How about something that isn't potholders today! I finished quilting two veterans quilts. I can't say equivocally, but I'd bet a lot of money that this was made by Betsy. This one was made by Glenda (Mom). She pulled out every orphan block that she had and put them together in this fun quilt.
I thought that these would be the last quilts that I quilted before vacation. I only have two tops left but I can't quilt them together. One needs a gray back and one, blue. Yesterday I got an email from peg and she has two tops ready. From the description it sounds like one will work with a gray back and one with blue. I'll be able to quilt 4 more quilts before vacation! There are more potholders coming too.
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Two more veterans quilts ready for delivery! This is such a simple quilt to make but I love how it looks and I've made it several times. I have it as a "pattern" that I called Regiment. But it's really simply 20 Churn Dash blocks. I've made this one 3 times before and I'm sure I'll make it again. It's easy, fast and looks good. I used one of my new pantographs on this one. It's called macrame and I love how it looks. The second one is the batik string quilt. This one was made with all scrap strings and I love how it turned out. I've made this one 4 times before. I lost one of the photos. I have 2 more kits ready to go! I quilt these free motion in diagonal lines parallel to the piecing. I can quilt one of these in about 45 minutes.
I'm glad to get these 2 done to add to the delivery that I'm going to make this week. It will have about 30 quilts for teh veterans! It was quite a busy weekend around here. It was also standard July hot so I stayed inside as much as possible. I got 4 veterans quilts quilted. Two are mine and I'll share those tomorrow. These two were made by other members. This on was made by Glenda (Mom) and I quilted it with one of my new pantographs. This one was made by betsy. She said it's a traditional Amish pattern. All of her quilts are really striking like this one. I decided on Woven Wind for this one because it gives kind of a fan effect that seemed a good fit for this quilt. On Sunday I spent the whole day with the Cricut making postcards. I can't share them yet until at least one of them arrives at its mail destination. For now I can say that it was a good learning day and it's a really fun machine with so many possibilities. I need to order the fabric blade. The other big job for the weekend was getting the guest house ready for friends who are moving in while they are between homes. Its' also part of the whole house reorg that shutting the business set off. Job #1 was getting this sofa bed out of the office, downstairs and over to the guest house. It's really heavy so we waited until a friend was here to help out. We discovered a moving hack where we could back up the truck to the house porch to load the sofa and then drive it to the guest house porch (about 15 feet) to unload it directly on that porch. It saved them lots of carrying up and down steps. Maybe this sofa will actually be used now! It's got to be 15 years old and it's in pristine condition. In this photo, to the right of the door is a narrow stairway to the loft. The story behind the guest house is that it was here when we moved here and it was a dump. It was filthy and disgusting. It didn't have AC or heat, aside from space heaters and it was not finished well. We invested a lot to finish it because we thought we would have a lot of visitors. My Mom stayed here for a few months and a couple of friends have stayed here between moves but otherwise, it hasn't been used all that much. That's one reason we did Airbnb for about 10 years. It was nice to have it used and we met some cool people. It was fun until Airbnb started treating hosts horribly. We shut it down after Airbnb initiated their Covid rules. All that to say that I'm really excited that it's about to be used again for a few month. My college roommate and her husband will be staying here off and on until they find their new forever home. They have a vacation home at "the river" and they have lots of traveling planned but hopefully they will be here a lot too. This is looking from the front door to the little kitchen. It's small but adequate. To the left by the kitchen is the bedroom. The bedroom is surprisingly spacious. This furniture is the first furniture that we bought when we got married. Nothing in the guest house is stylish but it's comfortable. The bathroom is off the bedroom and is just big enough. It has a pretty massive closet too. This is where I was storing the big rolls of batting for the veterans quilts. I've had to move those into the house and, at the moment, they are in the living room. I'm going to need to find a better solution for that! After Cheryl and Steve move, I'll be able to take this space over again. When we moved here, this loft was just an attic that was accessed from the outside. There were steps attached to the side of the house and they were falling off. When we decided to fix this place (instead of tearing it down), we added stairs inside and made it a usable loft. We recently had to have the drywall here repaired and Chris repainted. It's really cute in this space when the beds are made with all of the colorful quilts. The space is big enough for 4 twin beds.
If we had built this house I would have never even considered a guest house. It's a luxury for sure but has plenty of extra expenses, like and additional HVAC system. But, at times like now, I'm glad we have it. Cheryl and Steve will move in Thursday and, after this weekend, we are ready for them! I had these 2 veterans quilts quilted last month and I finally got around to quilting them. I have made this "pattern" before and I like it a lot. The effect is supposed to be like this with the mitered side borders to enhance the woven effect. I did that on these 2 quilts but I don't think there is enough contrast between the fabrics I chose for these quilts. They still look good but the next time I'll pick better fabrics. These are quilted with my standard stars and ribbons pantograph. After that last batch of quilts I decided that I needed a couple of new pantograph, I found Macrame and Becker's Shooting Star at Urban Elementz. It's very cool that you can pick a pantograph and, for just a couple of dollars, have it printed a custom size. I sized these up larger to get more width per pass. On the veterans quilts, speed matters! I used the Macrame pattern on my brown batik quilt and I really like it a lot. I'll get the binding on this one later this week.
Yesterday was mostly about doing some of my business shut-down admin tasks but I did get one of the single veterans quilts loaded and quilted. This one was made by Gwendolyn and I like it a lot. I lvoe the turquoise with the brown. In this close up photo you can see that it has a camping theme. I used the square spiral pantograph. The next quilt will use the same pantograph and thread to make things more efficient. Then I'll switch to another pantograph for the last 3 quilts.
I'm glad tomorrow is audiobook day because I won't have anything else to post. Today I go to a foot doctor and then I'm going to do a little furniture shopping. Two more veterans quilts are quilted! I'm not positive, but I think these were made by Margaret. I quilted these with the stars and ribbons pantograph and red thread. I have really gotten my money's worth out of this panto. I decided I was a little bored with it so I treated myself to two new pantographs this weekend. I'm looking forward to having something a little different to quilt when they arrive. The next two are loaded and I've started the quilting. They will be done by the end of the week. Here's a little side project I've worked on the past couple of days.
We buy the veterans backing fabric by the bolt. I cut it in 2 yard lengths and each of those pieces is enough for 2 quilts. The bolt is 15 yards so there's always a yard left over. I can cut those pieces in half and stitch them back together in a different orientation and get a backing big enough for 1 quilt. I had a stack of "ends" and got them all fixed up to make 6 single quilt backs. Now I'm going to go through that stack of batting strips (left over from quilting other veterans quilts) and piece them together to make batting for the singles. It will be like getting 6 free quilts quilted. I'm going to try to use these for the next few quilts. We had great weather this weekend. It was a good hot summer weekend and we both got outside every day for some sun and even got in an evening of kayaking. We checked on the baby bluebirds and I expect they will leave at the end of this week. I also did something new for me and I'll tell you about that at the end. On the quilting front, I got 2 more veterans quilts done and that's all I need to quilt before the club meeting Tuesday. Both of these quilts were made by Peg. I felt like this one needed a quilted motif to give it more personality, as opposed to something abstract. This leaf pantograph fit the bill nicely and it worked on both quilts. I've also been gradually cutting out the farm quilt. I have 4 elements cut out and 5 more to go. Some of you may remember that I took clay shooting lessons for a couple of years. It was a lot of fun but I stopped because I just didn't have anyone to shoot with. I've never shot a handgun but always thought it would be nice to at least have a handgun safety class. The opportunity came up when I was looking for something to bid on in a local charity auction. Up for bid was a beginner handgun lesson. I have never shot, or even touched, a handgun. I decided to bid and got it for $70! Yesterday was the day and the lesson was outstanding. Tracie gave me a thorough safety lesson and then I got to shoot 3 different guns. I was pleased that all of my shots hit the target. Chris was impressed. These were my first 8 shots! Not bad!
It was a fun few hours and I learned a lot. It's not something I want to pursue but if I ever had to use one I'd be comfortable doing it, so mission accomplished. I've overcome one fear. I'll not be taking snake of height classes to overcome those fears. I finally made some progress and finished quilting both veterans quilts and I got this one bound. I think this is the 4th quilt like this that I've made and I have two more kits cut out. I love making them. it's a great use of scraps and they look great. Well, at least they look great in my opinion. I like to do this diagonal quilting on these blocks. If you look close you can see that the quilting lines are pretty crooked. But I have a mantra that "messy quilting done consistently, looks great" and when you step back from this you don't see the wonkiness. This happy quilt was made by Karen. She's a master of scrap quilts. I quilted this one with free-motion ferns or banana peels, whatever you want to call it. It's fun and fast.
This weekend I have to get my little quilt club program ready, make a quilt label for Becky's quilt and, hopefully, get 2 more veterans quilts quilted. Part of yesterday was my monthly lunch with Mom and my cousin. It's always fun to catch up with her and we planned a trip to Asheville in September to visit her grandson and go to the Chihuly exhibit at Biltmore. We'll also see the other girl cousin so it will be a fun trip. In the afternoon I did some prep work for things I want to work on this week and weekend. Chris is going away for the weekend and I'm looking forward to having my own vacation recovery time. I want to work on some more veterans quilts so I needed to get out the next roll of batting. Our quilt club buys the backing and batting and I store it. I cut a whole roll at a time so that Brenda and I have easy access to batting whenever we need it. I do the same with bolts of batting. I have 4 more veterans quilts to be quilted at the moment. One pair of them needs a dyed backing so I plan to dye some backings too. But the first project is to quilt this quilt that Becky made. It's not a veterans quilt but it is a charity quilt. We are moving to our new meeting place in June and part of our "rent" is to donate one quilt a year for them to use as a fundraiser. I think that was a great idea and Becky is donating the first quilt. The nice thing about this quilt is that the quilting will not show at all so I can do a pretty pantograph. My other project for the week is to start cutting out the pieces for this quilt. It's going to be my project for Maine but I want to have as much cut out as possible. This is going to be such a fun project. I think I mentioned Monday that our downstairs AC stopped working. We were prepared for the usual bad news of "you need a new compressor". We were lucky that the problems is a bad breaker! We just have to get the electrician out for that small repair and we should be all set. Finally, some good news!
Thank you for your nice comments for Chris. He really appreciated them. He is continuing to heal and I'm getting back into some sort of routine. Today I'm letting him drive to the grocery store! Yesterday I got two veterans quilted. This one was made by Sheila and it's for a dog lover. I quilted this one with a pantograph called Burning Bush. This one was made by Glenda (my Mom). The mandalas are from Paula Nadelstern fabric and are printed mandalas, not pieced. I used a dark gold thread and quilted it in swirls. I like how it turned out. I also went to the REI store to buy some shoes and got some new shorts (on sale) instead. Of course I had to hem them. It took longer than it should because the were sewn together really well. But I got the sewing machine running again and that was good.
Today Mom and I have lunch with my cousin but I think I'm going to start cutting out the farm quilt to get it all ready for our trip to Maine in August. |
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I'm Vicki Welsh and I've been making things as long as I can remember. I used to be a garment maker but transitioned to quilts about 20 years ago. Currently I'm into fabric dyeing, quilting, Zentangle, fabric postcards, fused glass and mosaic. I document my adventures here. Categories
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