A Long While

I've been gone a long while from my blog, and how annoying to discover Google search links automatically appearing in my post!! Took me a while to figure out how to get rid of that unwanted feature. I suspect that is more for Google's benefit than mine! 

This year has gone by in a flash. At the beginning of July, I realized half a year had elapsed, and now here we are almost into September. The most momentous thing that happened this year is that my younger son got married earlier this month--his first marriage and her second. We welcomed his bride and her two children to our family, ages 14 and 7. 

I spent much of the earlier part of this year doing my work for the Maine Quilts show, which happened at the end of July. I have worked for quilt show now for nine years, and I'm thinking next year might be my last. I'm not getting any younger, and I really would like to spend more time with my family at camp during the summer months. A real vacation might be a nice idea too.

I really haven't gotten much quilting done this year, which is a crying shame because I have so much beautiful fabric. There's another good reason to give up my activities with Maine Quilts. The neutral strings quilt, which I called Cafe au Lait, from my last post was finished. 

I like this quilt so much, and I'd love to make another one, maybe in diamonds, especially since the bag of strings I was working from doesn't look like it was touched. An altogether too common story. 

I pieced the backing in an effort to use up some tans I no longer wanted. 

And I quilted it with a pantograph called Malochite, which was interesting and fun to do.

In April my quilt group held a charity sew day, and we made this pattern called Iceberg from Villa Rosa Designs. Precut friendly, makes a great lap size, and it's easy to sew. 

I quilted it with a pantograph called Knit 1 Purl 2, which I hadn't tried before. I liked the way it looked, but I wish I could have kept those lines a little more even.  

I got two more quilts finished in July. One was a UFO that was several years old, Bitcoin, a Bonnie Hunter design. Another quilt that will be a favorite of mine. And, in an altogether too common story, the strip bin doesn't look like I touched it, even though there are 3,330 rectangles in the quilt. I may have also, ahem, cut more fabric as I went along making the quilt. 

And I used everything in this quilt, civil war repros, batiks, calicos, modern fabrics, florals, novelties, kids prints, you name it. And some of them are really old, like from decades ago. It all went together so well.  

This was, as Diane Harris from Stash Bandit likes to say, a ridiculous amount of fun. I had a ball picking out each set of matching rectangles to sew together and moving them around on the design wall. The rectangles finished to 1 x 2, and I am working on another Bitcoin with slighter wider rectangles. There might also be another one in my future with bigger rectangles.    

My other finish in July was this quilt called From Our House, a free pattern from Riley Blake Designs. I used the same fabrics from Riley Blake that were used in the pattern because I liked the colors so much, and I liked the look of a textured solid-like fabric. This is more  modern for me, which is something I'm gravitating towards more and more. It would probably be more accurate to say modern traditional. 

I had a friend quilt it because I was running out of time before quilt show, and I love how it turned out. The pantograph is called Bayside, I think.