The best medicine!

January 16, 2020January 17, 2020 ~ Mary ~ 11 Comments

I hadn’t planned to sew at all today, I just felt too bad but I was sitting in the library after feeding Finn and looking at options for my next quilt and decided to go up and pull some fabric. 3 hours later I was ready for a break.

A while back, a year or more ago I found a line of map fabric from Connecting Threads that I fell in love with and I bought a LOT of it, yards and yards and yards of it. I pieced this Ohio Star quilt last year (it’s still waiting for quilting)…

And I knew when I made the dinosaur quilt for Caleb, that I wanted to use that pattern again with the map fabric.

So tonight, I pulled 5 fabrics and got started. This pattern came free with a bundle I bought from a quilt show but I found it online at Pinterest when you all had questions about it when I was piecing the dinosaur quilt. Click here to see it. Obviously the second page of the instructions showing the borders isn’t there but it’s the only place I could find it online to share with you … and neither of mine are going to have borders anyway.

Assembled

January 15, 2020January 15, 2020 ~ Mary ~ 12 Comments

The Tumblers are assembled and count as my precut project for January. I cut the tumblers with my 6 inch finished GO die and there are 13 tumblers across and 14 rows down making it about 58 x 84, a little larger than my usual donation quilts but I had extra tumblers so I used them.

I’ve been thinking about what my quilting goals are for this year … nothing too lofty.

Piece a top each month for our Precut Party
Keep my UFO number to 22 or below so I’ll need to quilt one top for each quilt I start with 12 of them being UFO’s.
quilt and bind the 6 tops from Maine
quilt whatever Mom throws at me!

Quilted

January 14, 2020 ~ Mary ~ 5 Comments

After working a bit on the Tumblers tonight, I loaded and quilted this Quick Strippie. It’s one I bought home from the Maine sew-in and I think it was pieced by Susan.

My goal is to get the 6 tops I brought home from Maine quilted this month. I want to get the bindings on them and ready for hand stitching before we go to Maine for the month of April … that SHOULD be doable!

I used a new service tonight – our insurance company has an arrangement with one of the online physician services and I developed a sinus infection on top of having the flu. I gave it an additional week since many sinus infections are viral but it’s not improving (and Keith and my Mom were hounding me to go to the doctor) I thought I’d give the online service a try. Other than having to fill in the health history before the visit, it was pretty quick and easy and she sent in a prescription for an antibiotic… and I didn’t even have to leave home!

Quilted

January 13, 2020 ~ Mary ~ 8 Comments

Thanks for all the comments, I am feeling a little better but still a long way from well. Luckily, I don’t have a lot of demands on my time right now so I’m working when I feel like it and resting when I need to. I’m thankful that I at least feel well enough to work and tonight I quilted this 16 patch top pieced by little Mary in Maine. I give them a hard time because calling her little Mary must make me BIG Mary …

It’s quilted with one of my new pantographs called Kindle by Lorien Quilting. She designs some of my favorites!

I also made a little change to the machine. I dislike the Innova side clamps, they’re small and even worse, heavy.

I didn’t like the original clamps that came with my Gammill either but after a bit of trial and error, I’d found clamps that I really like about 8 years ago. When I traded in my machine, I gave them the original clamps but kept the ones I liked thinking I might use them on the new machine only they connected by a strip of Velcro to the frame and I didn’t think that would work on the new frame. Tonight for the first time, I realized I could probably just tie the bungee cord from the Innova clamp to the ones I like …. and it worked. These hold a larger area and they’re a lot lighter so they don’t weigh down the edges!

A new blanket

January 13, 2020 ~ Mary ~ 6 Comments

Progress is being made on the tumblers, a top is loaded on the longarm and ready for quilting, and I finished the pink/brown ripple last night so I started a new blanket.

Pattern – Blanket Stitch, found free on Ravelry. It looks kind of like a puff stitch to me but it’s super easy and has a lot of texture.
Yarn – Caron Simply Soft Brites – colorway is Berry Blue. This yarn has been in the stash for a long time … I no longer remember what it was originally intended for.
Hook size – I
Chained 120

2020 Precut Party

January 10, 2020 ~ Mary ~ 7 Comments

We decided we’d play with precuts again this year. Here’s the list and Stephanie will pull one out of the hat each month. There’s always the option to just choose whatever precut you’d like to work on too.
1) FQs
2) Layer Cakes
3) Jelly Rolls
4) Charm Squares
5) Triangles
6) Panels
7) Kits
8) Bundles
9) Shapes
10) Scraps
11) Skinnies/Strings
12) Blocks/Orphans

January’s precut is bundles and I had leftover fat quarters from the Hunter Star quilt that Mom and I pieced that I wanted to use up so I cut a bunch of tumblers. Add in some fabric from stash and I’m ready to toss them up on the design wall. I could be more random but there are a lot of repeats and I want to make sure I distribute them throughout the quilt.