get around to much sewing this week, but I did make 7 blocks to add to a backing for my Winter Friendship Star quilt.  I'm using up all the leftover fabric like I did for the Blueberries and Cream quilt.  I'll show them tomorrow because they are on my design wall and I'm still working on getting the backing big enough for the top.  Here are my totals this week.
 
Fabric Added - 0
Fabric Used -  1/2 yd.
Fabric YTD Added - 20.25 yds
Fabric YTD Used -  50.83 yds
Net Busted for 2012 - 30.58 yds


Check out Judy's to see what others did this week.