"Garden Pleasures" Quilt

FINALLY here is a picture of the latest quilt top that I finished. I still haven't decided how I want to quilt it, but in the meantime I've been working on another quilt top. I'm thinking that once I get the second quilt top completed I'll figure out how I want to quilt the two of them and start doing it.

I know already that I want to do something other than straight lines for the quilting, so I'm going to have to practice some quilting with my BSR foot. I think I'm going to practice by making a tea cozy with some fat quarters that I have laying around. That way I can get the feel of moving the fabric and if I don't like it, its not a big deal because its just a tea cozy and not a big quilt.

That's all for now folks!

Happy Quilting!

Bad Blogger!

No treats for me! I've been a really bad blogger!

Fortunately, even though I haven't posted in quite a while, I have gotten some quilting done. I don't have any pictures to share right now, but I plan to take some tonight when I get home from work. I've gotten all the strips cut for the "Irish Rails" quilt and I even have the strips sewn into sets of 4 for both the border and the main pattern. Since its the standard rail fence design, I just need to cut the large strip sets into blocks and sew the blocks into rows before I'm done. I'm actually hoping to get it pretty much done this weekend, so I might actually be able to post some pictures.

However, I did some "retail therapy" last Friday while at work. Hehehe! I went online to Connecting Threads.com and bought a few necessities (some quilt clips to hold my quilt rolled up while I machine quilt and some basting spray that I want to try), but of course, I couldn't just pass up the free shipping if I bought more than $50 of stuff. So what else to buy??? More fabric of course!

So I bought three fat quarter samplers of fabric. The first one is belles fleurs tonals.

This next one is the same belles fleurs, but its the whole set of them. I probably could have skipped the one above, but they were pretty and nice colors. ;-)

This last set is an indigo sampler set, but it has some creams, tans, and reds mixed in with the blues. I like the combination of colors and it will be fun to create a quilt out of them.

So that's it for my shopping trip, besides the necessities, but it was fun! I just got an email yesterday that they were shipping, so now I get to have fun watching for them and I can play when they arrive. ;-)

Happy Quilting!

Quilts Completed!!

I know I've been a bad blogger and haven't posted stuff in a while, but to be honest, I've been EXTREMELY busy and its not even the "holiday" season yet. Yuck! Work has been really busy and I'm now taking a class for work that takes up about 4 hours of my own time each week from now until March.

I have been able to make progress on the quilting front, though. Last week I was able to actually finish our quilt. This is the first really large quilt that I made and while I ran into stumbling blocks along the entire way, I learned a lot and the quilt looks spectacular. I now have to decide who I want to take the quilt to get it quilted (its too big for my little machine) and decide on the pattern that I wanted quilted on it. It may take a while to do that. ;-)

I also finished up the "Garden Pleasures" quilt this past weekend. On Friday night, I sewed all the rows together to get the middle of the quilt done and pressed them all on Friday night. Saturday morning I cut all the strips for the borders and sewed/pressed them. Since we were dog-sitting on Saturday, I didn't really get a chance to sew the borders on then, but I got them on first thing Sunday morning. :-) So I finished up two quilts in two weeks! The "Garden Pleasures" quilt I plan on quilting myself, but I haven't to figure out how to do it. I think some free-motion swirls or meanders would look nice, but I've never done it so I'm a little scared to do it on a quilt that I'm going to be giving away.

I did start ironing the fabric for the "Irish Rails" quilt that I'm going to be doing next. It should come together very quickly since its all just straight strips sewn together. I think it will look good once its done, but we'll have to see how it all turns out.

Hopefully I'll get some pictures of our finished quilt and the "Garden Pleasures" quilt sometime this week and I'll post them on here.