WIP Wed and Awards!

I finished sewing all the HSTs for my new Reunion version of Rebel Flock.  Here it is on the design wall.  It looks so different than the original!  While I love quilts with lots of rich, deep color, sometimes it is nice to have something a little more subdued.  I'm working on alternate sizes to develop Rebel Flock into a regular pattern - this is a throw sized version that will finish at about 53" x 70".

There are so many great colors and prints in the Reunion line!  Because of the design of this quilt, though, I chose to use the ones with a light background for the outer blocks and the navy ones for the darker blocks.  Navy is looking so fresh and crisp to me these days!  It almost looks like a neutral quilt in the photos, but, in person, the pops of color in each of the prints stand out quite a bit more.

I'm linking up with Lee's WIP Wednesday.

Now the awards!  Both Cinzia of Deux Petites Souris and Josee of The Charming Needle presented me with the Liebster Award.  This is an award given to blogs with fewer than 200 readers (they let me squeeze in just over that bar).  They have each listed some of my favorite smaller bloggers too.  I've been a fan of Cinzia's work on Flickr for quite some time and just recently discovered Josee's work too.  They also founded the Montreal Modern Quilt Guild - great work ladies!  Check out their posts here and here.

What month is this?

With two daughters in school, it has been my experience over the years, that May is a very busy month.  Spring is blossoming and all sorts of activities are scheduled.  From Girl Scout camping trips to dance recitals, end of year concerts and birthday parties, Mother's Day and Memorial Day.  While that hasn't all happened this month, it has been an unusual week or so for March.

My younger daughter has had three dance competitions, three weekends in a row.  These are 8-9 hour affairs. Her dance studio only entered one of these competitions last year so this is new to us.  In addition, we are getting ready for her to go to France with her French class.  We have set up a new bank account so she will have a debit card, bought her a camera, new jeans and some new shoes, arranged to get some Euros, bought gifts for her host family and quite a few other small errands.

On top of that, my older daughter has been home from college this week.  It has been wonderful to have her home but she has had several shopping errands of her own that need to be accomplished, plus some borrowing of Mom's car.

Please don't get me wrong!  I'm not complaining by any means.  I'm thrilled my daughters have so many interests and that I can be of some help to them in doing things they love.  It has just all been a bit of a whirlwind the past ten days or so.

However, my older daughter went back to college today (I miss her already).  My younger daughter leaves for France on Thursday and my mother, who lives with us, leaves for a rare vacation on Friday.  My husband and I will have the house to ourselves for a week!  It would be lovely to think how romantic that could be, but I'm afraid, after the frenzy, we'll both just collapse :)

I have managed to get a little sewing done this week.  I finally cut into my fat quarter pack of Sweetwater's Reunion.  I selected 13 prints from the line to make a new, larger version of Rebel Flock.  The prints have more variety in this version and the background is light instead of medium/dark.  I'm hoping to get the top finished this week.  How is your March going?

By the way - did you see Sweetwater's announcement of their new line, "Mama Said Sew"?  YUM!

Stitch Summer 2012

I am so excited that Stitch Summer 2012 is finally out!   I've been a big fan of Stitch for quite a while.  It has so many great projects with such a wonderful  variety of styles and techniques.

I'm doubly excited for this issue since I have a project in it!  My Daisy Chain Table Topper is perfect for this early Spring we all seem to be having (those of us in the US anyway).  The table topper is 40" square with a background of putty linen.  Whenever I hear the word "linen", I immediately think of soft summer breezes.

I wanted the quilt to have a light and airy feel, so I used my favorite bias strip applique technique.  Once you've made your bias strips, you can applique them down by machine or by hand.  I added some quilting that uses the daisy petal shapes and some echo quilting.  Since this is a table topper, I used a facing instead of a binding, thinking that it would lie flatter.  All the instructions are included in the magazine.

I haven't received my copy of Stitch yet, but if they send me an extra one, I'll be having a giveaway.  If you can't wait, click the link in the first line of this post to take you to the Interweave store.

Cleaning Up...

All the fabric that was spread all over my sewing room as a result of my swaps is now neatly put away.  I store most of my fabrics by color.

The three greenish containers on the top shelf house my solids.  I group them by warm colors, neutrals and cool colors.

The nine boxes with white lids below are where I store the bulk of my printed fabrics.  The upper shelf includes the red, brown/orange, and yellow boxes.  The middle has green, blue and purple/pink.  The bottom has labels that say cream, white and multi.  In reality the "cream" box includes my cream and white fabrics and the "white" box includes my grey and black fabrics.

Can you tell which I have the most of?  It is hard to tell from the photo, but the green box has the most fabric stacked on top of it since the inside is full.  The purple and pink box is the only one with any room inside, although the multi is not very full either.  Most of the multi-colored fabrics where purchased quite some time ago as I rarely use them these days.

In addition to these containers, I have a few solid bolts that you can see peaking in at the top edge of the picture.  I also have a few fat quarter bundles from individual lines of fabric that I keep all together on another shelf that is WAY too messy to show you.  The same shelf also houses fabrics in pieces bigger than one yard or so.  Most of these are fabrics I picked up on sale to use for backs.

Now to sort out the paper stacks!  As I use my computer (located in my sewing room) more and more for personal/household business, many of these papers have invaded my sewing room.  I visited the office supply store yesterday to get some supplies to work on a new organizational system.  I hate filing "pending" items as I'm an "out of sight, out of mind" kind of person, but the "pending" stacks are getting out of control.  I'm going to try a special "pending" file and see how that works.  Of course, no system will work properly if you don't invest the time in maintaining it - definitely a weakness of mine.  I'm sure I'm not the only one who'd rather sew than file!

Pillow Talk Swap 7

The Pillow Talk Swap 7 mailing date was yesterday.  I mailed mine out before 10 am this morning - that isn't too late is it?  I hope my partner and swap mama will forgive me!

I had a lot of fun making this pillow.  It is big - 20" square!  The last time I blogged about this pillow, I was planning to do a small version of my Urban Trail pattern but it just never felt quite right.  So, since I have only ever done one project with diamonds before (6" diamonds), I decided to make this star with 1" finished diamonds.  It went pretty well considering :)  The center isn't anywhere near perfect, but the rest is pretty good.  Some of the diamond corners don't match up exactly, but they are the kind of off you only see if you really look for it, so I can live with that.

I included a sunglasses case and some chocolate in the package for my partner.

Now - see what I got!  Lynn sent me this gorgeous pillow, some coasters that I really need (somehow, I never have enough), a nail file and these darling scissors!  Doesn't her pillow look great on my couch!  The perfect springy touch to replace the deep red pillows the couch had before.  I especially love the quilting on this pillow.  It has some great spirals radiating out from the center of the pillow and curved lines connecting the corners of the outer triangles.  I hope to be able to do free motion quilting like that one day!

Off now to try to restore some order to my sewing room!  Two deadlines in a few days makes for quite a mess :)

Edited to add:  linking up to AmandaJean's Finish it Up Friday!

FTLOS2 Finished

Today is the mailing deadline for the For The Love of Solids 2 Swap.  I've just finished taking pictures of what I've made to send my partner.  The main item is a sewing machine cover.  The small item is a car trash bag - or for use wherever she likes.  Then I added a few tasty goodies for fun.  I hope my partner likes it!

This is the first big swap I've done and it was lots of fun.  As usual, I way underestimated how long it would take me to make everything :)  You'd think that, since I've been sewing for years, I would have worked out my time estimates by now.  I had a fun book on CD to listed to while I sewed.  I love doing that - the time just flows by as my mind is immersed in the world of the book and sewing.

Full View

I enjoyed making all these little cross blocks.  I've been interested in doing something with them for a while.  There are several sketches in my sketch book and a few diagrams on my computer that haven't made their way to the top of the pile yet.

I'll be sending this package off this morning.  No rest for me though!  The Pillow Talk Swap 7 deadline is Monday.  I've made a start, but still have quite a bit more to go :)

100 Days of Modern Quilting

I'm on the Modern Quilt Guild's "100 Days of Modern Quilting" post today!  Pop on over and see.

Swap progress

I'm stitching away on my For the Love of Solids Swap.      (First post on this swap here)  This picture is one part of the quilt top.  I ended up leaving out the aqua fabrics.  They stood out too much against the rest of the greens, yellows and greys.  Pretty, but not what I wanted for this piece.  These little squares finish at 1".  I definitely underestimated how much time it would take to cut them all and then sew them together :)

The shipping date is March 10 - that's Saturday!  I'd better stop typing and get back to sewing!

Sedimentary

Life has really gotten in the way of my sewing time this week!  Nothing unusual good or bad, just lots of it :)
Sedimentary is one of my submissions to the Modern Quilt Guild Exhibit that will be in Houston this fall.  This quilt started with the idea of making a quilt from strips with the second strip in each row being a contrasting color.  After I sketched out the idea, it reminded me of learning about sedimentary rocks at school.  I always loved the rock units.

When it came to choosing fabrics, I couldn't resist the contrast of the vivid oranges and the soothing greys.  I quilted Sedimentary with simple horizontal lines to reinforce the piecing idea.  I used grey thread in the grey sections and orange thread in the orange section.  Since I didn't need to do any marking, it went very quickly :)  It came out to be my favorite throw size - about 54" x 72".

Decisions about which quilts are accepted are supposed to be announced by the end of March.  Wish me luck!  Did you enter anything?