December

The last two months have gone by in a flash with no notable occurences, except for Thanksgiving. One of my sons and his family stayed for a few days, and we had a lovely holiday. We found time to play some cribbage, which I haven't played in years; and now hubby and I try to play every day at tea time. 

I started this Courthouse Steps a month or more ago; but I haven't been doing a whole lot of quilting lately, so it is still on the design wall. This is mostly fabric that is part of my quilt chapter's stash, that no one else wants to work with, so I'm (still) trying to use it up. This is a masculine quilt and is perfect for using up most of the man-themed fabrics. 

 

I bought a secondhand Handiquilter Avante long arm just about a year ago that came with a ProStitcher tablet for computerized quilting. I have spent the last year mostly in the dark about the operation of the tablet, frustrated by endless thread breaks, and lack of progress, until I was ready to just heave it out the back door. 

A totally unsatisfactory situation. Two days ago, I sewed some ugly fabric together into a top and decided to make another attempt. After spending quite some time playing with the top tension, I finally managed to stitch out two different patterns across the quilt top, with no thread breaks. An exciting breakthrough to be sure! I have much more to learn, but hopefully now I am on my way to actually quilting a quilt on this machine. 

I am keeping my Lizzie for now. That one is a much lighter weight machine than the Avante, and I love quilting on it, so I'm not giving it up. 

Truthfully, for the last month I have been way more absorbed in making quilted ornaments. I starting learning how to make these a couple of years ago from theornamentgirl.com. While the website has many patterns available for purchase by the general public, they also offer a couple of different subscription services, one with a complete kit each month, and one with a new original pattern each month, no kit. I am subscribed to both, so I have access to many gorgeous patterns and the supplies to make them. 

Ornament Girl also has a YouTube channel where you can learn to make some of the free patterns. 

The Nutcracker and the Santa Suit above are two of my favorites. The Santa Suit was December's ornament of the month. The gingerbread man one was just finished yesterday.

I made my daughter-in-law a Grumpy Cat ornament for Christmas. She has a 13-year old cat named Mo that she rescued from a shelter earlier this year, and he's very grumpy. He's bitten everyone in the house. He looks just like this too, lol.

This is another very pretty one called Daydream. 

Having a ball making these!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October

I don’t know why I feel compelled to write a post about a month that is long gone, chronological consistency I guess. But first, a couple of small finishes! This is a table runner for our coffee table at camp, taught to us by one of my quilt chapter members in a spring workshop. The pattern is Waverunner by GE Designs, purchased from Cut Loose Press; and perhaps Cut Loose Press owns the rights now, not sure. 

My table runner is 14 x 42, shorter than the original pattern to fit my table. I quilted it in a variegated blue thread with a panto called Riptide from Urban Elementz, a favorite of mine because it is not dense and is pretty easy to quilt. 

 

The backing is an odd piece I acquired from somewhere, scrap bag maybe. I had no idea what to do with this crazy print, but it works just fine for a backing, and I had exactly enough.  

This one is called Beach Buoys, an original pattern (I think) by Seams Sew Perfect in Madison. This was a kit I bought a long time ago on a shop hop, and it's a little wider and a little shorter than the Waverunner. I plan to hang this one at camp. Love that striped binding. 

 

I quilted this one with the same Riptide pantograph. You can see the quilting a little better in this photo. 

 

I usually hang my minis and small vertical wall hangings like this one with a sleeve on the back and the 3M Command strips, the kind that stick to the wall until you release them. They've worked extremely well and haven't damaged any walls; but we have cedar boards on the walls at camp, so Command strips weren't going to work. 

I remembered I had seen someone use folded triangles in the corners of a mini for hanging; so I added those, and now I can slide the lattice strip right up into those pockets. All I have to do now is tack a picture hanger to the wood strip, and that'll work just fine.  

The backing was pretty perfect for this one too! 

September was filled with many gorgeous days, and we had beautiful weather as well in the beginning of October. We shut down camp for the year about mid October, and my son and his family wanted to come up one more time before we closed. 

That weekend coincided with my new daughter-in-law's birthday, and I had J Marie Bakery in Augusta bake her this lovely cake for her birthday. DIL's favorite color is purple, and the pastel colors in the cake were just so pretty. 

 

I love how the flowers trail down the side of the cake. It was a surprisingly tall cake, lol. 

I came back up to camp the following week to start the fall cleaning. Every last thing gets cleaned at camp in the fall, and there's usually a mountain of laundry by the time I finish. 

We've had three small above ground garden beds every summer for the last three years that have produced very well. Even in the second week of October, the tomatoes, bell peppers, and green beans were winding down but still producing. The first day I was up there that week, I picked all the ripe cherries, a few green beans, and all the peppers worth picking. 

 

The cherries don't last long because we usually eat them right off the vine, but there were bunches of bell peppers. We had so many this year that we didn't know what to do with them. Then we decided to slice and saute them, and they're fabulous cooked that way. 

Last summer, we discovered you could saute radishes too, and we had bunches. I hate raw radishes, but I can eat 'em all day long sauteed. Who knew?

Unfortunately I waited until the next day to pick the rest of the swiss chard. Too late, the deer visited that night and ate all the leaves off my chard. 

The following night the deer came back and ate all the stalks too, lol. We haven't seen a deer here in five years; but not only were they up to camp, they seem to be all over the place. We caught six of them on the outdoor camera traipsing through our yard one night at home, and there were two young ones wandering around in the neighbor's yard one day. I heard they ate all the neighbor's hostas, but they didn't touch ours.  

They also ate every last leaf off the green bean plants...

 

... and they did the same thing to the peppers. Ate all the leaves off only one plant the first night...

... and came back the second night and polished off  the rest of the leaves. I guess they don't like tomatoes though because they never touched those, lol. 

By mid October, night time temps start dipping into the 30s, so we drained the pipes and buttoned everything up. 

We went back up to the lake a few weeks ago, just to check on things; and the water level has recovered a little, and the well has fully recovered. It will still be some time before the lake freezes over, so I'm hoping the water level will come up some more. It's supposed to be a snowy winter, which could mean a lot of spring runoff, which would be good. We'll see.  

September

I spent all the time I could at camp in September because I don't get hardly any time to do that during the summer because of quilt show. After Labor Day, most folks have closed up camp and gone home for the winter, so it is peaceful and quiet but still warm enough to be out on the water. 

We have been experiencing drought conditions all summer long, and it is not much improved this fall. Two summers ago, the water was up over this top step and over the dock and stayed that way through part of August. This summer, the water has receded quite a bit. 

Normally, all this sand is covered with water, with just a narrow beach up by that house.

 

The water level has been so low for so long that the grasses have gotten a foothold. 

Neither my granddaughter nor I go swimming, but we do like to go wading every summer, and I was amazed how far out we were able to walk. There is even another sandbar behind me in the picture. 

You can see we were a long ways out from the beach when I took this picture, and the water was still not even mid calf. I wondered if we could have walked all the way across the shallow end of the lake, but my granddaughter decided she wanted to go back. 

 

I bought a kayak for my (ex) daughter-in-law several years ago but had never kayaked myself. The kids brought their kayaks up, and we keep a couple under the deck during the summer, so I whipped up my courage and decided to give it a try. My kayak was a wider one, so no worries about flipping it over and not being able to extract myself from the kayak. 

We decided to paddle straight across the lake, which was a lot further than it looked; but we made it. I actually had a blast, and paddling wasn't as tiring as I thought it would be. I paddled a canoe years ago, and that was a lot more draining for me. 

I choose a project to work on at camp every summer. I leave my small sewing machine up there and have everything set up in one of the dormers so I can just walk up and start sewing. A few years ago it was the 21-Year Pineapple Project, which took a couple of summers to finish. This year, it was these Cherry Crunch string units, pattern from Bonnie Hunter. I need hundreds of these units, and I'm up to 330 so far. I figure I'm close enough to the end that I might work on it this winter at home. 

These are all string blocks of course, and I've even incorporated a few selvages here and there. I don't know why it didn't occur to me before to do that. I think it adds a lot of interest.  

 

My granddaughter is old enough now to use a sewing machine. She made a pillow at her friend's house, so she's used a machine before. Although she has not expressed any interest in making a quilt, I did ask her if she would make a Cherry Crunch unit that I could include in my quilt, and she was happy to oblige. 

She feels quite confident behind the machine and knows exactly what to do. Her block is the one with the little fox at the top in the photo above. 

 

I worked on some of these blocks too for Bonnie Hunter's Shattered pattern. These are so fun to make!

This unit is one of my favorites so far, which also incorporates part of a selvage. 

I also made this string block, which will eventually become diamonds for another neutral strings quilt. I have no immediate plans to work on it, just had to make one to get it out of my system, lol. 

 

 

 

 

A Long While

I've been gone a long while from my blog, and how annoying to discover Google search links automatically appearing in my post!! Took me a while to figure out how to get rid of that unwanted feature. I suspect that is more for Google's benefit than mine! 

This year has gone by in a flash. At the beginning of July, I realized half a year had elapsed, and now here we are almost into September. The most momentous thing that happened this year is that my younger son got married earlier this month--his first marriage and her second. We welcomed his bride and her two children to our family, ages 14 and 7. 

I spent much of the earlier part of this year doing my work for the Maine Quilts show, which happened at the end of July. I have worked for quilt show now for nine years, and I'm thinking next year might be my last. I'm not getting any younger, and I really would like to spend more time with my family at camp during the summer months. A real vacation might be a nice idea too.

I really haven't gotten much quilting done this year, which is a crying shame because I have so much beautiful fabric. There's another good reason to give up my activities with Maine Quilts. The neutral strings quilt, which I called Cafe au Lait, from my last post was finished. 

I like this quilt so much, and I'd love to make another one, maybe in diamonds, especially since the bag of strings I was working from doesn't look like it was touched. An altogether too common story. 

I pieced the backing in an effort to use up some tans I no longer wanted. 

And I quilted it with a pantograph called Malochite, which was interesting and fun to do.

In April my quilt group held a charity sew day, and we made this pattern called Iceberg from Villa Rosa Designs. Precut friendly, makes a great lap size, and it's easy to sew. 

I quilted it with a pantograph called Knit 1 Purl 2, which I hadn't tried before. I liked the way it looked, but I wish I could have kept those lines a little more even.  

I got two more quilts finished in July. One was a UFO that was several years old, Bitcoin, a Bonnie Hunter design. Another quilt that will be a favorite of mine. And, in an altogether too common story, the strip bin doesn't look like I touched it, even though there are 3,330 rectangles in the quilt. I may have also, ahem, cut more fabric as I went along making the quilt. 

And I used everything in this quilt, civil war repros, batiks, calicos, modern fabrics, florals, novelties, kids prints, you name it. And some of them are really old, like from decades ago. It all went together so well.  

This was, as Diane Harris from Stash Bandit likes to say, a ridiculous amount of fun. I had a ball picking out each set of matching rectangles to sew together and moving them around on the design wall. The rectangles finished to 1 x 2, and I am working on another Bitcoin with slighter wider rectangles. There might also be another one in my future with bigger rectangles.    

My other finish in July was this quilt called From Our House, a free pattern from Riley Blake Designs. I used the same fabrics from Riley Blake that were used in the pattern because I liked the colors so much, and I liked the look of a textured solid-like fabric. This is more  modern for me, which is something I'm gravitating towards more and more. It would probably be more accurate to say modern traditional. 

I had a friend quilt it because I was running out of time before quilt show, and I love how it turned out. The pantograph is called Bayside, I think.  

 

The Phoebe Quilt

We had another round of snow last night, another 6 inches or so, and just a few days after the last round. Because the temps have been so cold, nothing has melted; so we probably have a foot of snow on the ground now. Too bad it came so late in the winter before the ground froze because without that insulating layer of snow, we think the line coming off our septic tank at camp froze and split. Water ran down the hill under the sheds and froze, so the entire shed is now sitting on ice. Nothing to do about it now, but no idea what that will look like in the spring, but we'll get it fixed. More snow next week. Oh good. 

These are my sedums in the header photo, which we never cut down in the fall. I love how they look with the snow piled on top.

I spent all morning watching James Bond movies and finishing the Phoebe quilt. It finishes at 60 x 80. I intended to donate it; but hubby liked it, and I thought he wanted to keep it--until he saw a four patch quilt I started with the scraps from this one. Look! Over there! So easily distracted, lol. So this one will in fact go to Maine Veterans.

There isn't much blue in the quilt, so I used up another piece of blue fabric languishing in the stash for the binding. I also didn't have thread to match, so I used a variegated thread with that color blue in it, and I quite like the way that looks. Never occurred to me to do that before, but I'll definitely be using more variegated thread for bindings in the future. 

The backing fabrics were maybe 3-yard pieces that I've been wanting to think of a way to use for a long time. Truthfully, I don't know why they appealed to me. Maybe because they were a good buy at Mardens, lol. In any case, the middle piece is now out of the stash. More and more I'm liking the strip pieced backings on scrap quilts, an idea from Bonnie Hunter's blog. Great way to use up some stash.

This neutral strings quilt is the next one to get prepped for the longarm. When my friend passed away in 2017, I inherited 48 of these 4-inch string units.  

I had no idea what her plan was for these, and I didn't know what to do with them either because they're very busy. I finally decided to just sew them all together, and I really like the result. These are made of those low volume prints that are too busy for a low volume quilt, but they're perfect for this. 

The blocks came with a huge bag of strings in these mostly tan colors. Koleen loved those colors, but I much prefer whites and creams, so it took that much longer to figure out what to do with them. I needed another 72 units to bring the quilt up to the size I wanted, so I worked out of her bag of strings, and they blend well. That bag is so stuffed with strings that you'd never know I took anything out of it, lol, isn't that the way? The quilt is now 40 x 48, which will fit on the wall in my bedroom perfectly. 

Linking up with Oh Scrap!