B3, B4 and B5

I spent some time converting The Big Green Closet Formerly Known as Laurie's Bedroom back into a bedroom yesterday. That's a job that will be ongoing for quite a while. We're shifting things around a bit and I'm trying to reorganize my sewing area. I was able to consolidate some of the bags of grouped fabrics into bins, and label them. I discovered an entirely forgotten bin of strings. And the box with everything needed to finish my Home Is wallhangings. I will finish those, and then strip any left overs and add to the string box. Next year. Maybe.


Anyway, when I was at the point that I could not see straight and could walk around upstairs without risking personal injury again, I sat down to take a break and work on some Sylvias.












B3 (above) was paper pieced. I'm finding that I have a love/hate relationship with paper piecing. As in, I sometimes am not fond of it while I'm doing it, due to my occasional need for unsewing and resewing... And I LOVE the finished product.













B4 was designed to lull me into a false sense of serenity. I whipped through this one in no time.












B5 whipped me. I have not ever done a hexagon (Grandmother's Flower Garden) before. And I can say with absolute assurance that though I think they are Oh Sew Cute? Especially in 30's reproductions? I don't ever plan to do another one! I do, however, have plans to cut some hexagons and plaster them on some flower pots.... cos I'm weird that way, and there is no hand sewing involved. Heh heh!

If I ever have time do carry through on that flower pot idea (pencilling it in for 2012), I will post pix. Okay, back to my Monday. I have a vet appointment for Ms. Sadie, and a new dictation system arriving today (I think). Hopefully, I can quilt Karene's quilt tops starting tonight! Happy Monday all! Hopefully we will not melt with the 105 degree temps today!

:) (Note to self: do not use resized pix on blog..... they don't embiggen!) Sorry!

Yahoo! Karen's Happy Hour!

Karen decided to donate one of her UFO's for the Crisis Center homes. She made this Happy Hour twin-sized pattern quite a while ago, and did an awesome job! She even quilted it herself, stitching in the ditch, and putting a different purple button in the center of each block. The binding was all that was needed and I put that on tonight!

Such pretty colors!

Thank you Karen! One more quilt is in the box to head north. Tomorrow, I will start on the two quilt tops Karene made. They are Sew Cute!! We're getting closer to our goal of a quilt on every bed in the two Homes!! :)

Jacque's second 4-patch floral is quilted and bound...

Yay! A finish for the Crisis Intervention Service home! This is the second quilt top that Jacque made, which should have been completed before I left for Cody. However, the universe laughed at me, and my dictation system became terminally ill the night before my 6 AM flight, and no quilting got done that night!

All is better. My new Bytescribe system is on its way to me. We're limping along on the old one and looking forward to the arrival of the new one. And last night I went upstairs and bound this quilt, two weeks later than planned!

Thank you Jacque! It's in the bottom of a big box I purchased to bring my strings back home.... Still not sure how they grew so much while I was in Cody! Next up, will be two adorable quilt tops that Karene made! They are way bigger than crib, a bit less than twin size, so these will be for the two toddler beds at the home.

After that, I have an Irish Chain to quilt and bind. And then I tackle the two double size quilts. Tops are made, and quilting will probably be done very simply, in the ditch, etc, on my Janome off the frame, on the dining room table.

We're still short at least one twin, possibly two. If anyone has any ideas, or wishes to help knock out another string quilt (I have a string twin in progress, five 20 inch blocks out of the twelve needed are already constructed), or wants to help make a fast (BIG blocks) fractured nine-patch top, let me know!! Cold weather is fast approaching Big Sky Country!

I'm off to tackle my Friday! I want to get my work out of the way so I can quilt for Crisis Centers Saturday and maybe get a few of my Sylvias done on Sunday!

Catching up....#4

Okay, this is the last post from my trip... I think. I feel like I've forgotten some stuff, but maybe those things will come to me when I consolidate my different folders of pictures, and I'll post more if that's the case.

This post concerns the seemingly innocent box of strips that I brought with me on my trip, to work on a string quilt for the Crisis Center home, with Dad, while I was here.

Now, we started off with a bang, as you could see in an earlier post.

















This is the infamous box of strings.

Then I got side tracked for a day with quilting Jacque's quilt top. :)


Dad soldiered on, churning out square after square! I finished Jacque's top, and rejoined the string block effort, and we produced string blocks until we were having nightmares about them. The quilt kept getting bigger. The box of strips did not seem to get proportionately smaller!

Dad's hand gave him fits from time to time, but he just chalked it up to his old friend Arthur Itis, and kept on sewing.


Last night, he had the honor of stitching and ironing the very last block.























And then he put it into place....























And I commenced with sewing those last three rows together. Then I joined the two portions of quilt together. DONE! One double-sized quilt top for the Crisis Center!

It wasn't until today that Dad noticed that his thumb was not just sore, but swollen on the hand that he recently had caught in a kind of crush injury between a saw and a large piece of wood. So while we were at the Wellness Center this morning, he had a few x-rays. Guess who has been sewing with a fractured thumb all week!?

It's a hairline fracture, but it's an extensive one. His thumb is now immobilized for three weeks!!

We came home from the doctor's office, and before we packed up the quilt top to come home with me for quilting, we took some pix on the front porch. It's a wonder you can see the quilt, because it was windy enough that I thought it might blow over to Southfork.

I love this quilt.... I may have to make myself one!

Mom got under it and we almost lost her! It's BIG.

Now, having folded the top and put it in the bottom of the box, I picked up the box of strips, which should have been way smaller than when I got here.

There is something very wrong with this picture. Why hasn't the quantity of strips gone down! I came up here with one box; I'm going home with two. And I didn't buy any fabric or souveniers!

Dad has a theory...... he thinks they are "being fruitful and multiplying" while we are not looking. Anybody want to join me in another string quilt project??!!

Okay, I'm off to get some rest - there's a ticket in my bag that says I have to be on that plane when it takes off at 6:00 AM tomorrow.

(I miss my parents already! I'm coming back in the spring and it can't happen soon enough!)

Catching up....#3

Which is really #4, because the Mayor's house was really Catching Up #3, but anyway!!!

These are some pictures from the late yesterday and today - I will put it up as #3 and #4....















Another gorgeous Cody sunrise.

















Embiggen to see herd of antelope in the distance. It's still very early in the morning.
















For my VW bus-loving husband!! They cut a section out of this one, I guess, but I love the paint job!
















This young buck is maybe 15 feet from my car window! We saw these deer on the way to the Wellness Center (where I had a session on the Dreadmill, and my knee lived to tell the tale!)

















Hanging out in the 'hood!

So graceful!

:)

Dinner at the Mayor's

Mom mentioned to me that we'd be going out to dinner Thursday night. She didn't say much else until just about time to go. Then she advised me to clean up a bit and "maybe wear some earrings!" My eyebrows shot up!

"Where are we going?!" She announced that "we were going to the Mayor's house for dinner." I nearly had a heart attack. She took pity on me and showed me a pamphlet. The old Mayor's_House had been taken from its original location in 1997 and placed on a lot in town and it has been made into a gorgeous dinner spot. Here are some pix from the evening, and hopefully, I'll be able to properly insert captions under them!

This is the Mayor's House. I could love a house like that! So much history and character!

A Victrola! (See the hand crank on the side?)

A gentleman's "secretary".

Of course my eyes landed on the sewing machine! Look at the ladies' boots hanging from one side!

I'm gawking at the tin type ceiling....

The fireplace in the parlor.... and what's that on the hearth?

A chicken! :)

The old rotary phone in the hallway.

The parlor....home of the Victrola, a pretty piano, and the fireplace with the chicken.

Another interesting ceiling. I wonder if I could hang wallpaper on a ceiling?!

I know that pretty lady!

Mom and Dad sharing a tiny lemon sorbet we were given between courses.

The meal was perfection. Dad had some grilled shrimp, Mom had buffalo medallions and I had a huge grilled chicken dish. We played musical plates at one point, so we could each savor each other's dishes. I got two of the shrimp, a buffalo medallion, and they got to try my chicken, etc. My chicken was so big we brought home enough for them to have lunch the next day! The food was absolutely wonderful and for how delicious it was, very reasonably priced, I thought. The different sauces were flavorful without being overpowering and I savored the meal from start to finish. Then, there was dessert!

Mom's favorite: Red velvet cake with a creamy icing!

After dinner we got a peek at one of the bedrooms in the home. (It is a bed/breakfast business.)

And there was a quilt on the brass bed!

I'll blog more later!!

Catching up....#2

Hi handsome!





















Oh, my, two handsome fellows!



















And this little one sitting very very still, in the hope that I won't see him!
















One of our sunrises....

































As usual, click any pix to "embiggen"

.......going to start another post....

Catching up.... #1

I am going to try to catch up on my week - it's been so much fun and between having all that fun, and some working that had to take place, I've not had a chance to update!

Again, these are in no particular order!

Jacque's quilt top became a quilt! She did an awesome job of piecing it, and I brought it with me to finish here.

We pinned it at the church, using several of their large tables in the education center and Mom caught this picture of all the pins before we closed them! Isn't that an interesting perspective!

I have another one at home (that is quilted but not bound, in the same pattern) that Jacque also made. That one, I did loop-de-loops all over on my short-arm frame. This one, I decided to stitch in the ditch, and I also chose a higher loft for the batting. This is going to be one WARM quilt. I was pretty toasty while working with it!

It's a happy quilt, isn't it! It just shouts "springtime!"

Thank you Jacque! That one is on the stack for delivery to the second Crisis Intervention home.

We had some awesome weather one afternoon. Here's a "mare's tail" rain cloud moving through the area.

More rain moving in.

See why they call it big sky country?

I want a windmill like this one day! (Hooked up to my meter so I can save on my power bill, thank you very much!)

Here's a set of pix taken in my favorite kind of light, in the evening. The storm is moving on, and the evening light makes things so especially pretty!

(my favorite!)

I'll do another post with more pictures.... Blogger gets testy if I try to put in too many in one post!