Another Saturday night

(My Saturday nights are terribly exciting, let me tell you. We are watching Independence Day at the moment. Woo.)

The gift quilt went off yesterday via UPS 2-day, which means it will be there Tuesday. As soon as I find out they've actually gotten it, I can go public with the pictures that are currently hidden on flickr. (Actually some of the individual "congratulations" blocks are public, already, so you can see those if you want to look. Karen did those, on Printed Treasures fabric. You can see little hints of the sashing fabric here and there, but that's about it, so I couldn't see that I was giving a great deal away there. Surely the honeymooners are not checking my flickr page over the weekend, anyway!)

Today I worked on the exchange blocks, which are now due in a little over a month. I had 8 of 12 done already, plus some of the subunits. I got a 9th one done today, plus more subunits. For some reason I am having a terrible time getting accurate flying geese so I may resort to paper-piecing the rest of them. My mother finished hers a long time ago (of course), but she volunteered to make another 6 blocks for somebody who wasn't able to finish theirs so she was sorting her batiks in order to get started on those. (If you've seen all of those batik quilts she has made in the past, you can guess that she probably has a pretty good batik stash.)

Annual auction

I don't know if anybody who reads my weblog is in the Houston area, but I thought y'all might like to see the pictures, anyway: some of the items available at my guild's annual auction are pictured on the guild website. (Look in the "Latest News" box for the link.) My mother's little hand-pieced Drunkard's Path is one of them - I had forgotten that she donated it. The auction is always a lot of fun, even if I hardly ever buy much. (There are plenty of other people who make up for me!)

Whew!

I finished the quilting! Yay! Now I only have to sew on the label and I'm all done.

(Hopefully we can go public with the pictures early next week.)

The finishing stage

I am in the home-stretch on the gift quilt and I am so, so tired of it. The binding is finished and the quilting in the empty spaces is done. I still think the edge of the spaces where the quotes/messages of congratulations are needs to be tacked down, though - I have given up on my idea of doing it by hand and have done a few of them by machine, so I need to do the rest of those and there's some echo quilting around the edges of the stars that I started and didn't do everywhere. So I have to do that and then sew the label on and then I'm done.

It's funny because I'm not good in general about finishing things, but I do pretty well on quilts. I get tired of them - just like I am now - but I will usually choose to get them finished and get them out of my hair rather than let them hang around as UFOs. Anyway, in this case there's a definite deadline and I'm oh-so-aware of it - I woke up this morning dreaming about working on it.

Mom's Friendship Bee quilt

Mom - blue & white bee blocks
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

I never got around to posting this picture last week.

The Friendship Bee does monthly exchanges - you make one block a month and once a year, you get 12 blocks in your choice of pattern. My mom did the same pattern two years in a row and now has a whole quilt top.

(I think this pattern is from 101 Fabulous Rotary-Cut Quilts.)

Weekend update

Still working on the inevitable gift quilt. I'm getting ready to be done. But I had to go and get fancy, and I feel like I'm never going to be done. (It's not really true, though - I'm almost done on the binding, and I'm making good progress on the quilting now that I've made up my mind what I want to do. Eventually, I will get this done!)

Mom is still working on the batik quilt. She had a busy week, and didn't get a whole lot of quilting done. But she did make some progress, and she's ready to start on the borders, apparently. She found a black-and-white leaf batik (I think I have it in some other color, it looks really familiar) that she's going to use for an outer border. I think she was talking about doing a solid-black inner border.

Another flickr quilt

the completed quilt
Originally uploaded by 3e.

Cute!

(Addendum: For those of you - like me - who have trouble remembering such things sometimes, this character is Badtz Maru.)

This week's insanity

So not only am I hand-sewing down the binding on the gift quilt, I'm doing a tiny bit of hand-quilting on it. I think that makes me officially crazy.

Mom's project of the week

Mom - batik "rainbow" in progress

Mom seems to be feeling pretty good this week and so she got a lot done on this quilt. These are nickel squares from those exchanges we both did last year. (Although she has way more squares than I do.) It started out as a rainbow design but she is not sticking very strictly with the rainbow color progression, but it's pretty, anyway. She decided to throw the polka-dot fabric in rather than use more solid black and I have to say it works nicely.

Another flag quilt

Mom - flag quilt with doilies
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

The doilies are possibly a little excessively cute for my taste, but the waving-flag look works pretty nicely.

Happy belated 4th of July!

Mom - flag for door
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Oops, I forgot that I meant to post this - it's one of my mom's series of door quilts.

Too late!

I finally got around this morning to pulling up the rules and the entry form and stuff for IQF, since I was talking about entering the Autumn Leaves quilt - and the deadline is July 1. Oops. For some reason I thought it was more like August 1. Oh, well, there's always next year - and at the rate I've been going there was very little chance I would've had it anywhere near ready by the beginning of August, either. I have the gift quilt now, and it needs to get done more or less immediately. I put the binding on it Saturday and got most of one long side whipped down while we were watching baseball yesterday. (It's a BIG lap quilt - I think it must be around 70x55" - so whipping down the binding is no small task.) I decided to put the binding on and then do the additional quilting later, it gives me some extra time to think about how I want to quilt it. Karen quilted in the ditch around all the 5" subunits and the triangles on the Ohio Stars and the sashing, so all I have to do is quilt within the areas that are left.

History

My mother started quilting in the very late 80s, I think - 1988 or 1989. I remember that her first quilt was an Ohio Star. (I wonder if she still has it.) I watched her with interest but not with any intention of following in her footsteps whatsoever. Through most of the 90s I watched her quilt and heard about the quilt guild she belonged to in my hometown and went to the Houston quilt show with her, and I gradually got much more knowledgable about quilting, but I still didn't have any intention of starting to quilt myself. I have had a lot of hobbies over the years, and mostly they have ended up with unfinished projects and lots of unused supplies, and I figured that quilting would just be another one. But my mother had bought a condo in a new community in the interim, and in 1997 she decided she wanted to join the local quilt guild, and since she didn't know anybody she decided that she wanted me to join with her, and she offered to pay for my membership if I would go. So I did. That still didn't mean I was going to become a quilter, but I enjoyed it a lot, and the next year I paid for my own membership, and eventually I decided that I would make a very simple quilt for community service. And that was where I began.

Pussycat Pussycat

Pussycat Pussycat

(Full title: Pussycat Pussycat, Where Have You Been?) Made by Lorraine Carthew of Australia. From IQF 2003.

I don't know why this impresses me more than more traditional applique, because it doesn't really have any more pieces than a lot of others, but it does. Take a look at the big version if you can't see it - this is put together like a mosaic, so each little piece is hand-appliqued down separately. It's gorgeous.

Wanna take a survey?