Business Up Front, Party in the Back...

Whew! Done with that! I took a break from all the quilting to make this totally awesome scooter/walker bag. I call it the Mullet bag, because it's business like and professional on one side, 

and BAM! 

Party on the other! 

It's reversible, so she can choose which side to sport.

Here's a close up of the awesome fabric, isn't it gorgeous?

 On an unrelated note, I think I have Parkinson's, because I just cannot take a picture that is not shaky. I hate my camera. I've had a hundred people look at it and tell me why I can't take a good picture, but no one can help, so I assume it's the Parkinson's. 

So anyhoo, a friend at work has broken her foot so she's got one of those little scooters. Have you seen these? Apparently they're all the rage. You kneel on it and push around with your good foot. Well, she went off to rent it, shiny brochure in hand, and came back very disillusioned. She's been showing everyone, "Look at the brochure! Look at it! It's got a drink holder! It's got a basket! It's got spinning rims!" 

Ok, maybe not the rims, but it's pretty sweet. The one she actually got is not quite so swanky. As in not at all. As in straight from the chop shop. So I figured she needed at least a bag that she can hang off her handlebars and carry SOMETHING around. 

But I forgot that I do not work so well in three dimensions. I prefer my quilts flat. I am proud of my box corners though. I have to give myself credit for that. Maybe I'll make a really, really fat quilt and give it box corners. Ha! 

Now back to the real work. I have a new idea about the borders on my Terry Pratchett quilt. Should be nice...

OH! 

I almost forgot! I won a prize from Amy's Online Quilt Festival! How cool is that? And I've been buying a lot of fabric lately. I'll show you pictures next time. It's some cool stuff! 

:-)

PS... I'm Psychic

Ok, so my Sweet Baboo has the habit of talking to me when I'm not quite awake, and then I don't remember the "conversation" until it comes up later. If at all.

Like just now I checked the news and found out that Bea Arthur has passed away, and my reaction was "OH MY GOD! I JUST DREAMED THAT... AND IT TOTALLY CAME TRUE!" 

So... sorry about killing you Bea. Rest in peace.

 

Mulch Angels Anyone?

Whew! I am wiped out. 

Every year the company I work for has a charity day where we pick a school and volunteer our time cleaning and painting, weeding, and building. And mulching. Lots of mulch. Seems like no matter what projects are planned, there's always mulch. This year we had two truckloads of mulch delivered. That's a lot of mulch, trust me. 

Before...

After.

Before...

After.

It's a fun day for everyone, but all the planning takes it's toll. 

Well, the planning AND the hole digging, cement mixing, post leveling and plain old manual labor.

But mostly the planning. Now it's over. All over but the paperwork. 

But it's always a great day, and this year the principal, parents and teachers were so appreciative and nice, it really made it all worth while. I wish we could go back to this school every year! 

But now, after a couple of naps, a heating pad or two, and lots of Aleve, I can get back to the business of being me. Starting with these blocks from my vintage sheets! Woo hoo! 

Like this?

Or maybe off-set? 

Sashing? No sashing?? 

I don't have my green grass sheet yet, but I did find a panel of it that I used for the centers. Did I mention that I also had curtains out of it when I was little? I really liked these sheets.

I like this one a lot...

And this one too...

I like them all! It makes me feel like I'm in a hammock.  

I can't wait to find my other green sheet and finish making a million blocks!

But for now, I'll hobble down the stairs, creaking and moaning, and finish a different little project I've got going. 

More on that next time! 

Blogger's Quilt Festival!

It's a festival! 

Ok, so Amy, over at Park City Girl has started the first Online Quilt Festival! How awesome? So we're supposed to post a picture of our favorite quilt. How could I just choose one? All right, who am I kidding? I totally have a favorite. I want to say it's this one... 

That I made for my Mom. Every single square inch is fraught, FRAUGHT with meaning. It's a word. It's sort of a medallion quilt, with four house blocks in the middle. One for each of her four children. 

Mine is the hot pink one. ;-)

There are X's and O's on it, and a border of appliqued hearts because I love her so much. There are pansies, because that was one of our favorite flowers. 

There are roses and garden tools because of her love of gardening. There is bee fabric, because when she and my Dad were first married, they were dirt poor and agreed to not get each other anything for their first anniversary. 

Well, my father broke his promise and bought her two tiny chenille bees. She kept them forever. It was one of my first quilts, and I didn't even quilt it; it's tied 

with embroidery floss. 

She seemed to like it though, and would keep it on the back of the couch so she could look at it. 

I WANT to say that this is my favorite, and it is, really, it's up there. It's definitely top three. 

But if we're talking FAVORITE, like FAVORITE quilt, it would have to be this one. If the house was on fire, I would grab my Sweet Baboo and Da Pup and this quilt. I use it every single day, even today when it's 90 degrees out and Da Pup has melted.  

It's completely flannel, and soooo soft and fluffy. I actually made it for a friend's mom, but couldn't part with it and ended up making her another one. THIS is my absolute all time favorite!

It's got CAT fabric! What am I, dedicated dog-person doing with a cat quilt? What can I say, we don't get to choose who we love. I fell in love with a flannel cat quilt. 

And they lived happily ever after!

I'm Going Back To Bed...

Ok, so I'm a little late to the vintage bed sheet party. I was busy picking out the right outfit and getting my hair did. But now that I'm here, let's get this party started! Oowah! Oowah!

So I have this sheet from when I was a little girl. I'm sure you'd recognize it, green and orange and yellow, with butterflies and blades of grass. I'd show you a picture of it, but of course I can't find it now. Story of my life. But in the spirit of the Beatles, I've got a driver and that's a start. I now have a stack of beautiful fat quarters, bought from the

 lovely WhimsieDots.

  Ok, that one is a crappy picture taken at my keyboard at work, but I was just so excited! Here's a better one.

 Aren't they fabulous? This one's my favorite.

 No, THIS is my favorite.

 No, no, wait... THIS one...

Aww hell. I love them all. Don't make me choose. 

It'll be Sophie's Choice all over again. I love old sheets. I love how incredibly soft and silky then get. These have that feeling. 

When I was a kid, my bedroom was on the side of the house, and the afternoon sun came right in my window. I have very clear, vivid memories of laying on my bed in the hot sun, reading books and smelling the wonderful fabric softener smell of the warm sheets. Mmm... heaven.

 Now I live in the middle of a redwood forest and I can count the number of hours of sun we get on one hand. Maybe now I'll be able to capture back that summery feeling when I whip it all into a quilt! Light and breezy and soft, soft, soft. Ooo I can't wait. 

Now if I could only find that sheet. 

On another front, over the weekend I wanted to sew something. Just sew something for the sake of the needle and thread, without worrying too much about where it was going or what it would be. So I figured, hey! Let's sew some curves! I got out Stack A New Deck and started chopping it up. This is the result... 

Or maybe this? 

The possibilities are ENDLESS! And really easy to make! I'm liking this book. Seriously, I highly recommend it. You know, if you're looking for a quilting book. Not if you're looking for a 800 page novel. Although I have been known to read my quilting books in bed. What? They've got a good plot!

So I guess this wants to be a quilt top after all. Maybe just a few more blocks... 

I can stop any time I want...

Lazy on a Sunday Afternoon...

Thank you soooo much for your kind words and encouragement. I have met the nicest people out here on the web.

So here's the latest.

 This one is kind of personal, and part of me can't believe I'm sharing it with the universe. That's the point of this whole blogging thing, isn't it? A diary that you intend for other people to read? I got three older brothers, folks. I learned at an early age not to write down anything that could someday be used against me. So here it is. It's got a background story, so grab a cold beverage and make yourself comfortable. 

Got it? Ready? Ok. 

So there's an author that I love; Terry Pratchett. He writes "comical fantasy" books. They are funny, and brilliant. He also has recently been diagnosed with alzheimers disease, which is near and dear to my heart, but I refuse to capitalize, but that's not why I started reading his stuff.

So anyhoo, I love his books, and turned my stepson onto them. He then turned his wife onto them, and now we all exchange text messages about who's read which book, and which one is best, and we were all very excited once when we saw a reference on a very hip website. 

So I was puttering around one day, and I really like what THIS girl does with text on her quilts, so I started thinking about what I could print out and use. Poems? Eh. Song lyrics? Maybe. Then I got the idea of using quotes from Terry Pratchett and making a quilt for the boy and his bride. They're owed one anyway. He helped me set up my first sewing machine. The first (still unfinished) project I ever started was a quilt for him. Oh if I knew then what I know now. I thought that a green quilt had to have nothing but green. Light green and dark green and every shade in between. It's one fugly quilt, let me tell you.

So here's the new one.

Wonky log cabins. Lots of white. I tried for a majority of greens, with a little blue and orange thrown in for interest. And I also tried to pick prints that had some white in them too. I wanted fresh and clean and modern. So fresh and so clean!

My personal favorite.

I can see from the picture that I'll have to do some un-sewing and fixing. In that upper right corner there's too much white showing. Do you see it? In between the top row and the middle row. I think I'll rip something out and add bigger strips of color. And then I have some borders of small squares to go around. Maybe. We'll see what it wants to be. You gotta listen to what the quilt wants, you know? And I think it's so strange that I have no patience whatsoever in every other aspect of my life, yet having to tear out something that I've worked hard on doesn't even make me blink. I've learned that if something bothers me early on, it's not going to bother me any less later. Better to just take care of it now. And now that I look at it, I might just take that top row and move it to the bottom. 

If that's what it wants. 

What do I know? I just run the machine.

I will take credit for how these leaves wrap around the corner seam though. That was all me.

(blows on fingernails and polishes on shirt)

My Declaration of Independence

I'm sorry! I didn't mean to leave you out here in Blogville all alone! I know that I always appreciate the blogs that I can read daily, or if not daily, at least regularly. 

Here's the thing.

I could say I really don't have much to say, but that would be a cop out, wouldn't it? No one reads a blog to get the latest info on world politics, or what's happening on Wall Street, do they? We read them to be entertained. Well, I do anyway. But lately I've been in a funk, and didn't figure I should inflict it on my many, many, (3) readers. Sure, I've done a little sewing, and I'll share that with you, but I haven't had the Woo-Diggity cheerleader attitude that I like to project.

I've been comparing myself to the wonderful, 

wonderful quilters out there, and I think when you start comparing yourself to anyone you can always find something that you lack. These people make BEAUTIFUL quilts, but they also make A LOT of quilts!! I saw a few blogs with "2009 Quilts" on the sidebar, and I thought "Neat! I've finished a quilt or two, I should do that! But then I have the, well, the quilt or two... and some of these chicks have THIRTY QUILTS OR MORE!!! Hello? I mean, it's MARCH! Oh dang, it's APRIL! See? It gets away from me! I still haven't put away the New Year's champagne glasses, let alone churned out a quilt a day! That's a lot of quilts! So yeah, I compared my two to their thousand and came up a little short.

But then I told myself that I don't know their circumstances; I barely know mine. Maybe they stay at home all day every day. Maybe they have maids. MAYBE they employ tiny quilt elves who do all the pesky basting and quilting in the night. I don't know. I do know that I work Monday thru Friday from 8 to 5. I come home to a beautiful pup and a beautiful man who deserve my attention. I wouldn't change that for the world. So, I guess I'm not going to be churning out the quilts like a Cambodian sweatshop any time soon. That's ok. I've taken off the pictures of my "2009 Quilts", you'll have to catch them as I blog about them. And I will. It's a quilting blog, after all.