Isn't this a cute quilt? My friend, Anne, made it. She finished it a few years ago and somewhere along the line I promised to quilt it for her but I keep avoiding it because I'm at a total blank on HOW to quilt it. Well I spent the last 2 days hanging out with her at the river and she had it positioned exactly where I couldn't avoid it any longer. I'm surprised she didn't have it between the sheets of my bed but it was almost as obvious as that! 

Don't get me wrong, I want to quilt it and if I had a remote idea I could get it quilted in a couple of sessions. I'm cool with figuring out the background quilting but I want to do something special to highlight the crab but I'm totally clueless....and idealess.

What do you think?

For those of you who want the pattern, this quilt was designed by Lisa-Marie Sanders and we had to get special permission to make this one copy. If you have to have your own crab quilt you might be able to get in touch with her here.

I've got two more veterans quilts ready for quilting and that's all I can do until I get more tops that will pair with the 3 that I have on the closet. So once these 2 are quilted today I need to get another quilt ready to load. I was a little surprised to find that I only have 3 quilt tops! Of course I have big quilting plans for all of these.

I have this one that I finished last summer (May 2018). I more or less know how I might quilt it but I don't have a back for it yet. I'm not sure I'm ready to tackle this.

This postage stamp quilt is my oldest UFO. I started it in 1998! I think I finished this top last year.  I'm pretty sure that I'm going to do some Spirograph motifs on this one and I'm not really ready to do that again yet.

The third, and smallest, quilt is this one. It was done during Barbara Brackman's Grandmother's Choice block program. It's the sister quilt to Lura's Choice. Both quilts have the same blocks but they look completely different. I think this will be the next one. I'll spend some time this weekend thinking about quilting motifs.

But my #1 priority for the weekend is to piece the binding for Lost My Marbles. I really want that quilt done by the end of the month.

The past 2 days I really pushed and got the rest of the mulching done. I had projected 7 truckloads but it ended up being 8. The last one was brutal because it rained Wednesday night so the mulch was wet and extra heavy and I had to wheelbarrow all of it. Usually I can just back the truck up to the tree and rake it out but the canopy on the last 2 trees was too low for that. We've got to do some serious pruning on the maples this winter! I cold have waited to do the last truckload for a day or two but I really just wanted to get it over with.

I usually do this chore in February and March when the weather is more pleasant but we had so much rain this winter and Spring that I couldn't drive the truck in the yard. The weather was a little cooler this week so that's why I had to push to get it done. Today I'm exhausted and my allergies are a little crazy but I'm happy to be done with yard stuff for a white.

I'm not sure how much I'll get done today but I thought I'd at least organize my to do list.

I have fabrics for a new Stash Pack that need to get ironed, cut and packaged. These have been patiently waiting a week. Meanwhile there are yards and yards in the soak baths now that will be ready for ironing and photography later this weekend.

I got the cutting table moved out of the sewing room so I'm ready to block this quilt. But first I need to make the 2 repairs. That's first on my agenda for this afternoon.

After the Marbles quilt repairs are done I'm going to knock out a few veterans quilts before I pick my next longarm project. I have 3 "next projects" to choose from. They will all be very involved and 2 of them are huge.

​But today I'm going to mostly relax!

Isn't is interesting how we can go in the same rooms every day and we eventually just stop seeing what's there. Maybe it's a pile of clothes in the corner of the closet or a stack of fabric on a shelf. Our remodel has really forced me to look and see the accumulations around me. We had to unpack the kitchen and family room and fit it all on the foyer, living room, sewing room and guest bedroom. It's total disarray.

We are watching TV in the sewing room and that's working just fine except that now I have been actually looking at this wall. Usually when I'm in here the TV is on but I don't really watch it much. But for the past week I've been looking at the mess and it's been driving me nuts. Last night I had had enough.

I have also reached my clutter tolerance for the cutting table, currently the dinner table.

The project wall is also a total mess. So I got busy to see how much I could clean up in 3 hours. It turns out that I was able to fill 2 trash bags, create a 2 foot stack of magazines for the recycle bin and a few dozen books to give away. 

I got the project wall back in order. The top of the cabinet would be clear if I could get to the bench where I store quilts that happens to be my kitchen pantry at the moment. Mostly I emptied a couple of bins and got things off the floor and in the shelves. I could easily empty more bins but since this was the last place I tackled I'll take what I've done and be happy for now.

The empty cutting table makes me feel like I can breathe again. All of the patterns and projects have been put in their appropriate places and a lot of junk was thrown out.

But the best of it is here. I actually got rid of a shelf! The remaining top shelf even has about 12" of empty space. Now I had room to put up the flowers that have been hanging out in the living room waiting for a home. I stuck them up with Command tape. 

I'm very much a function over form person when it comes to my work spaces but it is nice to have a little color in here now.

I got all of the the flowers from my booth put up in the sewing room and this makes me very happy....until they get covered in dust. But mostly I'm happy to have a little bit of order back to my room.

Oh boy do I love a 3-day weekend that I don't waste. It's been a long time since I've had 3 days to do whatever I wanted and I took full advantage.

I finished quilting the Indonesian Batik quilt.

I love how the quilting shows in the purple but completely disappears on the batik fabrics.

I haven't taken it off the frame yet because I have this much backing fabric left and it's the absolute perfect amount to fit in 4 placemats. The leftover of the leftovers are calling.

While I thought about placemats I got the veterans quilt tops sewn together. I'm really happy with the way it turned out and I already know that I'll quilt it with a wavy crosshatch. I will make more of these. It's a great way to use scraps of Jelly Rolls and goes together so quickly.

I have 24 leftover blocks. Theoretically, these could be made into 4 placemats but the size just isn't quite right. So I'll ponder some way to combine them with all the other scraps for the placemats.

On Saturday I didn't have any football to watch (Hokies eeked out a win Friday night) so I spent the day in the basement making soap. This 18 lbs of soap will cure to about 15 lbs and will be ready in early January.

And then I remembered that I needed to get my Christmas postcards done! I have 2 sets left to make and got one set started yesterday. I plan to have these done this week. They are simple and will be really cute.

So Michael came through Thursday evening. There wasn't much damage in my area. We did lose power for a couple of hours Thursday night but mostly there were some flooded roads and downed trees in Hanover County. The place where we do our quilt club meetings is owned by the county and we cannot use the space if schools are closed. Because of blocked roads schools were closed Friday so we couldn't sew.

Big bummer.

​Fortunately, I'm a quilter and I have other things I can do!

I decided to use the time to quilt Antelope Canyon. I did this one with a pantograph. It's going to be a quilt for the guest bed so no need for "special" quilting.  Quilting pantographs bores me so between each row I worked on cleaning up the dye studio and I have it ready for delivery of my new washing machine tomorrow.

I was a little nervous while quilting because I didn't have a lot of the color that I wanted to use. But my quilting luck was with me and I had "plenty" left over. This might even be enough to sew on the binding. 

​But I'm not doing the binding yet....

When I quilt I think about things and one of the things I was thinking about was how quickly Christmas is coming up. I stated making some thread trees earlier this year and I'm going to make about 10 more on the edges of Antelope Canyon before I take it off the frame. This is one of my goals for the week. The other is to start organizing all the fabric and supplies that I brought home form the show and get my living room back to being a living room.

Yesterday I was back in the dye studio all day to start restocking things. It's nice to be back in "normal"mode now that the show is over. This morning I finally finished editing all of the photos from the quilt show so that's what I have for you today. Just click on the gallery to go through the photos as a slide show.

I'm sorry I went AWOL on the blog last week. I had great intentions of posting every day but my social life got in the way. Chris and I lived in Virginia Beach over 20 years ago and we have family in the area. Every day after the show I visited with either family or old friends. It was fun to catch up with my nephew and his wife and two former co-workers that I hadn't seen in years.

The show itself was an interesting experience. AQS runs a good show. Everything was where it needed to be and it's run very efficiently. Set up and take down was easy and all of the vendors are friendly. I met many of my customers and got some new ones. It was all good.

The only downside was that attendance wasn't even close to what they expected. It was slow and I think there were numerous factors. First, there were competing events in the area and the weather outside was fabulous. Fall is coming in a couple of weeks so I think people went to some of the outside events while the weather was still good. Add to that the devastation in North Carolina that probably reduced the number of people coming from the South and the fact that people living on the Peninsula of Virginia LOATHE coming through the tunnel to get to Virginia Beach and there were probably many factors contributing to the low attendance. They will have the show again next year so hopefully the attendance will be even better.

For me, it was a great opportunity to hear from my customers and see what people were drawn to. AQS even did a video interview that will eventually show up on their Quilttv Youtube channel. It will be featured sometime next year along with a product review in the magazine. That's going to be some great advertising. The only complaint that I have is that my friend gave me her cold!

The quilts were amazing, as they always are in and AQS show. Here are some more photos for you. I'll have a third set later this week. If you clock on the gallery it will open a slide show view so you can see mroe details.

The first day of the show is in the books and we had a great time! There weren't huge crowds but we had lots of people stop by and still had some time to wander around a bit ourselves. I even got to catch up with an old friend (I used to live in Virginia Beach) for a little while. We hadn't seen each other in years!

I even got to see about a third of the quilts. AQS puts on a nice event and the quilt competition is FIERCE! Here are just a few of the ones that I liked. I don't have the energy to narrate them so I just set then in a gallery so you can scroll through them. I'll have more tomorrow.

By the time this posts at 10:30 our time, we should be already unpacking all of this at the convention center. I love our Subarus, they hold a lot of stuff!