Needles and Pens

Time for another progress report on my January "guest room" challenge, and I think I've set an all-time personal speed record on this one. The bed quilt is finished! I started on Monday with this: And here is the end result, finished on Friday. (Just out of curiosity, I kept track of my time. From cutting to piecing to pinning to quilting to binding -- 26 hours, 15 minutes.) I was lucky again fabric-wise. Halfway into making the blocks, I realized I was short of the cream print. (sigh) When I went back to the store for more -- the bolt was gone. (groan) BUT when I checked the remnant bin, I found the end of the bolt. (yes!) It was just over a half yard, and turned out to be exactly enough to finish the top. (whew!) Best $1.39 I ever spent. My only regret on this quilt, I wish it were just a bit wider, so it had a little more drop on the sides. Of course if it were, I wouldn't have had enough of that cream print, so... all for the best, I suppose. I...

Well, the Better Home Challenge wasn't meant to be a quilting challenge, but wouldn't you know I'd find a way to turn it into one? LoL My January home project is the spare room in our basement (which I guess has improved to the point where I can officially call it "The Guest Room" now). It's actually very nearly done, but still needs the decorative touches to finish it off. So this week's design wall project is a quilt for the guest room bed. Here are the fabrics and pattern I'll be using. I wanted something that will go together relatively quickly, and decided on this 9-patch variation. The pink is left over from my mom's birthday quilt, the cream, I bought yesterday (but didn't quite buy enough!) and someone gave me three yards of the green Fairy Frost. It's just been waiting for the perfect project, and I think I found it! This was my attempt to show how well the colors work with the walls and the curtain I made for the room last...

... there was lots of working, and sewing, and keeping the household afloat between bouts of summer partying, graduations, birthdays, anniversaries, the end of one school year and the beginning of another, halloween... ...and now it's November once again. Wow. It's official. I am the world's worst blogger. Yet somehow I can't quite give it up. And as usual, I have a hard time deciding how to pick up where I left off. Which would be... June. Oddly enough, it was my biggest June quilting project that brought me back to my blog tonight, so I guess that's a good place to start. I recently received an email from the Wrapped in Hope project, and stopped by to add their link to my sadly neglected blog list, and here I am. :o) So, a little about Wrapped in Hope: One of the various projects of Margaret's Hope Chest (which has, to date, donated 722 quilts to people in need), Wrapped in Hope provides birthday quilts "to bring HOPE and comfort" to children who a...

I finished a project this month that was a long time coming. For my son's 23rd birthday, I gave him what was supposed to be his high school graduation quilt. Better late than never, I guess. I blogged a bit about this quilt last fall, and if you'd like to know at least part of the reason this gift was so late, you can read the backstory in Part One and Part Two . In a nutshell, my round robin flew the coop, and this is round two... I made the new ( Blackford's Beauty ) center block sometime last October: Then, working from photos of the original quilt, I remade the first border, designed by my friend, Maura: I was buying fabric for the next border when I learned that Hancock Fabrics was hiring. I started my new job the following Monday, and from there on, work on the quilt slowed considerably. I finished the appliqued music border sometime in February or March: By April, I was scrambling to put together the 20 blocks that would make up the last border. I decided to repe...

Lynette from Lynette Anderson Designs asked this question on her blog yesterday, and inspired me to share my own bed quilt story. I first became truly hooked on quilting back in 2002, by way of an online quilting group's invitation to join in my first quilting round robin. There were six quilters in my group, and we each started with a center block, sending it away to the next person, each adding a border and then passing the quilt down the line. I was fairly new to quilting, but really enjoyed the excitement and challenge of adding a new border to each quilt that came my way. Little did I know just how beautiful my own little center block would grow to be. When my top was finally returned to me, I just knew it belonged on my bed. It would be years, however, before I actually got it finished. Here's a photo of the quilt in 2007 -- five long years after the round robin was completed. I added the wide checkerboard and final solid borders to make it big enough to fit the bed. Fin...