Sunday of catching up.............11/13/2011

Now that I am back from vacation and slowly getting back into things, I figured I would start by clearing up some of the mess that was laying around, and find out where Myra's mystery went. Yes I have been following, I am behind though and no I haven't blogged about it. Originally I picked out  LOTS of rainbow batiks, Myra listed her colors as a neutral, a print and 3 colors from the print.................hmmmmm, don't know if my rainbow will work. Step one was to make 3 blocks of my desire, I wasn't sure what I wanted to make. (I know now, but haven't made them) Then when step 2 came out, I changed my color selection to something I think would work better. Made all my 4 patches.

This is only some of them.

Then I did step 3, got all those HST with a square in it done too. 
Then life got in the way..............
Let's see then step 4 came out the Thursday before I went on vacation, I don't sew Thursday, Friday or Saturday for the most part. Then I went on vacation, came back and completely missed step 5. Then all of a sudden there was the final step............WHOOOAA, I had better get busy. It just so happens that one of the other QAL that I have been following came out with a block last week, that I am going to use for step one on this QAL too.  Myra has been wondering if I am indeed even following along, (It is a great easy quilt to make if you need one in a hurry.) I am making it a mystery to her what the final looks like, hehehe.. I am not the only one doing this either. So today, my Super Sewing Sunday has been catching up with steps 4, 5, and 6. To get this one done. Spent a lot of time making flying geese, I love to make mine the "no-waste" way.

 My quilt will be more scrappy controlled, instead of really controlled with only 5 fabrics. But so far it is looking pretty good. I am now seeing where I could have went more scrappy, next time. Yes, I think I will make this one again too. That is all the sneak peek you get today Myra, should have it done tomorrow though. :D

I need to really get some of these other projects OFF my table and FINISHED. Psycho cat Ely Mae, keeps dragging stuff off the tables and ironing board and leaving them all over the house, and I mean all over. 3 stories worth of all over! I find something else several times a day, scraps, pieces of blocks, whole blocks, chain pieced sets of blocks waiting to be ironed, fat quarters, even yardage. Maybe she is giving me a hint to spend more time up there. Maybe. This is what I picked up around the house in the past two days!

All of that, and see those white and blue pieces, not all at the same time either.
Jacob's Ladder blocks are all done, rows pinned together waiting to be chain pieced into a lovely top. Had them all pinned to the design board but that crazy cat kept pulling the pins out or pulling the blocks off with the pins still in them and either just leaving them all over the floor or dragging them all over the house. Didn't want anyone or any of the animals to get a pin stuck in their foot so I took them all off the board and safety pinned them together. Isn't the whole point of a design board so you don't have to pin???? Not in this house. LOL

Saturday I went shopping for my Secret Santa Swap person. I hope she is excited at getting what I am going to send to her, as I was shopping for it, and what I am going to make for her too. I have 3 weeks to put it all together and get it in the mail. SOOOOO exciting!!! Pics in a week or so for this one.

Oh yeah, you know it wouldn't be a complete blog post without pics of some of my helpers, here they were today...........

Super Sewing Sunday 09-04-11

Well it is Labor day weekend so that means I also have tomorrow off of work, YIPPEEEEE! Not sure what we will be doing tomorrow, but it has been raining her non stop for the past 36 hours due to whatshisname tropical storm.
Do you want to see what I have accomplished since last week? Of course you do, otherwise you wouldn't be here right! Oh I am so proud of myself.

First off check out this lovely piece of fabric I picked up yesterday to make me a new nightie. It is black with silver and turquoise butterflies all over it, and it even has little silver shiny things all over it too. It is a slinky satin type of fabric so soft and flowing. Going to use my favorite nightie for the pattern, it is starting to get ragged, and I have fixed it more times than I can count.

Ok I was working on the Garden Fence QAL, this is all that is leftover from 33 fat quarters.

I finished the last 2 stacks, the last 36 blocks. Now onto the design wall we go..........I have all the centers pinned on the board. The straight ones there are 3 each, and the on point ones there are 6 each. Except the top left there is only 1. Now to get the side pieces arranged so I can match them all up.

Here they all are.....

Now lets start pinning and matching, 100 blocks, with no duplicate matches. I know I can do it. Even though there are 19 polka dot middles. Whew, all done, now I will have to have a chain piecing marathon to put them all together.

But right now something else is calling my name. Sunkissed that I used for the Black A Palooza QAL.

I counted up my blocks, seen that I still needed to sew 2 more blocks, so I had to go through and find out which 2 I was still missing. Found them and got them pieced, finally!

So now that those are done, I can move onto the center part..........the flower garden. I haven't been able to do this because I needed some more of the GO! dies. Well I have all of them now, gotta love Mother's Day, & Birthdays too! Also finally found a silver permanent marker so I could mark the dies, and see where I was going to be cutting.

And now away we GO!..........What is that I hear, I hear snoring........what?? Look what I found under the cutting table!

on top of the cutting table are these two............surprise?! NOPE! They are always there, somewhere!

Oh on the otherside of the room is Riley...

Had to go look for Ressie, she wasn't at the top of the stairs where she normally is. Seems they pulled all the blankets out of the box my daughter had stashed up there, they are not stupid that is for sure!!! Reesie made herself COMFY too.

Oh yeah.............and away we GO!..............got so busy making this, I forgot to take pics as I went along, so here is the center of the BAP quilt, my Sunkissed Flower Garden.

It will measure 24X48 when it is in the center of the quilt. Big smile on my face, it is done. Well I still have to stitch it all down. and boy what a mess I made too. I guess I will clean this up next time I go up in my room.

It was nice listening to the rain all day long today while getting all this done. I am pooped today, and ready for bed. I have a lot to do this week, so I hope I have more mojo than I had this past week, because I just couldn't get with it, till today.

Wow 12 days since my last post

 I had lots of helpers this evening, here is Jethro keeping track of the pile on the ironing board, he didn't want me pulling the chain piecing out from under him to iron them. You will see later in this blog what I was ironing........

 Here is Riley, sleeping! He is part of the 16 Muddy Feet gang. My furry Lunatics!!!!!Earlier before I took this picture all 4 of them were running around full speed in my room. When they about knocked the chair over on top of two of them, that is when they mellowed out and all took a nap, and then I remember I actually had my camera still up there to take photos of them. So here are the rest of them too.

 Bailey, guarding the staircase.



Hershey sniffing the scraps that are not quilting fabrics, she steals them out of the basket, and I find them all over the house sometimes.






Reesie just chillin!

 Here is Hershey and Reesie again. Don't they look so innocent?? Ha! Don't let them fool you. Hershey and Riley (the white one)are my two BIG trouble makers. Reesie is the watchdog, while the other 3 are goofing off, she will be alert to every little noise she hears, and she will go investigate them too. All it takes is one bark from her, and the rest are right behind her adding their barks too.

And Bailey again, all curled up in a ball.  She usually lays here, so I can't leave without her knowing it.
She is the oldest at 3.5, Riley and Reesie are 1.5, and Hershey is the youngest, she is almost 9 months old now, but she isn't the littlest, that would be Reesie the watchdog.










Down in the south they have what they call Mardi Gras, well the past 3 weekends we have had Mardi Gras festivities around town. Every year we help our good friends JB & Lori in their Big Bead tent they have. Yesterday was #3, and the 4 of us are all glad it is over. It can get exhausting when you do them all back to back, plus working your fulltime job during the week. Poor JB he needs a relaxing getaway on an island someplace. But even though I have been busy on the weekends helping my friends I have still managed to get a little bit of sewing done over the past 12 days since I last blogged. And I made progress on the endless supply of scraps my room seems to have.

This is actually a laundry hamper, but for years I used it as a scrap holder. It was STUFFED to the max. It was round, and you couldn't pull it out it was so fat. Well it is empty now, I got all the scraps 100% sorted out. At least from this container, only one more 16X16X16 box to go. This worked great as someplace to put the scraps because the shelf above the bag has slots in it, so you could just drop the scraps on top, and they would fall into the bag, to stay for years to come it turned out. Well I am living up to my resolution of getting rid of scraps, and shopping from the stash too. I had some of my scraps sorted, but the colors were sharing bins, and the bins were getting full. So I found some bins at the dollar store the other day, and resorted the sorted ones, and then started on this hamper too. Here are all the new bins on one of my sewing tables.







                                                                                                                                        



Jethro is getting ready to claim his red bin, but sniffing the other ones to decide if he wants to change colors today or not.

















 Here is Jethro hanging out in the red bin, his favorite at this time.Elly didn't hang out upstairs today, because the dogs chased her away. She didn't come back either, found her hanging out with Willow downstairs on the fuzzy blanket.

I started to get caught up on the Block a palooza here is block 5

 and here is Block a palooza block 6

AND Block a palooza Block 7. Still have 8,9,10,11,12 to do and 13 comes out tomorrow!!

I am caught up with the Layer cake quilt along here is block 9. Block 10 comes out on Tuesday.

 This is 2 piles of 2.5 inch squares piled 3 inches high each.......for Raven stars that I cut out finally.

 This is all of the HST sewn together waiting to be ironed.

 This is them all ironed out nicely.

 Here they are sewn with those 2.5 inch squares.

 Here is a full block, for Raven stars, now I have 41 more to go to finish the quilt top. I still have to finish cutting out the white that goes with the blue triangles though. But it is coming along quickly. I am ready for some of these quilt alongs to be over with, because it is camping season, and I don't want to get even farther behind when I start camping out on the weekends. Haven't touched my Dorinda, and I am 3 clues behind on that one as of tomorrow. Maybe I will just have to pick one day and only work on that one! Rainbow Scraps challenge color is green this month, haven't decided if I am making anything or not. I don't care for green, unless it is outdoors or in my pocket. The Monochromatic challenge is Brown this month, I have hardly any brown, so that one won't be happening either this month. I am almost done with the purple yo-yo project I started last month. Hopefully will have that one done by the end of the month, need to order something to finish it. But for the UFO challenge, it is quilt number 1 which is my Black White & Red quilt, I got the 12th block pieced (forgot to take pic). My youngest daughter wants that quilt, so I have been looking for fabric for the back, and trying to decide how to piece the top together. Probably on point to make it bigger, might have to put a few more blocks together as well. But I should have the top at least done by the end of the month.The whole thing depends on if I can find suitable fabric for the backing. I got quite a few more of my string blocks done for the RRCB too. I will have a HUGE celebration when I sew the last one of those. I soooo dislike string blocks!!!!

Over at Freckled Whimsy a week or so ago she blogged about these carpet replacement blades that fit the Olfa 45mm cutters. At the time they were on sale $1.49 for a 2 pack!! They are $1.79 as of this post. I jumped on over to Harbor Freight and ordered 5 packs. So with shipping I paid about $14.00 for 10 blades, sure beats the heck out of the price of $7.99 PER blade around town! You never realize how dull your blade really is until you change it out. Then it is watch out fingers because the blade fly's down the side of the ruler. I have since read about this same thing on about 4 other blogs I follow. Wonder what those guys over at Harbor Freight are thinking with all of a sudden huge surge in carpet replacement blade sales! Shhhhh don't tell them quilters use them, they will raise the price on them. Well I think I made up for missing the blog last week I normally try to post. What are you working on today???