I could have finished this yesterday but I'm holding myself to limited time quilting so I will finish it today. I haven't picked a binding yet so I might have to wait until I dye something for the binding. I'll be happy to load some veterans quilts again soon! I am so glad that I started this quilt. It's really re-energized me for making quilts. I've been a little lost since the blue quilt was finished. I just love making these houses and I got another street done yesterday. The two longest streets are now done. I think in this photo you can now see the gradient effect in the background. I have 8 shades of this purple and I decided to use the lightest 6. I didn't want a very dark corner. I'll use the dark for the binding whenever it gets to that stage.
I expect that on Monday you will only see these 2 projects again. I'm visiting my SIL Sunday for a special project so I'll only have Friday and Saturday for sewing and ironing fabric for the shop.
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Yesterday was "dyeing day" so I really didn't get much else accomplished. Most of this dyeing was for custom orders, including a UVA shirt for Chris to give to a friend of his. I did get a couple more rows quilted on the big blue quilt. The end is in sight and I think it will be done this weekend. I should have it ready to deliver it to my SIL at family beach week. I haven't done a ton of crochet since the end of football season but I work on this blanket a little each week and I'm almost ready to add the border.
Today I have some bloodwork, a errands trip to Walmart and acupuncture. Then I can get another 2 rows on the blue quilt and, maybe, make some more house blocks. Yesterday I had lunch with Mom and my cousin and then I went to the repair shop to make the appointment to get my car fixed. May 6 is the date to drop it off. The weather has also been beautiful and I've tried to spend time outside every day. Yesterday it was for a long walk in the neighborhood. On the way out the driveway I checked on the baby bluebirds. We have 4 in this clutch and them are at least a week old now. It's also been nice to be back to quilting. I've gotten a couple of rows quilted on the big blue quilt every day and it's about half done now. I love the cloud look on the back. I also got another row of houses built. It's coming together fast because the pieces are big and it's a lap size quilt. I am loving it!
Today is dyeing day so I might not get much sewing done but I might get in 2 more rows on the blue quilt. I didn't intend to stay away all week last week but I just didn't have anything creative to post. I helped my friend move Tuesday and Wednesday and that all went really well. I then spent Thursday just resting my back and Friday was errand day. On Saturday I had a chiropractor and acupuncture appointment and that helped a lot. By yesterday I was ready to spend some time in the sewing room and I decided to start another project. I don't have any specific project that I want to work on but I've had this pattern hanging around for several months and this seemed like a good time to make it. I went back and forth on what I wanted to do with the background. I knew I didn't want gray and I was leaning towards blue. But then I found this set of fabrics in a grayed purple. I thought that might make an interesting background bu grading the background from light to dark. I always knew that I wanted to use my "waste" fabrics for the houses. Here are the first two rows of houses and I love them! I think you might be able to see that the purple HSTs under the bottom row of houses is slightly darker than the first row. I think this is going to come together pretty quickly and it's a really fun pattern.
I don't know who will eventually own this quilt but I think it will make a nice gift at the right moment. I got the news last night that the mosaic patio is all grouted and finished.I hope to go see it in the next 2 weeks and get lots of photos. Today I'm helping my friend move so I thought I'd share the rest of my weekend events. It was sewing weekend for my quilt club. I always look forward to our 2 days of sewing together. On Friday we had 16 people, one of our largest groups ever. During the 2 days I got all of these blocks made and I sewed the top together Saturday night. I now have 3 of my own veterans quilt tops that need to be quilted along with about 7 more....once the big blue quilt is done. On Friday afternoon I went into Short Pump (yes, that's a town name because "back in the day" there was a short pump where people could get water for their horses) and met up with Chris. Chris is a super nice lady who work with that Lutheran Relief organization that I mentioned last week. She takes all kinds of fabric and craft donations from people. What they can't use she passes on to various organizations around town. She gets a lot of linens in the donations and she now passes those on to me for dyeing. She had 2 bags for me this time! Saturday evening I sorted through it all and have piles of things. Some are complete sets, some is fabric that I might be able to dye and some I can't use and will pass on elsewhere. Most of it, though can be used and some will be used for a specific patchwork project that I have planned. While I was at sewing Saturday this happened. There's a park area there and the parking lot gets a lot of traffic. So now I'm working on dealing with this through the insurance company. It will be an annoyance but much worse things have happened.
It's been a couple of days. I didn't post yesterday because I dyed fabric Wednesday and that's all I accomplished. Yesterday was a little more productive. How's the pollen where you are? Yesterday I hosed off my car at 11:00 and it was green again by 1:00! I normally wouldn't look forward to rain but we will all appreciate a couple of showers this weekend. I started the day yesterday by getting my second acupuncture treatment and it seems to especially be helping my right foot issues. I'll keep it up for a few weeks and see how it goes. After I got home I decided to put some borders on this quilt. The blocks are from a block collection that we did in quilt club. Carolyn put the 12 blocks together and returned it to the club meeting Tuesday. It wasn't big enough for a veterans quilt so I brought it home, and after auditioning several fabrics, I decided in lime and navy borders. I think it calmed the blocks down quite well. I cut more lime for the binding and after it's quilted someone in the club will bind it. It will be a true group effort quilt. Next I decided to start quilting the big blue quilt. I tried to come up with an idea I liked that I could quilt from the front but I really, really wanted a pantograph. I wanted Happy Times. Even though my shoulder isn't totally healed, I'm doing it anyway. I'll quilt one pass at a time and a max of 2 passes a day with a long break between the 2. I like how it's looking so far. The last thing I worked on was this card. We got word yesterday that one of Chris' friends had emergency heart surgery yesterday morning. He was supposed to join Chris and a bunch of other guys next week for their annual Myrtle Beach golf trip. He even asked his doctor right after surgery if he could still go if he didn't golf! Doc said he didn't recommend it.
Dudes will be dudes..... I decided to make him a quick card with the golf ball just missing the hole. John just missed the golf trip but he also missed dying and we are all grateful. This card is the reason that we keep stashes of things that look like garbage. I the message with some cheap letter stamps. The background a fabric that I printed probably 8 or 10 years ago! The other elements came out of my box of pre-fused scraps. The hole is from a 1/2 inch strip that I would have normally tossed. The whole card took about an hour and I think John will like it. Today and tomorrow are sewing days with Country School quilters. We have 2 months left to meet in our current location. The club has been meeting there for 35 years! It's a little sad to leave but we have a wonderful space right next door and it cleaner and brighter and the center really wants us there. We are quite excited. For now, I'm looking forward to working on one of my new quilt kits. Our friends returned home Monday and we are slowly getting back to our normal life. I decided that I'd get the big blue quilt loaded so that I'll quilt it before the veterans quilt tops that I picked up last night at the club meeting. I think I know how I'm going to quilt this with some simple continuous curve motifs. I didn't have anything ready to start sewing so I decided to tackle this bin of fabric scraps. These are the quilt back leftovers from veterans quilts that I've quilted. This pile was much higher before I started putting together veterans quilt kits but I couldn't use all of it in the quilt kits and had this big pile left over. I keep adding to it every month. Last week I found out about another group of local sewists who make quilts for Lutheran World Relief. The quilts they make are very utilitarian and they use 11" cut blocks. The woman who is our contact gives me occasional bags of napkins to dye. People give her orphaned fabrics and sometimes it includes things like napkins and other unusable items. She works really hard to find homes for everything. Anyway, I found out about the 11" squares and thought I could turn that mess of backing scraps into something they could use. I cut and sewed and sewed and cut and in no time I had almost 100 squares to donate to their charity. I hope these work for them because it would be nice to have a destination for the leftover backing fabrics. Then I found a stack of 3.5" strips leftover from another project. I spent about an hour sewing them together and produced another 15 blocks for them. I got the pile down to this. I kept the gray and dyed blue fabrics because I do use those in my own veterans quilts. I feel like I really accomplished something!
I'll be getting on with quilting the big blue quilt today or tomorrow. First I have to do dyeing today. Our friends from England are still here and we had a lovely weekend with lots of great food. I got away for a few hours Saturday to take a class in fly tying. It was so much fun and the instructor is a true master of fly tying. He's an Iraq War veteran who has had a fascinating life. He got into fly fishing through a program he was invited to join to help with his PTSD. That was 15 years ago and he's been an avid fly fisherman since. There were 4 of us in class and we each made these 4 flies. The top one is called the Chernobyl ant, the fluffy one is the Bunny Leech, the tiny one is an ant and the pink one is the San Juan worm. I was right in my assumption that sewists would be good at this craft. In the sewing room I decided to finish putting this veterans quilt top together. I started it at quilt club last month and I had the blocks all together already. I hadn't been longarming for a while. All that quilting I did in January and February was a little too much on my neck so I've had to take it easy for a while. It's the process and posture of quilting pantographs that did me in. I decided that I was ready to load a new pair of quilts and quilt them from the front in short sessions. Usually I quilt overall patterns but this one (which is bright lime green) really inspired me to have a little fun. It's still pretty fast quilting. It should be done in a couple of days.
All of the patriotic fabrics that I ordered came in and I've soaked them to remove any bleeding dye so I might get back to cutting some veterans quilt kits before I leave for a little trip Thursday. We've had another couple of good days here with our friends. Wednesday we took advantage of the last sunny day for a few days. We went to Charlottesville to hike Ragged Mountain which is a nice 6 mile hike around the city reservoir. It was windy but a beautiful day. Laura has been doing some sewing for her grandson. His parents are chefs and he's likes being in the kitchen so she made him an apron. Then she made him a drawstring bag and pouch for his car collections. While she's been sewing I worked on more veterans quilt kits. These are the leftover blocks from the big blue bowtie quilt. I decided to do something like this. I had plenty fo blue scraps left to cut out pieces for more blocks. Here are all of the pieces cut and ready to sew together for this quilt and there are still some fabrics left over. I think I'll still need binding but I might just cut a scrappy binding. There's a stack of blue strings and I think there are enough for a string quilt like the one in this post. I cut the foundations and I had this orange/yellow fabric in my stash that I thought would be good for the center strip of the blocks.
I got the notice today that the patriotic fabrics that I ordered should be in Monday. I'll be ready to start on them when I get back from my road trip. I leave Thursday to meet my friend in Lincoln, NE and ride back to Virginia with her in her van. It should be a fun trip. Meanwhile, I'm going to try to get 4 veterans quilts quilted before I leave and today I'm taking a fly tying class and that should be fun. We are having a great time with our guests. So far we've stayed close to home because they mostly wanted to relax and recover from their jet lag. Ian has been doing some yard work with us and we've been taking 5 mile walks. (Ian loves doing yard work. I'm really not a horrible host.) Laura has been doing some crochet and sewing and I've been making veterans quilt kits. The first one another version of this quilt. I loved it when I made it last year and am ready to do another. This was cut quickly on the Go! Cutter. The next quilt is from an idea I got from Cynthia Brunz. She coordinates a ton of charity quilts and I get some great ideas from her. My centers are scrap pieces from the last batch of patriotic veterans quilts that I made and the background is an assortment of blue hand dyed quilt back scraps from a lot of veterans quilts that I quilted in the past year or so. I think this one is going to look pretty cool. The third kit is a double 4-patch block. I've made this one several times. This one will reverse the dark and light positioning and it's going to have a border. The tan and light green are also quilt backing scraps. I didn't have enough of those fabrics to do blocks for the whole quilt so I found a stripe fabric to make a 4" border. Then I found a stack of large tumblers and cut more so I'd have enough for a 48" x 60" quilt. I'll put this together and if it needs some calming down I'll cut it apart and insert some sort of inner border. These are already labeled in rows ready for stitching. That weird piece of green fabric that looks to me flying in from the right is actually on a table. When I go through my scraps to cut them up I tend to cut 4" HST pieces and I cut enough to make another quilt like the one in the paper. I think I made that one about 12 years ago. It was a pretty pretty quilt and I'm ready to tackle another. Next I pulled these fabrics from my Nadelstern stash and I had great plans but just as I was typing here I realized that my plan will not work. I think I have a good idea for a replacement fabric for the sashing so I'll work on that, and some other kits, this week.
Last night we had a friend over for dinner. Today we are going to visit my Mom and my brother and then doing a little shopping and we have a hiking excursion planned for Wednesday. |
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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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April 2024
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