Teddy Bear BOM - Maria, the Dancing Bear is ready

The Teddy Bear block of the month for August has been uploaded and is ready for you to download.

This is Maria who is dancing to celebrate her birthday which is just a few days away.

A note on the applique for this block - to get the feel of movement in the dress, I used the wrong-side of the fabric for the sections of the dress where the underside would be showing.    This is not a necessity, but I like the depth it gives to the block.

And yes, in case you were wondering, Maria is the Spanish version of Moira.   So this one is named after me...........lol.......  And yes, I'm sure you can guess what that means as regards to her birthday.

Click here to download the pattern.




Gratitudes:

1. Cooler weather than last week.

2. Safe travels so far for my parents.

Right or Wrong.....

Have you ever had a piece of fabric where you couldn't decide which side of it you wanted to use in your quilt?  Well that is what I've got with this bunch of scraps.  

There were 19 pieces of this fabric that were approximately 9" by 18" or larger.   I'm cutting them up into 3.5" squares to use as a background in one of my planned scrappy quilts.  (Note - a couple of the pieces I'm keeping so that I can make the needed HST's for the designs.)

The front of the fabric is a purple with a robin's egg splatter over it in a much darker color.  And then there is a metallic gold print over that.  It is not a bright print.  

In contrast the back of the fabric has a hand-dyed look to it as shown here.   And the purple is much brighter and lighter.

I'm really considering using the "back" of the fabric as the background for one of the scrappy kitty quilts that I have planned.

My question for you today - have you ever used the back of a fabric for what is seen in a quilt that you've made?

1. For the Trim Healthy Mama plan being an easy one to follow and live with, and the results that are coming with it.

2. For it not being 110 degrees here!

It's Quilted!

My row-by-row is now quilted and I've put the side borders onto it!  All that is left is to get it bound and a label put onto it....woohoo.  

My aim is to get it turned in on Saturday, hopefully at Pieced Together (where I basted the swan quilt last weekend).   If they have a winner before I can get there, then I'll be checking with others that are further away to figure out where I can turn it in.

The quilt is approximately 80" or so long by approximately 46" wide (guestimating on this one...lol).

Three big chunks of scrap batting were used up in quilting it, and the backing came from the stash (and there are still 4 yds of it left!).

Gratitudes:
1. I'm almost done with this!

2. I get to go out to dinner with 50-yr long friends tonight.  Am looking forward to seeing them tonight.

Mail Call

I've been blessed the last couple of weeks to be the winner of a couple of blog giveaways.

The first was by Annie who blogs at - anniesrubyslipperz after taking part in her sew30sewfun challenge for June.  The challenge was to sew for at least 30 minutes a day 6 days a week so that anyone taking part could make progress on their projects.   Taking part in the challenge was really helpful to me to make progress on several different projects.   My wonderful prize was a gift certificate that I haven't spent yet, but I will.  =)

The second was a giveaway for a quilt book.  This was given away by Angie who blogs at quiltingreadersgarden.blogspot.com .  This is a technique book and that is good for me because I've yet to ever make a quilt exactly like someone draws up a pattern.   It just isn't in my DNA to do so.

Check out their blogs to see what they are up to these days.

Gratitudes:
1. For the blessings of the goodies that I've won lately.

2. For this being the last day to get fillings taken care of (and I'm not thinking about all the work still left to do!)

Weekend Progress

The first thing accomplished this weekend was getting the swan quilt pin basted.

And I've made a lot of progress in getting my row-by-row quilt finished.   The final 2 rows were made and attached to the quilt top and the extra needed length was added to the quilt back.  Rows 3 through 6  have been quilted, and row #7 is now in progress of being quilted.

Still to do to finish this quilt up -

• Finish quilting row 7 (with the school bus)
• Quilt row 8 (the bottom row)
• Add 4" cut borders to the sides of the quilt
• Add binding and sew it down
• add a label
• Turn it in at one of the stores

Successes with this quilt:

-- other than the sky fabrics in 7 out of the 8 rows, all of the fabrics for this quilt have come from my stash.

-- Most of the applique pieces have come from my scrap stash.  Only two pieces came from yardage, and one of those was a piece that I had already cut off of for the swan quilt!

-- This one has been quilted in a modified quilt-as-you-go style to make it easier to handle

-- I've managed to meander two of the rows fairly successfully.   Only problem was that the bobbin thread on one of the rows has a few spots where it is a little looser than I'd have like.  Hard to see tho, so i'm not taking it out.

Also worked on and completed over the weekend was getting the commissioned swan quilt.  I did the basting at my local quilt shop - Pieced Together in Mesquite.  The shop is about 7 miles (15 minutes) or so from my house which is really nice.

The owner has said that I'm welcome to do my basting there as long as she doesn't have any classes going on.  =)   She's a great gal and her daughter and daughter in law also work there.   Love digging thru their scrap barrel.  =)  She's got about 5000 bolts of fabric and lots of wonderful stuff.   About the only thing I don't remember her having is civil war fabrics.

Gratitudes:

1. Being able to make progress on projects w/o pulling my hair out.

2. For the rain over night which helped give a wee break in the high temps and humidity this week.

Stretching Art 2018 Inspiration

I love looking at pics of plants that show geometric designs and progressions inherent to the plants themselves.   And have wanted to do a quilt based on them for a long time.

This year's challenge is "Focus" and I found a picture to serve as my inspiration.  This pic of a succulent with the lady bugs in the center has really caught my attention.    So this is the one that I'm definitely going to do.

However, having said that....I'm also intrigued by a couple of other pictures and am sooooooo tempted to use them as well.  Especially the one with the raccoon.   Don't you just wish you knew what he (or she) was focusing on?

Gratitudes:

1. The inspiration for creative endeavors that is all around us.

2.  The ability to take that inspiration and do something with it.

Row-by-Row Row #7

The row pattern for this was from Fabric Fanatics.  The original pattern was of a quilt shop hop bus on the way to a shop.  

I changed the pattern to feature a school bus on the way to school.  Not seen in the picture are the buttons I used for the headlights and for the lights up at the top.   With the exception of the sky fabric, all fabrics in the row are scraps.

And here is the original as the store made it.

Gratitudes:
1.  I finally made it to work this morning after dealing with the traffic mess left over from fatal accident on the freeway in the very early hours of this morning.

2.  It's Friday!

Row-Hopping, Final Day in Dallas

I think I've finally hit most of the stores in the DFW area.....with stopping by the last two just this week.    I picked up two rows.

The store I stopped at was the "Bernina Sewing Center".  This was the store I hadn't been able to find several weeks ago thanks to google directions.  =P     It is a nice looking store and had a nice, but small selection of fabric.  Focus of the store is more on selling machines.

Their row was this cute one with two vehicles towing the little retro campers.  The sample was worked up in two ways (tree machine embroidered vs appliqued as in the pattern).  The shop has a 3D, scalloped awning in the sample which is really cute.

The second shop I stopped at was "Fabric Fanatics" and I love stopping at this shop.   The only fabrics in the store are batiks and they are all lovely, definitely drool worthy.....lol.

Their row is this cute shop hop bus on it's way to the next shop.   The pattern gives the basic pieces for all but the hills and road.   And encourages quilters to be creative when making it.  

This is one of the rows (#7) that I'm making for my row-by-row quilt this year.   But i'm changing it up and making the bus a school bus and doing a little school instead of a quilt shop.  I have the row fused and ready to stitch down with plans to do that tonite once I get home from work.

I'm working hard to get my quilt done so I can turn it in and as of this point I know of 5 stores that I've made rows from that don't have winners yet......here's hoping I can get mine done in time to turn it in.  =)

Gratitudes:
1. for the fun I'm having in finding the right scraps to make each row

2. For the progress I know I'm making with my diet and losing weight, in spite of days like today when my ankles and feet are swollen and hurting.

Planned Scrappy Projects

I've been sorting through my purple scraps so that I can get some of them used up.  Have been cutting squares from them for the puppies quilt that I showed a couple of days ago.

In the sorting I found two different fabrics that I have a large amount of scraps of.  These had to be ones that I bought at some point but I couldn't tell you where now.  

the one on the left has a metallic cold print on top of the purple.   Both of them have enough to do the background of some of the critter quilts that I have planned out, well at least this first plan, and I think the second one.  =)

Will probably pull bright colors for the cats.   Out to make a couple of cute quilts.

Gratitudes:

1. It's a new work week and I still have a job.

2. It's the middle of the summer.

Weekend doings

Progress has been made on my row-by-row quilt.  5 rows are now complete and sewn together.  I have also started the quilting process, and have the top two rows quilted.

Backing fabric was from my stash.  2nd picture shows the quilt draped over my little cutting table.  It is 36" wide so the quilt doesn't quite fit on it.   But it has not been hard to work with.

Approximate count of different fabrics in the quilt so far is over 50.  =)




Rows 3 & 4 are now pinned and ready for quilting.  Will wait on pinning row 5 until after rows 6 & 7 are completed and attached.

After all the rows are on and quilted then I will be adding a black border down each side the same size as the sashing in between the rows.   Am debating whether to add a border after that or not.

Am going to try to see if I can get it finished up this week and turned in.

Gratitudes:
1. Many of the fabrics have come from my stash of scraps, love working with them.

2. For being able to find fabric for skies to use in this years rows as well as in the AZ rows that I have collected for a quilt for my bed.

Weekend Hop

Wend by two more quilt stores for rows on Saturday.  First store was Texas Quiltworks and there I picked up their row pattern and a license plate for my friend Susan who blocks here.

I was disappointed in the shop, they are discontinuing carrying fabric and going only to selling and servicing Bernina machines.   So their fabric selection is minimal, and mainly older civil war repro's.   No winner turned in here, but then again I wouldn't want any of their fabrics...lol.








Next up was Blue Ribbon Quilt Shoppe.  I picked up their row kit because I'd love to do this one for myself at some point and I wanted the figure for in the car.  =)  However, I also do intend to make it for my row quilt but will need to scrounge through my novelty prints to find some other figure for the car.   Am hoping I have something that will work.

They did not have a winner yet that I saw so it is a possibility for turning it in.   there are still a couple of other stores closer that I haven't seen with winners posted yet, but will  have to call when I have my quilt finished.

Bottom pic shows the figure I picked.

Gratitudes:
1. Safe driving on my travels Saturday.

2. No rain while I was driving.  =)

 

Scrap Happy Fifteenth - Scrappy Pups

I finally decided I'd use some of my purple scraps because I have two big bags of them - a full 2-gallon sized one and a 3/4's full 1-gallon sized one and it is getting hard to close the tote that they are in.  (Yes I need to do something with more than just the purple ones!)    Might be time to use them......lol.

This will be the first quilt from the purple scraps.   My aim is to comfortably get them back into one bag (albeit a 2 gallon one)!  It will take at least a couple of quilts approximately 40" by 60" to actually get to that point and possibly more.



The next scrappy quilt that I'll be working on is this one featuring two pups.    I 'll be making it with 3" finished squares.  Bodies will either be light or medium purples, ears - dark purples and noses black.  The heart will most likely be pink.







For today's post I'm linking up with Kate who blogs at https://talltalesfromchiconia.wordpress.com



Gratitudes:

1. For all of the opportunities that have been given to me.

2. For the friends in my life.

Rows 4 & 5

Two more rows are in various stages of progress for the 2017 Row-by-Row.

The top row is from Minding My P's & Q's in Denton.  bottom row is from Cabbage Rose Quilting and Embroidery in Fort Worth.  The bottom row still needs to be stitched down and the wagon wheels embroidered.  Scraps were used for the design elements.

The last two pics show the two rows as they were done by the stores.

Gratitudes:

1. No rain this week so far.  =)

2. Almost to the weekend.

Row-Hopping, Day 3

Made it to 6 stores this past Saturday in the NW part of the metroplex - only 110 or so miles of driving this time!

In order, the first store I stopped at was The Old Craft Store in Carrolton.   Lots of wonderful fabric, although it was a little bit of a pain to get to because of construction.  Their row has this cute quilter's train on it.

Found another sky fabric and two lovely batiks for block backgrounds.   The two upper fabrics were in the clearance fabrics.  The alphabet one will go with my alphabet fabrics to be used in making kits to sell and the other is a batik.  Might use a bit of that for binding on the flamingo quilt, although I'm not fond of hand sewing batik binding down.











Store #2 was "Minding My P's & Q's" up in Denton.   Not a huge store, but a decent selection of fabric.   They were celebrating the store's 2nd birthday so had lots of sales going on.

Fabrics were buy 2 yds, get one free - So I ended up with part of the tan one for free.   The scrap bag is the size of a typical pattern bag and yes I stuffed it full - but managed to get it closed w/o it popping open.  =)

Smaller scraps here - precut triangles of the same fabric line in the red and blue on the left.  The green and yellow in the middle were just 8" and 7" by WOF, and then some squares and smaller scraps on the right.

The striped piece on top of the pile on the right is earmarked for the flags in this row that I got at Cabbage Rose Quilting.

Next into the scrap bag went this panel featuring different scenes from Texas.

And the last item that I managed to get into the scrap bag was this panel.  The print is by Jim Shore and there's nothing wrong with the panel that I can see.  This panel alone was worth more than the cost of the scrap bag ($5).   Can you tell that most stores who sell their scrap bags don't make money off of me?

Will take and finish this and then sell the quilt.

Store #3 was "Material Girl" which is also in Denton.  It is about 4 miles or so east of the previous one.  Their row was this cute one featuring a family of chickens.

Picked up two 1/3 yd pieces there for teddy bears.














Store #4 was "Quilt Country" in Lewisville.   I loved this store and would be happy living closer to it....ok maybe I don't need to given the size of my stash, but still.....lol.    Close to half of the fabrics that they have are batiks which I drooled over.  There was also a good selection of all the others that are on the market these days.

They also have 4 APQS long-arms that people can rent time on at a reasonable price.....just gotta take the $150 class to learn how to use them first.   Very tempting thought for me as I have some bigger quilts to get quilted coming up.  Their row features sail boats because the town is between two different lakes (aka reservoirs).  I'll probably put this one in my row quilt, but instead of having 'Quilt Country' on the building I'll put either "Bait" or "Marina".

Found a cute little wall-hanging and bought the kit because it was a reasonable price.  Alto got water fabric for the row, a scrap bag (prefilled) with more fabics that will work for the sky in rows, and a FQ that I'm may use in a row with Balloons if I can find something with city buildings on it.








Store #5 was "Must Love Fabric" in Grapevine.  Small store with an ok selection of fabric.    Google maps did not want to route me to the right place for the store so I ended up wandering trying to find it for 15 minutes initially.   Finally made it though.

Picked up another batik for block backgrounds, a blue for skies and blackberries for potholders (planned gifts).   And got a cute little key chain as a gift as well.

Store # 6 was "Quilter's Dream" in Colleyville.  Store was a decent size in square footage, but has a tiny selection of fabric.   There might have been 150 bolts all total of fabric - far less than what is in my stash!  One room was a classroom, and there was another room that I didn't see into that has her long-arm.  Given how little fabric was there I suspect that is what the owner makes a living on doing.  

She also had a room set up as a 'Quilter's garage sale'.  Quilters from the area (or her?) can sell their unwanted fabrics, books, patterns, etc there on commission.  Did find three pieces in there that I bought.

The grey on the right is one that I've had a piece of for years - the grey swirly print makes great fur, santa's beards, etc.  Middle one is a piece of Fairy Frost in a color I hadn't seen before, and then the pink/blue one I thought might make a good border for the flamingo or maybe binding.  Haven't laid it out with the quilt yet so don't know if it'll work or not.

The day of shop-hopping wrapped up with me getting caught in a horrible thunder storm  on the way home (or as I posted on FB - a "bad, bad, ugly bad" storm.....lol).   The best way to describe it is that if you take a blizzard with white-out conditions and then raise the temp so that you are dealing with rain instead of snow, you've got what I was trying to drive in.  I ended up pulling off the road twice because the rain was so heavy I couldn't see to drive.    Was finally able to drive again after about 30 minutes of combined waiting and within 5 miles had driven out of the rain. Texas storms can be so hit-or-miss to say the least.

Gratitudes:
1. Safe travels in the storm I was in on Saturday

2. As bad as it was, there was no tornadoes associated with the storm.

Monday Goals

Just a couple of goals at this point for this week.  

The first is to finish trimming to size all of the WOW, COC and tonals in the white & cream ranges so that I can put them away in my scrap tote.  I had so much stuffed into the tote that it wouldn't close.  Needless to say it has been a long while since I did that.


I took all the yardage and FQ's that should not have been in there first out first and that freed up some space.  Then took out everything that needed to be cut up into a standard (for me) size.  The multitude of stacks on my cutting table are what was in it that needed to be dealt with.  

I trimmed things down into 2.5", 3.5", 4.5", 6.5" squares, and WOF strips that were at least 2.5" or larger.   Then bagged all that in the correct baggie.

 The final piles of scraps for this tote yet to be dealt with are these two.   They were still in a tote on my cutting table (buried under other fabric in the pic above!) and were about 12" tall before I pulled them out.

 The next thing I want to get done this week is to get the triangles onto these blocks and get them squared up.












Then I'll get the alternate blocks made - there are 2 more blocks to be made and I need 8 of each of them.  Once they are done then I can set them together in the lay out below.   Have to be careful when I'm making the remaining blocks because I switched colors in the first blocks on where the greens lay and now I have to remember to do the same switch in the remaining blocks.

Gratitudes:

1. Lots of scraps to play with and have fun making quilts with

2. A job that pays the bills

Weekend Wrap-up

Made progress this past weekend in several areas.  First up on Saturday was a day trip of shop-hopping in the NW area of the metroplex to pick up more row patterns.   I'll blog about the trip in the next day or two after I get pictures taken of the rows I picked up and the goodies that came home with me.

I finished off the flamingo quilt top this weekend.  There are approximately 700 2.5" squares in the finished quilt top.  More than 20 different WOW's were used in just the section below the body of the flamingo.  A dozen or so different medium pinks and about 8 different dark pinks were used in the body.  The black and grey were scraps as well, but only one fabric for each of those colors.

Size of the top as is now - 48" by 60".

I'm still debating on whether to add a border of some sort around it.   What do you think?

I plan on doing a cross-hatch in the background area, but am still trying to decide how to quilt the flamingo.   Any ideas?

This one will be going up for sale when I get it quilted and bound.

And if you'd like to win a free magazine, don't forget to go here to sign up.  The giveaway ends on the 15th of July.

Gratitudes:
1. Made home safely Saturday after ending up in a horrendous thunderstorm (had to stop twice because I couldn't see to drive!)

2. The summer heat and humidity doesn't last forever