Patriotic Lap Quilts

A friend from the American Legion post gave me her mom's leftover fabrics. They were all patriotic themed and I thought making lap quilts for the VA would be a good use for it.

I made 6 of these little cuties. They are all bright and cheery, thankfully. I will get them all on the longarmer this week and finish binding them as soon as I find some matching fabrics from my stash.


These are two of the six squirrels that live in our yard. We feed them peanuts daily to keep the out of the bird feeders. Obviously that does not always work.

A Busy Saturday

It's a sad day today. My old car died and after a week at the repair shop, it was determined that it is not worth fixing. Apparently Santa Fe's have 3 catalytic converters and on this car, 2 of the 3 are in need of replacement. There are no after-market parts for these so you have to get them from a dealer. The cost of the parts with labor runs about $2K. If new converters are installed it's still not certain the problem will be fixed.

Considering the blue book value of the car it's just not worth the trouble so today my husband sold it 'as-is'. I thought I would take one last photo of it before the buyer loads it on his trailer. I enjoyed driving it and after I purchased my Mini Cooper, my daughter enjoyed it as well. So for the next week we will be searching for a new car for her. I think next week will be stressful until she finds one because she is using my car until then leaving us to have to alter our schedules a little.

Today we also had our appointment with our tax accountant to get our income taxes done. The new tax reform hasn't helped us much. We owe way more money than I thought we would.

Oh well.

We left the accountant's office and stopped at the Habitat for Humanity ReStore. My husband loves the store. A few weeks ago he purchased a door from a deconstruction project. It was so old, heavy and well-made and he's enjoyed refinishing it. While we were there I picked up some beautiful crystal wine glasses and some glass door knobs. Since he is changing out our doors we might as well have new knobs to go along with them.

Here's the view out of my kitchen window this afternoon. It's starting to rain and all the ducks are coming in for a landing. We feed more than 50 of them regularly. They hang out here all winter.

You can see the hammock frame sticking out of the snow. Last week you could only see the top of the frame since the snow was so high. It is melting slowly and hopefully we are finally seeing the end of this brutal winter.

Sweet Sundays Quilt

My quilt group will donate this quilt to the spring craft fair at our church. During the craft fair it will be raffled off.

My job was to quilt it on my longarmer. The quilt is a king size so it took me 4 days to finish it. It is so very big that I didn't want to spread it out to take photos of it. It took up the whole room!

We picked a nice pantograph that had some large swirls so each row of quilting was a nice 10-inch wide pass. It still took a long time to quilts something this big.

What's on the design board?

Here are the first few sections of my second gypsy wife quilt. I decided to do this second one using a cat theme. I am going to fussy cut kitties all through the quilt blocks.

This will definitely be a scrappy version of the quilt. I am using scraps left over from many other projects, except the cat themed fabrics. Those are new.

I finally decided on the backing for my first gypsy wife quilt and loaded it on my longarmer. The thread choice was easy - a variegated gray. As for the quilting pattern, originally I was going to hand quilt it but I have such a hard time with my fingers in the winter. They are so cracked and dry that I struggle to hold a needle without pain. So that idea has come and gone. I think I will do some straight-line quilting.

Charity Quilts

A member of my church, Lisa approached me and asked me if I would like her mother's fabric. Her mother recently moved into an assisted living center and gave up sewing. I find it so sad when that happens and I want to honor her mother by making some nice quilts for the church to give away. Here is the first quilt I made from her fabric collection.

There were two full boxes of fabrics. When I got them I sorted them into groups where I gave some away to the senior center, gave the large pieces to the church sewing group to use for quilt backings and kept the rest. I washed all the fabrics and folded them in groups by color. Besides making this quilt, I cut 3 more quilt 'kits' in different color ways. I like to have 'kits' to take with me on sew days at the senior center so I am happy to have these ready to go.

I will save up the quilts for the blessing of the quilts at church in fall. I think Lisa will enjoy seeing them on that day.

Etsy

I had my very first Etsy sale. I am very excited that it finally happened. Over the years I've sold many things at craft fairs and by word of mouth. I've even sold quilts on Ebay. But for me, Etsy was pretty elusive. 

I tried to sell quilts on Etsy a few years back with no success. That's when I tried Ebay and that worked better for me. I chalked it up to the saturated market on Etsy that did not exist on Ebay. I don't think it hurt that I have a good seller score on Ebay from years of selling other items there.

I thought I would try again with table runners. I have a regular clientele that purchase my table runners directly, so maybe those would be better to sell than high-end quilts. I listed 24 table runners and the first one sold. Yay! 

I shipped her item this morning and I hope the purchaser enjoys her new home-made item.

Sea Shells and a Shadow Box

Last summer I went on a girlfriends' trip to Marco Island, Florida. Three of us would go shelling early in the morning and walk the beach for miles. It was a great, relaxing time and some really good exercise.

One of my friends took a photo of me walking down the beach while looking for shells. I love the photo and I knew I wanted to do something special with it.

Once home, I took all the sand dollars I collected and decoupaged them to preserve them. They are extremely brittle and delicate and sadly, a few of them broke on the plane trip home.

I went to Ikea and purchased a shadow box for the shells. I love that we have a new Ikea a few blocks away. It's nice to be able to pop in there for just that one thing instead of stocking up like I used to do on our trips to the Ikea in Schaumburg, Illinois.

I cropped my photo to a size that would fit the 5 x 5-inch opening in the photo matting and printed the photo. Then I added the shells to the shadow box. I was surprised how few shells fit. That's OK though, I do love how it turned out.

I guess I will have to think up another crafty project for the rest of the shells.

Scrappy Granny Squares Quilt

I made a scrappy granny squares quilt using a tutorial from Quilty Love.  It's a great tutorial with straightforward instructions that are easy to follow. The blog post with the instructions can be found here. There's even a PDF to download for easy access.

I used a jelly roll I purchased at Nancy's Notions last fall and some white Kona from my stash. It was easy peasy to put together.

I quilted the quilt using a pantograph called Leaf Crown. It has lots of large pretty swirls to compliment the quilt squares.

The backing and binding is in pretty teal dots that match the fabrics in the jelly roll. I like that the fabric bundle had some navy blues in it. I normally would not choose that color. Fabric bundles help me step out of my comfort zone when it comes to color.