Happy 2009!

I understand that Christmas is over, but I'm still working on my redwork Santas (Here Comes Santa designed by Robin Kingsley for Bird Brain Designs). My LQS is doing these as a BOM, so I'll be working on them for several more months. Here's the latest:

I have no Christmas quilts, believe it or not, so I'll be happy to finish this one in a few months and see if I can get it ready for next year.

I need to run trace the next one so I can work on it tonight. If I don't have something to do with my hands I'll fall asleep waaaayyyy before midnight.

Have a wonderful 2009 - I hope it is everything that you are wishing for.

One Word

I've been visiting blogs for over a year now, and one reason I thought it would be fun to have one would be to participate in a "meme." Here's one that was on the Allsorts blog of Jenny B. I'm sorry I don't know how to link to her here in the post itself, but I think her blog is great and you can check it out via my "my blog list."

You can use only one word to answer the following questions. Here we go.

Where is your mobile phone? purse
Where is your significant other? bed
Your hair colour? grey
Your mother? missed
Your father? memory
Your favourite thing? quilting
Your dream last night? work
Your dream goal? quitting
The room you're in? chilly
Your hobby? creating
Your fear? poverty
Where do you want to be in 6 years? home
Where were you last night? home
What you're not? skinny
One of your wish-list items? remodeling
Where you grew up? Texas
The last thing you did? coffee
What are you wearing? pajamas
Your TV? off
Your pets? three
Your computer? essential
Your mood? peaceful
Missing someone? friend
Your car? cranky
Something you're not wearing? socks
Favourite shop? fabric
Your summer? complicated
Love someone? several
Your favourite colour? pink
When is the last time you laughed? meeting
When is the last time you cried? unknown

So give it a go, is what I say. It was fun.

Work

This was my "to do" stack when I arrived at work at 8 a.m. Thursday morning.

Of course, that doesn't include the weekly report I had to write that was due at noon (got it done at 1:30) or the e-mails and telephone calls and walk-ins I had to deal with throughout the day.

Here's the stack at 6:45 p.m., just as I was about to leave the office:

Pretty good, I'd say. Until my boss, who was also working late, did this:

Baby Rose

Here's my latest "finish" - the Baby Rose (yet to be quilted) from Jo's Little Women series 7 is done! Question: When you finish something, do you feel compelled to clean your sewing space? I do. It's hard for me to go directly from a finish to a start (or a restart as the case usually is) without cleaning the sewing room first.

I love the color variety in this. Haven't figured out how to quilt it yet.

My Favorite Job

In 1993 we moved to Birmingham, Alabama. We stayed until 1996. It was a sweet time in our lives and I loved it there. Our daughter was two when we moved there; I was a stay-at-home mom; the part of town we lived in (Homewood) was lovely and friendly and I had some really nice stay-at-home mom friends. I was sorry when we left.

A few months after we arrived I happened to be in a quilt shop one day (where else would I be?) and saw a notice posted on the door that McCall's Needlework magazine was looking for stitchers to work for the magazine, bringing the designers' work to life for photographing for the magazine. I didn't even know McCall's Needlework was published in Birmingham. I wrote them a letter the minute I got home and sure enough they called me to come in and bring samples of all the needlework things I could do. They sent me home that day with a needlepoint project. This one:

Over the next three years I worked on a number of projects. In addition to needlepoint I did cross-stitch, counted thread work and embroidery. I also did some finishing work for them.

It was soooo enjoyable to sit on my sofa while DD was at mother's day out or preschool or napping, drink Diet Coke, do needlework, and watch tv, and then, get a check for doing it! And then get to see my work in the magazine! I absolutely loved it.

I have specific memories about some of the projects I did. The hunting dog needlepoint, for instance, took hours and hours of work. I remember that I watched the entire O. J. Simpson trial while working on that project!

And these little jewelry pieces caused me to need reading glasses for the first time in my life!

Credit where credit is due: Marie Barber was the designer of the two needlepoint projects. I'm not sure who designed the jewelry pieces.

A Recent Project

Over the long Labor Day weekend I decided to go through over 15 years (yes! it's embarrasingly true!) of saved quilt magazines. Don't tell my husband, but some of these magazines have moved with us eight times. I wish I had counted them before I started - or maybe not. Anyway, this is the result:

I saved instructions for quilts I truly loved/might make/would be loved by family members; articles on quilt history; and articles about decorating with quilts.







The rest of the magazines went in the recycling bin. My sewing room closet is much neater now. Or, at least it was neater for a few days!

The interesting thing was that there were very few (like five or so) magazines that went into the bin intact. In every other magazine was at least one project I felt like saving. I had multiple copies of all the most popular magazines: American Patchwork and Quilting, Quiltmaker, McCalls Quilting, etc. By far, the magazine that had the most pages going in the books and the fewest going in the bin was American Patchwork and Quilting. None of those were discarded intact, and most of them resulted in multiple articles from any one issue being saved. Just a personal preference thing, I guess.

So did all that work (it really took me all weekend and then some) cause me to rethink my magazine buying habits?

Nope.

Quilt Restoration

I've been trying my hand at quilt restoration. I'm working on a friend's grandmother's flower garden quilt. All of the yellow hexagons in the quilt are disintegrating. I read about this in a magazine article once - I think it's caused by a chemical in the dye.

So here is a before:

And an after - it's not the same block, but you get the idea.

It's not a perfect match, color-wise, but it works and after months of searching, it's as close as I could come. It actually looks a bit closer in person than it does in the photos.

Baby Whig Rose - Center

Here's the center of a Baby Whig Rose, one of the projects in the 7th Jo's Little Women series. I've participated in a Jo's Little Women club at my LQS since 2006, and it's a high point of each month for me. Jo Morton, designer for Andover Fabrics, has created these patterns for small-scale quilts and designed a club around them. So fun. Check your LQS, they just might have a club going on, too.

My Day So Far

It's been a busy day. I made homemade buttercream icing for and decorated a pineapple birthday cake (made last night) for a co-worker. In our office we mostly bring store bought cakes. I don't know if people laugh at me, but when it's my turn to provide, I bake. I don't really have anything against store bought. I certainly partake readily when offered. I just like to be different, I guess.


Then, I made some faux-Romanov sauce and de-leafed some strawberries for the same birthday party, and then I made two quiches. One has mushrooms, swiss and spinach and the other has mushrooms, pancetta and swiss. They are baking now.


And now, it's 6 a.m. and time to get ready for work!


Tomorrow is DD's birthday, so I'll be baking again tonight. Her choice: devil's food cake with homemade caramel icing.




Here's a quilt I love. My grandmother pieced it about 40-50 years ago and I quilted it about 10 years ago. She'd be so proud, and so would my mom.