Quilt Squad Done

Here are the ladies; standing guard in my studio making sure everything is going well. I had a lot of slaplaque to do on them before I was able to load them onto the long arm. I didn't want to do all that background fill with my little sewing machine, so I sewed some extensions onto the top and bottom to be able to load this onto the long arm leaders.

Long Arming the "Ladies"

The Quilt Squad

After long arming the background on the girls, I loaded a small sampler top I was going to use in class. Class? Yeah, if I ever get the chance to teach quilting, this will be a nice little top to show examples of.

On the mower this afternoon, but I'll putter around here this morning doing who knows what.

DW in Action with the Pro Stitcher

A few days ago, while working in the yard, a thorn (pricker week type) found its way into the ball of my foot. Yesterday Hazels deck, which had one (ONE!) rough spot in it with a small piece of wood sticking out, thought it would be nice to slice the other foot open.

Thankfully, Jim forgot his sunglasses this morning and was able to (hopefully) dig out the pricker thorn. I have a bandage on the other foot.

This means no outside work for a few days. Well, shoes could be worn, but seriously, we are finally going to see 80 degrees and I'll just say no thank you.

I quilted these two quilts yesterday.

Debbie's Coin Top

Donna's Coin Top

DW did most of the work. I set the Pro Stitcher up to do an edge-to-edge on both of these and they turned out quite nice. Donnas had a loose meandering feather and Debbies had a daisy/leaf combination. Both quilts are going to be used to snuggle on the couch so leaving the quilting motif loose was the decision.

The Quilt Squad ladies are in the works. I'm doing "slaplaque" on the pieces and will load the quilt on to DW to do the background fills. Mike (my free motion Janome) is behaving well and I don't want to push my luck on having him do all that white background.

More with Quilt Squad today and maybe I'll load the Morning Star piece on afterwards?!?!

Projects

Unfortunately, I was not in the studio AT ALL this weekend. But I did work on quite a few projects around the yard so at least I was productive.

Remember the chairs I started working on a while back? Here's the before pics.

Before

And two of them are now finished. Here's Saturday's project after.

After

Pricilla also got her bi-annual face lift so she seems much happier.

Happy Flamingo

Today is being spent as a transporter for my mom for her colonoscopy and perhaps, after I return home, I'll be able to spend some time working on something in here?

AAANNNNDDDD DONE!

One day. One four hour block actually to quilt the t-shirt quilt. Since I was on such a roll, I went ahead and bound the quilt as well. Only three more steps to go: Remove stray threads in the binding. Tack down the collar of the ref shirt in the middle. Bill it.

Before the binding could be added, the pieces for the Quilt Squad were laying all over the return on the machine used for binding. Knowing the quilt size and how things get thrown around, the Quilt Squad needed to be finished. Or, at least, the pieces needed to be added. Here it is prior to stitching around everything.

The Quilt Squad

Mowing the lawn is in the future for this afternoon. The dew fell pretty heavy last night which gives me the opportunity to do a few things in the studio beforehand.

Yeah Superior!

Superior threads are primarily used in the studio. I piece (currently) with Aurafil, but am going to switch to superior So Fine! for piecing too once the Aurafil is depleted. Why? Cost. Why? Service. Why? Value.

When you have a small business, all factors mentioned above need to be taken into consideration. I've pieced with the So Fine! in the past and quite frankly, it does as well as the Aurafil, and per yard, the cost is ridiculously lower than Aurafil.

As you can tell, my thread arrived yesterday in the mail. Even off the spool (they were currently out of cones) the thread behaved well and I was able to FINALLY get the Tula quilt finished and off the frame.

On to the t-shirt quilt today.

Loaded and ready to go

I loaded it last night and am ready to rock n' roll today.

After loading the top and getting ready to go first thing this morning (changing needles, clean machine, winding bobbins, picking thread colors), I worked on my new little wall hanging project. Here's the first of four ladies.

The Fabric Stasher

Isn't she funny? The other three are just as cute, but this was the hardest of the four, and the directions said to tackle her first, so I did. It needs to be blanket stitched down yet, but despite what the directions say, I'm not going to do that until all four of them are onto the fabric.

And, I'm actually not going to blanket stitch them (I don't think). I'm thinking I'm going to do what I did on my Seasonal Silhouettes quilt and just free motion straight stitch everything down. It's a wall hanging. It's not going get much washing done to it. I can change out the thread colors easier (the pattern said to use just one color of thread when blanket stitching) and it sounds like more fun.

It's a crappy weather day so let's crank up the tunes and put some thread in the cotton.

HQ Inspiration Squad

I've received a few pics from Utah for the surprise we are building for the staff at Handi Quilter. I have to print those off first this morning to let them dry before transferring them to fabric to mail out to Washington for Jan to start getting them into what we are making. Lots of steps, huh?

I've decided to postpone row by row for this week. It would be so much fun to run around with my mom and get all the patterns/kits to build another rxr quilt, but the timing right now just isn't good.

Yesterday, despite being busy outside while waiting for bug man to come, I did manage to work on these sporadically. Before the day ended I was able to get them done. Just a little something to say I actually sewed.

Bowl Cozies

These are great for hot soup and cold ice cream bowls.

After these were finished I dug around in my 'bag of tricks' to find an Amy Bradley pattern in there Jim had purchased for me a few years back. Doing appliqué in the summer is fun since it doesn't require something hot laying on your lap. Not that it's been hot here; anything but actually. But the lighting is great in the summer and small pieces and placement sheets are more easily seen through.

It's called Quilt Squad and has four silly quilting ladies lined up with all the necessary things needed to build a quilt. I started transferring the individual pieces to fusible last night and will continue on with that this morning.

MAYBE my thread will show up today from Superior. Jim tried to track it down at the post office this morning with no luck. Apparently they were not yet done sorting through packages and didn't know if mine was in there. He has an actual run today so he can't go back in the hour they said it would take to go through everything. And my mail person doesn't show up until the middle of the afternoon which leaves me to work on the Amy Bradley piece until then. I really need to get this Tula quilt done!

Another Nice Day in Paradise

Jim and I were sitting out in front of the house (the front of a lake house is the side that faces the lake, not the side which is normally the front where people park and enter into the house) last night. Most everybody had went back to their "normal" lives downstate, or wherever they lived. It was quiet. There was a nice gentle breeze. Temps in the low 70's. Small waves lapping onto our rocks at the waters edge from a passing pontoon.

We said to one another, 'Why do we ever need to go on vacation when we live in this beautiful place?' And we don't go on vacations. First, with only one income, we can't really afford to, but moreover, why would we? The few long weekends we've had for Caleb's military stuff of late only left us wanting to be home again.

And with the beautiful day I had a beautiful amount of work to take care of outside. After finally showering again in the evening, I HAD to do some sewing, so the left over triangles from Morning Star were put into large blocks for pillow shams...or something.

Left Overs

I'll quilt these when I quilt the other top.