So far, so good...

I decided to add the two borders, mostly to use up my leftovers. Still haven't gotten it quilted, but my derailment is, in my mind, justified.

I really like how easy this was. And I had a few questions about this one -- I didn't use a pattern for it, so I'm working on recreating my steps. Or trying to. Writing a pattern is a lot harder than it sounds, and I'm math-challenged, so it's taking longer than expected. In fact, I've spent more time trying to capture it all than it took to make the top!

Anyone willing to try it out when I'm done?

Oh, and if anyone knows if this pattern already exists, would you please let me know? I definitely don't want to get involved in any copyright infringement! Thanks!

Time for a little instant gratification...

I ventured back to Michigan last week for another long weekend in the north woods. Which, of course, meant another trip to my favorite quit shop. I'd managed to miss their annual sidewalk sale by visiting the weekend before and the weekend after, and I was happy they still had some of these Moda jelly rolls left. I'd been thinking about this one since my last trip, and regretted not picking it up the first time around. I fell in love with the bright, saturated colors of the fabrics -- like the name implies, they really do feel fresh!

When I got home, I dove right into it. I know if I sit on something too long, I'll get paralyzed by indecision and it'll end up in a stash box.

Gotta swim with the momentum while it's flowing, the tide seems to ebb rather quickly around here.

So I made this:

I definitely needed to get something done. It always feels so good to actually complete a top, especially to one whose work usually ends up half-baked in a Ziploc bag! I'm still contemplating adding a border, which would seriously threaten its progress, and I'd really like to get it quilted this week to further add to my sense of accomplishment. Here's hoping!

And while I've been gone off and on for the past month, my little neighbor Ryan has been watering the flowers on my deck. He takes this responsibility very seriously, reminding his mother every morning that "Cake's flowers need water!" Over the years I've been "Aunt Take," "Auntie Tate," now "Cake." It could be worse.

Now, the weather took a surprisingly cool turn while I was gone last week, bringing a ton of rain (and a tornado, which I missed driving through by oh, six or seven minutes), and, I imagine, a bit of relief to my petunias, but that really doesn't explain how everything has virtually exploded.

I came home to a festival of purples and pinks and crazy verbena. My butterfly bush has dozens of cones, and my roses, which last year produced three flowers all summer, have twelve blooms on one bush this week alone!

Obviously Ryan has a greener thumb than I. Maybe I should leave a three-year old in charge for good?

Back to our regularly scheduled chaos...

And I have to say, a computer crash really takes the wind out of one's sails.

I've spent about a week recovering data and transferring it to a new machine. I'm still not sure I got it all -- I'm sure I'll realize I need some obscure file about an hour after I take my old laptop off life support. On the upside, my new machine is fast and shiny, with a hard drive three times the size of the old one; on the downside, it came loaded with Vista. Don't get me started on that.

Vacation seems like forever ago. I sunned, I swam, I golfed, took tons of pictures, enjoyed 45-degree mornings and 75-degree days with blinding sunrises, and managed to pump a fair amount of money into Michigan's quilt shop economy. Between three shops I purchased a jelly roll, some adorable snowflake prints that I have no idea what I'm going to do with them but were just too cute to resist, and a Woodland Bloom charm pack for a very special project this week: I was on Monkey Girl duty.

My goddaughter has been reminding me for the past six months that she learned how to sew, which qualified her to make a doll quilt when she came to visit this summer. Who was I to dispute her expertise?

I'd seen a short program on Quilter's TV with Billie Lauder (sorry, can't find a link) where she sewed two squares into a tube, sliced it down the middle, rotated the top piece and made another tube to cut in half to produce a nice, tidy four-patch. It seemed like a good, easy place to start, so when Monkey Girl arrived, in addition to making a special shopping trip for Kraft Mac 'n Cheese, chocolate pudding, peanut butter (and, for good measure, a jar of Marshmallow Fluff) and a little fruit just so I could say she ate healthy, I had her machine all set up and the squares ready to go.

Over the course of an afternoon, she made four-patches out of all of the squares. Her seams were a little wobbly but not horrible (I set up a "fence" made of about eight layers of painter's tape a quarter inch from the needle to keep her on track), and we only had to redo a couple that wavered a little uncontrollably when she picked up speed, but all in all, it was great progress...until she proclaimed to her mother that "parts of quilting were boring."

I suppose that's to be expected of an eight-year old. She liked making the "checkers," as she called them, and liked arranging them. The ironing and trimming and piecing the sashing? Not so much. I was left with making the actual tops while she colored and ate Fluffernutter sandwiches, which was fine. I managed to get one quilted before she left, packaged up as a surprise for her birthday next month.

Doll quilts for Nelly, Samantha and Kirsten -- American Girl Store, eat your heart out

I'm not so sure we'll be sewing next summer.

Monkey Girl works on her first quilt project

She's off to spend time with more family before returning with Mom & Dad to Bermuda, so my house is once again at peace, and Archie can come out from under the bed. The question is, though: what do I do with all this pudding?

Crash!

So my computer crashed the day before leaving on my annual Grand Tour of Michigan...so no posts until I return!

Goin' crazy...

My friend and her architect husband are rehabbing a gorgeous old house in an area west of downtown punctuated with turn-of-the-century mansions like this (and no, that's not it):

It's a beautiful street that was probably one of the more fashionable places to live in Chicago in its day. It saw a decline for quite some time through the sixties and seventies, but in recent years has seen many of the properties like the one above returned to their former glory. When they found their house, my friend's husband saw an opportunity to create his own architectural showcase; as it takes shape, she's seizing the opportunity to decorate.

She asked if I'd work with her on the window treatments. She'd like to preserve some of the Victorian charm of the house, but with a modern twist. She loves crazy quilts. And purple. She knows she wants roman shades on the wall next to the cantilevered staircase and drapes in the bays in the living room. We've begun the process of looking at books, and magazines, and drawing lots of pictures. And choosing fabrics to see if they're workable.

I started playing last weekend with some silks, satin and brocade we'd picked out to do some samples. We had this (crazy) idea to applique some blocks or panels to velvet, see how that worked. Well, the silk shantung worked up beautifully, although it's a little messy (and I thought the homespuns shed -- hah!). I even took the Paintstiks to some of it to add some texture.

I was pretty jazzed about the progress I was making...until I got to the velvet part. To make a very long (two-day) story short, after much experimenting and swearing, the only way I could keep the #@*^!! velvet from stretching was to spray-baste a heavy tearaway stabilizer to the back, then use more heavy tearaway under the edges of the applique block on the front. While it actually looks quite nice, the result is a piece so stiff it could probably stand up by itself.

So I'm back to square one. I think I may try to piece the blocks and velvet instead, but still not sure how that would effect the draping. More experimentation, obviously, is in order.

Any ideas out there from the blogosphere would be appreciated!

Panic on the Yellow Brick Road...

This is one of last week's many finishes: leftovers from my first Yellow Brick Road project a few years ago. Due to time constraints, I fell back on my favorite funky-line quilting; I've done this on a few pieces over the past year and I love the look it produces -- even if it does appear as if I've been chugging tequila at my sewing machine.

It is the second of two quilts destined for a twin baby shower last Sunday afternoon, and I was on schedule to finish it with time to spare. And by "time to spare," I mean thirty or forty minutes. An hour, max -- enough to get a shower in, do the hair up nice and stop for gas on the way.

I've been time challenged all my life, and I've learned to accept it. It's just the way I roll.

I was just adding the binding at about 7:30 that morning when:

Pfffft! Grrrrrrrrrrrzt! Gzzzzzzzzzt!

Darkness.

Silence.

I know onomatopoeia is subject to interpretation, but to me, that's the sound of the power going out. And not just in my place (because there was a brief moment there where I questioned whether I'd forgotten to pay the electric bill) -- it was out for blocks in all directions. A call to the power company revealed that yes, they were aware of the outage, and estimated power wouldn't be back up until eleven.

What came out of my mouth next was a string of expletives that I'll leave to your imagination. I only had about two feet of binding attached, and nobody with power close enough that I could pack up and go finish it somewhere else.

This is not the first time I have wished for Ed Begley's bike generator -- while he uses his to make toast every morning, I have a dream of using one to power my sewing machine and laptop, at the same time returning my butt to its pre-desk jockey shape. It's the greatest motivator I can think of: unless I pedal, I wouldn't be able to sew...or blog.

So I took a shower. In the dark. Because when the power goes out, so does the electronic ignition on the hot water heater, and it was a very good bet that most of my young neighbors were still sleeping off the previous night's revelry, oblivious to the fact that the early risers in the building were in the process of emptying the tank. Heh, heh.

And as the day inched painfully slowly toward eleven and I had cleaned myself, and cleaned up all my fabric scraps and sorted through some piles and watered the plants and played a few little ditties on the piano and did anything else I could think of that didn't require electricity, I determined that there was NO WAY IN HELL I could finish sewing on the binding and then stitch it down by the time I had to leave at 12:30.

Admitting defeat, I placed a sheepish call to the shower's hostess to tell her I'd be arriving a little later than anticipated.

"Oh!" She replied. "Didn'tyougetmye-mail?" She's a really fast talker.

Um, no. I have no power. (and, I might add, a really sucky battery in my computer)

"Theywenttothehospitalatthreeo'clockthismorningthinkingshewasinlaborbutshe'snot." (deep breath)
"Whichisgoodbecausefourweeksistooearlyandanywaythey'rekeepingherthere."
(The showeree is over 40, considered high risk)
"Sowe'llhavetoreschedule...noshowertoday!"

She hung up with a breezy "Haveagreatday!" and as my hair began to grow back from the spots where I'd torn it out and my blood pressure returned to normal, the refrigerator brrr-urped to life, the next door neighbor's air conditioner lurched into its familiar annoying hum, and all was right again with my little world.

Revisiting the Raggedy Rag...

Some of you may wonder whatever happened to the Raggedy Rag quilt. Well, after being sucked briefly into a black hole because I ran out of batting scraps, it has made a comeback...and is now done.

I can say with 100% confidence that this is the messiest quilt I've ever worked with. Ever.

I don't think I'll rid my house of all the tiny bits of thread this baby shed any time soon. Between the ragged edges of the homespuns (which are scraggly to begin with) and the clipped seam allowances, geez Louise! I washed it inside a pillowcase, but my poor dryer was having fits. And have you ever tried to Swiffer with an 11-lb. cat attached to the handle? It's a challenge.

The quilt's not very big (10" blocks), but it's a perfect baby/car quilt -- very lightweight, and incredibly soft and cuddly. I ended up binding it because I couldn't stand how sloppy all the fringe was around the edges. At least this way it's all contained, so to speak.

It was really fast because the ragged edge blocks on top were sewn down as I quilted it. Had I not run out of batting halfway through, this probably could have been done this in an afternoon.

I may actually do another one of these, I really like the look of the plaids. Next time though, I'll be better prepared to deal with the mess.


So knock another one off the UFO list and add it to the pile of the past week's finishes! I've been busy!