Dallas Quilt Guild Retreat 2014

If you have been reading my blog for awhile you know that my favorite time of the year is in January  when the Dallas Quilt Guild has it's annual retreat.
I love going to this retreat. I can hardly make it to our monthly meetings but the retreat lets me catch up with everyone.

It doesn't hurt that my daughter loves the retreat as well and flies in from NH to spend the 5 days with me.
Now, don't tell her this... (Hi, Nyshma!!!) but at this point I'm on the fence as to grand children just because I know she won't be able to come to the retreat when they arrive. Grand babies that live gazillion miles away --- Retreat in January.. I'm telling you! It's a tough choice!! Good thing I have no say in it! lol!!

This year there was the least amount of quilters I have seen since I started attending the retreat.

There were 81 of us.

My roomies. Renee and Robin. So focused on their tasks!

My other roomie, Nyshma (my daughter) and Mary Ann, who was not rooming with us, but is part of my small group. We meet once a month or once every other month, depending on our schedule, but it's always fun to hang out! She was making a Dr. Who quilt for her daughter!

Even though we were just a few (typically we are over 100) the room did not fail to inspire...

I wish I had grabbed every one's name so that I could give them the credit they deserve.

But of course I failed miserably on these beauties. The pineapple quilt was made using a strip piece method, not paper pieced or with the possibilities ruler... It looks even more lovely in person.

That last one was Jan's loveliness and we didn't realize it was sideways until after the picture.

Another version of Di Ford's Phoebe was present this year:

This one belongs to Peggy.

I love the details she put in the center block. And look at the sheep!!!

Never would have thought of making them out of wool. How appropriate! 

Pamela and her sister, Wendy were working on Blackbird Design's Love Letter quilt...

Pam chose the same color scheme I chose when I started making mine 

(which is in a bin living the life of a "thought I'd make you" project)

I feel quite inspired to pull the pieces out and actually START mine!

My lovely daughter decided to dance to her own beat, as usual, and was doing a bit of improv with a jelly roll of PB&J by Basic Grey. We hit the local quilt shop to pick up the weave fabric she used in the background.
I wish I had taken a picture of the finished top. It turned out wonderful!!

I worked on my Fat Quarter Shop BOM while there. Four blocks down.. 

3 to more to catchup.

AND... I finished all my blocks for my Regimental Stars quilt...

I was so excited about that!

I had to come home and start putting it together almost immediately...

I'm loving how this is turning out!
I think I'm very close to my first finish for 2014!!

Hello World!!

I have trouble believing that it's been 6 months since I last posted. I have no excuse except the lack of time. Quick recap as to what has happened in the last 6 months... Yes, I can recap it in just a few paragraphs and I'm not sure if that is a good thing or not...

Here we go...

 Last time we chat I had just adopted this little one:

I had gone off to Boston to visit this other one:

When I got back my sister, who has lived with me for the last 7 years, bought a new home and undertook a major renovation of the place. Very Brave. I will say it was worth it since the place went from "really? This place?" to "Awesome space, sis!!".  But there were many, many, hurdles on the way.
Lots of packing and buying new furniture (for me, not her, since all the furniture in the house was hers to begin with! LOL!).

All this happening during the end of year craziness that takes place at work.

I had parents visiting during the end of November through December. My Daughter, Son in law and grand puppy also visited during the Thanksgiving break. I will say, Oreo was exceptionally happy with the yard and the happy company of Penny.

Needless to say, I got barely a smiggin of sewing done.

In November I was able to go to the Dallas Modern Quilt Guild's retreat and I made a bit of a dent in the blocks for Regimental Stars (see here for details on that quilt).

I also started Piece of Cake 3 by Thimble Blossoms. 

I have made progress on that quilt since that picture was taken. I just need the borders which I hope to add sometime this spring.

As a result of my sister moving out of the house I was able to appropriate one of the bedrooms as a sewing room, so now I have a place I can spread out and leave things ready to sew in the few minutes I have free here and there.

I made this cutting table from bookcases from ikea. My daughter found a post on Pintrest and made one for herself. I loved it but had no place to put one, so as soon as I had a room of my own I made one! I STILL love it.

Over the Holidays I made this cute little iPad sleeve for my sister's iPad mini.

I am officially cured of any thoughts of making a hexagon quilt. Lovely as they seem, putting together those hexies can be trying when you have a tad of carpal tunnel.

Now you are all caught up with life in 2013 around my neck of the woods. Next time, I'll  let you know what I've been up to in the last few weeks.

Nice to be back.
Hope you didn't forget me!
Leave me a comment so I know you are still out there... lol!

Weekend of sewing... check

I finally was able to take a weekend to focus on some sewing.

I took a pile of theses

Put some serious sewing to eventually get them ready to become these

Which eventually became this mess

while Penny kept me company under the sewing table

I have already paired the half square triangles into units of two which will eventually become the flying geese part of my stars. If you don't recall when I'm aiming for, I'm making Red Crinoline's Regimental Star.

This week I hope to post a few pic from my trip up north in July.
So stay tuned.

Blogger Girls BOM update

I'm officially two blocks behind. BUT, I did make a dent on this one last month. I tackled block #3 and dwelled on the sashing a bit more.

This block finally brought into the play the companion ruler to Monique's Fit to be Quarter 6.5 ruler. I was excited to give it a try and found it super easy to use.

You start with the center of your square in a square

Trim the edges off

Then you need to attach the hst unit to the newly trimmed edge.

I centered the piece by folding the triangle in half and finger pressing the center. 

I did the same with the trimmed edge of the square and just aligned the folds.

After attaching both sides to the center square, I used the Fit to be Quarter ruler to trim the piece.

Perfect. EVERY TIME!

I added these units to the strips I made for both of my blocks.

Ended up with two new installments on this BOM. 

This is Block #3 v1

This is Block #3 v2

On that last one I really wanted to have the churn dash pop so I used lighter tones on all my other fabrics in the square. Overall, I like the way these new blocks compliment the existing ones.

April's installment is my favorite block so I have to think about the color placement to make sure I don't screw it up.
If you visit the blogger girls today you can pick up May's installment, so get out there and grab your instructions off of Monique's blog . Above all, have fun!

February in April

I've been a bit missing in action the last few weeks. Thought I'd post a little update before it's been officially a month since my last post.

Not much going on over here. I finally got my sewing machine back from the shop at the end of March. I think having her away had me a bit depressed and unmotivated. Not that I didn't have a replacement, since I was using my old machine, but I didn't want to start anything new on that machine since I kept thinking how easy it would have been on my other one. I know it makes no sense but I kept putting obstacles in the way of any creative endeavor.

Anyway, she's finally home but I was not able to really dig into anything because I had a business trip planned. When I go up north, I try to squeeze in a few days with my daughter so it was another week before I could sit in front of my machine again. I enjoy every minute I spend with my baby girl but I needed to get home to sew SOMETHING.

When I finally got a chance to sit down, I had to tackle my Blogger Girl BOM quilt.
I started this back in February and I had the next block cut and ready to roll.

This is Version # 1 

This is Version # 2 

I like the way the colors are playing well with each other but I'm a bit concerned with the sashing/finishing instructions Monique posted last month. I think if I go with the brown I had in mind, the color will overwhelm the quilt (I am using a floral brown for the outer border and red for my inner border). Yet, I'm not sure that throwing in a red will look good in the sashing.

I think I will have to do a Thelma and make a different sashing strip for each of my variations and see which one I like better. Not freaky concerned about it yet since I still have two more blocks to catch-up with the series. I cut my next block and have it ready to roll for this weekend. It will be my first adventure using Monique's Companion ruler so wish me luck.

Lil' Baskets

At the Dallas quilt show, earlier this month I picked up a couple of kits. One of them was a small quilt designed by Lori Smith. The quilt is called Grandmother's Baskets and it's about 16" x 20".

I thought it was the cutest thing and had to give it a go.

I made the 12 mini baskets from fabric to finish in about 4 hours.

This past weekend I decided to finish it. 

I wasn't crazy about the tan that came in the kit but decided to go with it and not lose sleep over it.

In no time at all, the top was finished! 

Since I had some "extra" time, I thought I'd just quilt it too. 

I'm not brave enough to do it on my own,
so I marked it with that FriXion pen everyone raves about. 

Sooo easy! 

After the main quilting was done, I thought I'd add a few "big stitches" to this small quilt.
 I loved the whole big stitch process, I just struggled with the hoop... it was definitely the right size, but for some reason I struggled with getting the stitches on the needle. I guess I need to practice more.

After all my experimenting, I finally attached the binding. It's only waiting for me to stitch the binding down but I thought I'd leave that for when I traveled in a few weeks. Gives me something to do on the plane.
BTW: The fabric in the kit is from Minick and Simpson's new line for Moda - Indigo Crossing