Pillowcases

I've been making pillowcases this week, six in all. The two pale purple ones with the dark purple bands go with my Springtime Stars quilt. The rest will be donated to ConKerr Cancer and will go to locations here in Maine. My deadline for this project is Friday, August 7, so I might have time for a couple more.

These are a nice little stashbuster too--each pillowcases uses about one yard and goes together in less than an hour. On the selvage of one of these fabrics was a copyright date of 1994. Does that tell you anything? I probably bought that fabric intending to make quillows or something for my kids.

My favorite is the one with the racing cars and the checkerboard border. I'm going to make one like this for my son's girlfriend's little boy. He turned two a few months ago and is now sleeping in a regular bed, so I think he needs a big boy pillowcase.

The Latte Block

Today three of us got together at Carolee's for our little embroidery group. We all have Bernina sewing machines with embroidery modules, and we want to learn more about them, so we get together once or twice a month to play. Carolee has a basement sewing room, which was the place to be today because it was warm and muggy outside. From left to right in the photo is Carolee, Pauline, and me. I tried to look busy because I don't like to have my picture taken.

Pauline took a bunch of classes after she bought her Bernina a while back, so she is the brains of the group. We try to choose something specific to work on at our get togethers, and today our focus was multihooping. When a design is too large for the selected hoop size, it becomes necessary to rehoop the fabric at some point during the stitch out in order to complete the whole design. Getting the design lined back up correctly is not an easy task for a novice, and I'm not too sure that I grasped exactly how to do this, but I'll play around with it some more.

The block we worked with today was one of the blocks from the Latte Quilt, a sampler of a dozen or so embroidered quilt blocks, and so named, I suppose, because it is all stitched in neutral colors on a neutral background. I've seen the complete sampler stitched out and quilted, and it's gorgeous.

What you see in the photo is two thirds of the design, which required two hoopings. The most obvious problem I had was puckering in the fabric, which is something that has frustrated me quite often. There must be about a dozen reasons why this might happen, and I never seem to get any of them right. (Teresa, are you reading this? Help!)

The second problem was that we actually loaded the wrong design into memory when we rehooped it for the right side of the embroidery. Some of the stitching crossed over parts of the center design, which wasn't right. Neither of these things bothered me, however, because it was a practice piece, and I had fun watching it stitch out. I was pleased with the quality of the stitch out today, which I haven't always been able to say in the past.

Next time we get together, we will play with machine embroidered applique.

Just Because He Loves Me

Correction to "Quilt Show" Post

Thank you, Wanda, for letting me know that the link to Margo's website, where you can see more photos from the Maine state PTQG quilt show, was not working properly. Sorry about that--I should have checked my links before I posted. I've fixed it now, and the correct url is http://heartinhishandquilting.blogspot.com/

Enjoy.

Sunday Stash Report

Well, I bought 7 yards of fabric at the quilt show. I thought I showed great restraint. I would have preferred to have bought 70 yards.

I finished another little strippy and crossed it off my Power of Ten list. The yardage for it was calculated a while back. I added Pillowcases to the list to replace the strippies. I'm planning to make 4 or 5 of them, some of which will be donated in the name of ConKerr Cancer. It's a project one of my quilt groups is working on. Today I cut the fabric for 2 pillowcases, so I'm counting it out of my stash.

Here's the Stash Manager's Report:

Fabric used this week: 2-3/4 yards
Fabric used year to date: 67-3/4 yards
Fabric added this week: 7 yards
Fabric added year to date: 178-1/4 yards
Net used year to date: -110-1/2 yards

Quilt Show

This weekend was the 32nd Annual show of the Maine state quilt guild, Pine Tree Quilters Guild. The show ran for three days, and I spent all day Friday at the quilt show, sitting in Raffle Alley, shopping, looking at the quilts, taking pictures, and socializing.

This is the raffle quilt for our chapter. I really like this quilt, and I should start making triangles now because I'm not going to win it.

Shopping the vendors is nearly always the first order of business for me at quilt show--got to get your priorities right, right? I bought some yardage of this magnificent Christmas stripe, which is going into the Christmas quilt I'm working on; several patterns; and two packages of Sweet Treats from Pincushion Boutique. I think these people must work every major show from here to the West Coast. I can't remember any big shows that I haven't seen them in a booth. I don't usually use black in my quilts, but after I went back to look at these two packs for the fourth time, I decided they'd better come home with me.





There was the usual assortment of art quilts and heavily quilted prize winners at the quilt show. What appeals to me, however, varies from one year to the next; and this year I was more interested in traditional quilts and miniature quilts. In fact I was fascinated with the miniature quilts, and there were lots of them this year. They're all shown here, along with some other quilts I liked. Both Margo and Beth have loads of pictures of all the prizewinners, and you can have a look there as well. I think, between the three of us, we took pictures of darn near every quilt in the show. I'd have posted more of my pictures, except that Blogger is taking FOREVER this evening to get pictures posted.

Four of us, including the white glove hostess, had quite a discussion about this interesting quilt. At first I thought it was a Cathedral Windows, but I'm not sure if it was made that same way or not.

This was another
interesting quilt. On closer inspection, I realized that the cutouts were raised from the surface of the quilt. The quilter used small pieces of velcro to achieve that effect, and I remember thinking how much fun a little girl might have rearranging the dolls and clothing if this quilt were hanging in her room.























Take a look at the closeups of the miniature quilts--they're so cute! Someone made a miniature blooming nine patch that has squares that look like they finished to a teensy weensy 1/4 inch. And one of them looks like a miniature Heartstrings quilt. Cute, cute!

Sunday Stash Report

No photos and nothing exciting in today's post, just the stash report. I feel like I haven't been home for five minutes this week, and I'm behind with just about everything there is to be behind with, including blogging. Seems like it's been a really busy summer for everybody. Sometime in the next few days I'll get some pictures posted of my adventures last week. I do want to thank everyone who left a comment about my Springtime Stars quilt--you're very kind, and I appreciate it.

In the meantime, I've made more progress with my Power of Ten list but no other finishes yet. Mostly I've been very absorbed with my Christmas in July project, the one called It's A Wrap; and I've worked a lot longer than just three hours on it. Of course all the fabric for it has now been cut, as well as all the rest of the fabric for the September Sun. I also have a strippie on the quilt frame, so I used up some stash for the quilt back. I'm practicing a pantograph called Bubbles on it, and it's really hard to keep those circles round!

I missed a stash report last Sunday and did buy a bit more fabric that week for my September Sun project and some extra background fabric. Here's the Stash Manager's Report:

Fabric used this week: 9-1/2 yards
Fabric used year to date: 65 yards
Fabric added this week: 10-1/4 yards
Fabric added year to date: 171-1/4 yards
Net used year to date: -109 yards