Use It All

Here is a quilt I quilted this week for Carol from our guild. It is one of her "Use it All" quilts. I will have to ask her how she goes about this. Does she piece it in big chunks and then join those, or do it by row or exactly how? Not sure if I will ever make one or not the idea interests me.


Big news on the home front!! My daughter passed her Life Guard certification testing yesterday. I am very proud of her for going after and working so hard with a goal in mind. She hopes to get summer jobs life guarding through the rest of high school and in college. I guess this is the first "adult" accomplishment for her. I guess driving will be next, OH NO!!!!

Kathie

Hospice Quilt #22

YEARS ago several of us around the country swapped Goose in the Pond blocks. My blocks are still sitting on my shelf waiting to be made into a quilt. I mentioned to my friend MaryLou in New Hampshire that eventually I wanted to turn my set of blocks into a quilt for our local hospice, but that I have not had time to do that yet. After "chatting" about that via email she dug out her blocks and made this quilt up and mailed it to me for donation to Hospice House of St. Marys.

Blocks were made by Sue in Texas, Shelly also in Texas, Margie in Nevada, MaryLou in New Hampshire and myself.

Thanks Lou for the donation, I am sure someone is going to love this quilt.

Kathie

Do you quilt on vacation?

The last few weeks before we left on vacation I quilted up several table runners for my fall craft shows. I machine stitched on the binding but didn't do the hand sewing so I could take them on vacation with me. When I am on vacation I like to have some hand work to do since we usually are just relaxing and watching TV in the evenings.

I got the binding done on 6 or these 7 runners while in North Carolina and my husband did the last one for me.

Do you quilt on vacation?

I quilted a twin sized customer quilt yesterday and boy were my legs bothering me by the end of the day. I don't know if it is from not standing at the frame for more than a week or because I didn't take enough breaks during the day. Guess I will try to take longer or more frequent breaks today.

Kathie

Good and Bad of Vacation

Well I seem to have recooperated from all the after vacation chores and should be back in my normal routine today.

All vacations have things you like and didn't like. The not so good list includes:

1. Was not thrilled with any of the restaurants we visited in Emerald Isle, all seemed just adequate.
2. Pretty much struck out on visiting quilt shops. Tried to visit two in Morehead City on monday and they were both closed mondays. Went by several fabric stores in New Bern and only one of them was an actual quilt shop and it was mostly sewing machines and very little fabric. We also visited Jacksonville and tried to check out two quilt shops there. One was closed until the afternoon and the other was out of business. I was disappointed but I did save money that way.
3. Noisy neighboors a couple of nights.

My favorite things were:

1. Sitting on the balcony each morning with my husband drinking coffee and watching the sunrise.



2. Having a nice sized condo to stay in. Plenty of room for the four of us so we were not tripping over each other.

3. Not cooking............... we ate breakfast and lunch at the condo and then ate out every night.

4. Having a chance to visit with Angie (my step daughter from my first marriage) twice. She lives in North Carolina with her family about an hour from where we were staying. I also finally got to meet her son Jake who is four and he now knows who grandma Kathie is.



I managed to get a very small project linus quilted yesterday as a way to ease my way back into quilting. This morning I need to get a customer quilt loaded and get back to work.

Kathie

North Carolina

We just returned from vacation in North Carolina last night. We spent a week at Emerald Isle, North Carolina right on the ocean. Even though I am not a huge beach person it was a nice and relaxing week. No schedule, no certain time to be anywhere etc.

We rented a 3 bedroom, 2 bath condo that overlooked the ocean. Here is a view from our covered deck.



This is the first vacation we have taken that we allowed Mandy to bring a friend with her. It worked out great as they kept each other busy and allowed us to have more of a relaxing time. The spent hours on the beach and the pool every day and both ended up with a great tan.



Will post some additional pictures later, right now have to take care of all that after vacation activities like loads of laundry and hitting the grocery store.

Kathie

String Quilt

For those of you that like to use up scraps making string quilts here is a picture of one I quilted this week for a customer. I loved the yellow Carol used to set off the string pinwheels.



It has been one of those crazy weeks. Arn't things suppose to be slower in the summer!!! I keep asking myself that anyway. I had a couple of rush quilting jobs (large quilts) that I did manage to get done along with a couple of other projects, tried to do a few things around the house and have been taking my daughter to life guarding classes once or twice a day.

After all that was done I didn't have the time or energy to work on any of my projects until last night when I finally put the binding on a runner that I had quilted more than a week ago and got the border on another runner. It felt good to sit down and sew for awhile, standing at the frame can get tiring after awhile.

A customer asked me if it took 3 or 4 hours to quilt a quilt on the longarm? I knew it was substantially longer than that but decided to keep track of every minute that I put into the next quilt I did. The quilt I finished yesterday was 90 x 96 inches, it was made mostly out of panels so very few seams involved. Between loading the quilt, winding bobbins, quilting, unloading, trimming, invoicing etc. it took me about 7 hours to do the quilt. Of course this varies greatly with what kind of quilting it being done, the shape the quilt top is in (is there tons of seams so you need to go slower), if there is any problem loading the backing (not square) etc.

Kathie

Hospice #21

At quilt guild last night this quilt was donated for our hospice effort. It was made by Shirley and I quilted it a couple of weeks ago. Love the colors she used on this.

Kathie

Goals

Well I did get #1 and #2 done from last weeks goals. I quilted the queen customer quilt and in addition got two more customer quilts done. In between I quilted a hospice quilt and passed that off to Jane to bind and even got the borders on a couple of runners I was working on.

This week is going to be very busy with taking my daughter to life guard classes every day (sometimes twice a day) and several other things I need to do. It is great that I am not working in an office this summer so that she is able to do things like that. It wouldn't have worked out otherwise.

I don't think I am going to set specific goals for this week other than to finally get the customer wall hanging on the frame and finished and hopefully one more quilt by friday.

Kathie

Shes Growing Up

You wonder if your teenagers will ever mature and "grow up" and then they surprise you. Don't get me wrong I have a very good kid and she is a great student but typical teenager usually only thinks past the next day or two.

Mandy is going to be a Sophmore in high school the end of next month. She has surprised me the last couple of weeks. She has been researching colleges and majors though it will be three more years before she is off to college. In addtion today she is starting a life saving/CPR/Life Guard training at a near by pool. She says if she passes and gets certified she could get a job next summer after she turns 16 as a Life Guard.

Now "working" has been the farthest thing from her mind ever so this is very surprising. I don't know if she has the upper body strength to do CPR or if she is a strong enough swimmer to pass all the tests but I am so proud that she wants to try and sure wish her a lot of luck.

On a sewing note I did get the large customer quilt done and a hospice quilt also quilted. I am going to suspend the rest of my weekly "to do" list for awhile as I received several customer quilts in the last couple of days and those will come before anymore of my projects.

kathie

Hospice Update and Weekly Goals

Last week I only set 3 goals and I met all of them. I finished quilting the twin customer quilt, quilted and bound two table runners and finished the Christmas quilt top. In addition to those specific goals I made two additional runners and started on a couple more.

This week I would like to accomplish the following:

1. Quilt r/w/b queen sized customer quilt.
2. Quilt hospice quilt
3. Quilt customer wall hanging
4. Get at least one border on my daughters quilt.


HOSPICE UPDATE

I was in contact with hospice yesterday and they will be coming to our August quilt guild meeting so that we can formally present them with the hospice house quilts. We currently have twenty quilts completed, one with the "binding fairy" and I have 3 tops still to quilt. In addition I know that several other ladies are working on quilts so we will have a nice number to present.

Kathie

Four Square Christmas Quilt

I put the borders on the Four Square Christmas quilt today. I will get some binding cut and then put the top away until I get a backing made and time to quilt it.

This quilt was made with left over binding and other 2 1/2 inch strips of Christmas Fabric.

As usual when I am not using a specific pattern I made way to many 4 patch blocks. I decided instead of putting them away for now I was going to use them up so made two Christmas table runners out of the left overs.



Kathie

On the Frame Tips

There are many types of quilting, panographs, custom quilting where there is lots of stitch in the ditch and every block/border quilted differently and free hand all over designs. The last is what I do.

This is a customer quilt that has been on the frame this week. She wanted an all over design but didn't want the appliques quilted over. I was afraid I would get on a roll and start quilting over them so each time I rolled the quilt I would mark the applique with a piece of paper. That way as I got close it would alert me to NOT quilt over those shapes.

I am sure there is a better way to do it but this worked for me just fine.

Kathie