pam's earthly quilt

before she moved away from us, my mother-in-law picked out a lovely selection of solids, earthy batiks and a neat stripe to tie them all together. she wanted a simple design of square blocks for her brand new guest room, which she hadn't seen at the time, but my father-in-law had put together while waiting for her to finish retiring.

i started work on the quilt during 4th of july weekend. things were slowed down a little with this trip instead...

my MIL has come to visit us for a week and i knew i needed to get it finished before she got here so she could take it home to north carolina with her. that goal was accomplished and this is how it looks!

and some detail of the all over stipple i did in the variagated brown/tan thread:

the thread was a complete nightmare though. 3 of the 4 spools were defective in some manner; thread breaking (not due to tight tension or wrong sized needle), thread peeling and not being able to quilt very long (say, an inch?) with spool 3. the first spool had a few issues, but i managed to do ok. the second spool was wonderful without issues. the third... i hate. i don't want to talk about the third spool. the fourth spool was better than the third, worse than the first, but managed to get more quilted on it. then the third spool had to come back out since there was so much breakage and waste, i needed the extra.

i haven't mentioned it to my MIL yet. she'll eventually see the mess on the back - it's not obvious until you get to one side of it and you see little clumps here and there. i think once she washes it when she gets home, it'll be better looking.

and i need to give a HUGE shout-out to my favorite redhead. today is boo's 9th birthday and i love him dearly. now...just how to figure out how to keep him from growing more...

can i take a nap now?

i had a very, very busy weekend and i'm glad it's over. although, i'd rather sleep tomorrow than go to work.


on friday, i was annoyed at all the junk in the garage and the fact i couldn't find my painting stuff. so, snappy and i started cleaning it out and getting rid of all the junk and putting the camping supplies in their huge storage tubs again. i cut my leg on the bucket of tile pieces that we unearthed - be careful around cut tile... it'll make a nasty jagged cut when you just barely bump it. somehow, most of my painting supplies went missing and i had to buy them all again, but we did find the dining room paint that i purchased a while ago, but couldn't do with my bad shoulder.


while snappy kept working on the garage, i ripped out the old caulking in boo's bathroom. my MIL is coming to visit this week and boo was with his dad - perfect timing. i also worked on stripping more of his bathroom door and trim that he started.

and then i got to some serious work on the wall. while the paint was drying, i worked on the bathroom and replaced some worn out items for him.

by the end of the weekend, this is what i got to see:











the fruits of my labor were worth it!!! of course, the garage isn't finished, but it's SOOOO much better than it was. we have clean carpets, the tile and worn out linoleum has been washed and we have more color in the house. i love it.

it's moving along and coming soon!

this winter, some of my contacts with the navy approached me about making a QOV to enter in a wounded warrior art exhibit that would be in a brand new DoD building in the washington, d.c. area. at the time, i was a few weeks out of my shoulder surgery and still completely immobilized... no sewing was happening for quite some time. they had a backup plan and that plan worked.

the opening ceremony has been delayed from mid-august, to october to early november. the first press release is here and it tells a little background of two artists and some of the program. i didn't know before, but the DoD only selected 12 pieces to be displayed within 2 floors of this new building. the quilt is mentioned (i'm not, but that's completely ok! these two are more important to the story and history).

so now my travel arrangements are being made and i should know something "soon" about that. i'm taking my mother with me to the opening ceremony - who better than the person who taught me to be kind, generous and artistic?

some help for the littlest wildfire victims!!

my sister fowarded me this info a little earlier this morning and i'm definitely going to help out. can you?

http://futurecraftcollective.com/2011/09/what-we-can-do/

the modern day quilters at valli and kim quilt shop are hosting a quilt drive with the hopes to have a handmade quilt for every child who has lost their home in the texas wildfires - especially those in the bastrop area, which is just down the road from them.

the fires have started popping back up in the greater houston area, where i live, as well. thankfully, they have not been to the level of destruction that bastrop is suffering and i continue to pray that we see a little spot of rain and that the winds stay calm enough that the firefighters can do their job as well as they possibly can.

so if you can help out, even just a little, please check out the most up to date information with modern day quilters. if you want to make some blocks and have me put them together, i am more than happy to do that too. just send me a message or leave a comment and i'll give you an address to send the blocks.

Scouts and Popcorn!

would you like to support this adorable cub scout and his pack?

it's the time of year where scouts come out and sell delicious popcorn to raise funds for camping and other scout activities, pay for uniform supplies and awards and give them an awesome experience to remember and grow by. this is their one and only fundraiser for the scouting/school year and we try to make it count.

popcorn treats offered includes kettle corn, microwave bags, chocolatey delight, white chocolate pretzels AND one of the greatest things - the military donations. trail's end, operation popcorn and the BSA offer two levels of donations that send popcorn treats to our troops overseas. take a look at the pictures of popcorn in action!! orders of popcorn for yourself is shipped out in a few days directly to your house.

so if you would like to support scouting and possibly our military at the same time, visit the trail's end site and use scout ID 8480080. the deadline to order is october 1st.

many thanks from all of us!

happenings around my house

it's hot. it's stinkin' hot here in houston. and it's dry!!! although, as i type that, the sky is getting really dark and i'm crossing my fingers for desperately needed rain. we've had over 215 days with less than an inch of rain (if ANY rain). where i live, we got a soaking rain about 2 weeks ago and haven't seen any since...that rain was the best i'd seen since last year in about october. how sad is that?

the heat and a failing A/C unit have made us all sluggish. no one wants to do anything but blob. i want to sew, but just don't have the energy to sit under the lights or use an iron or have fabric draped over me while i bind things. at least our entire A/C system should be replaced this weekend or early next week...i'll find out more on that tonight.

snappy got a few of his stitches out last thursday.

we actually got to see his hand and wrist unwrapped from all the massive amounts of gauze and the surgical splint. poor thing with his bruises. he's a bad patient... would keep trying to do lots of things with both his hands instead of letting me do it. you should go with a man to the store to buy a new printer/scanner and try to carry the box. hah! ok, so my shoulder still doesn't quite allow me to pick up a lot yet, but he had all this stuff on his hand and stitches! we were both broken, but at least i didn't have thread holding me together.

it looks a lot better now. the incision is healed up so much more and he gets the remaining stitches out tomorrow morning. i know he's looking forward to that. then the mean PT lady can work her torture on him...

that same day, i also received my super lovely mini quilt from DQS11.

how gorgeous is this?!

i watched pattiann's photostream as she posted pictures of this one - from the drawing stage, to the little blocks pinned for placement to the final quilt. it's amazing. her binding is even pieced - that's not printed fabric. this was one of my absolute favorites in the bunch and i'm SO thrilled and surprised to have received it. she couldn't have made a more perfect mini quilt for me.

ok. it's a lot darker outside. the sky looks like dusk it's that dark. so, where's the rain!?! and if it's not raining here at my office, can it pretty please be raining at my house? that direction of course is where the weeeeee bit of light is showing, so i doubt there's rain there right now. the ground is so dry that if you look in a crack in your backyard, you can see down it a few feet. and if you step on one of those cracks, it breaks apart and falls down.

oh oh! there's a mist! it's a start and we'll take what we can get!

"roman rainbows" for dqs11

i'm participating in this round of doll quilt swap (dqs) over on flickr. you may have seen it around on other blogs... i haven't made a mini quilt in a while now and wanted to jump back in now that the shoulder has healed up enough and i'm taking a slight break/slow-down from all my QOV making. last night, i finished sewing on the label and boxed up this little beauty so it can arrive soon at it's new owner's house:

this one is called "roman rainbows" since it's the roman stripe block and done in a scrappy rainbow fashion. it's perfect for summer, even if houston isn't having any rain and the forecast for the week is all over 100 degrees. ugh. with the heat and humidity and no rain, i felt like keeping things simple.

my secret partner's mosaic and favorites showed that she likes triangles, bright and happy fabrics and often in the scrappy fashion. so do i! and i love the way the roman stripe block looks...gives the perfect opportunity to do a scrappy quilt without being overwhelming.

i had a hard time deciding on the quilting for the doll quilt. in a way, i wanted to do some tiny freemotion stitching, but i hesitated from working on that for some reason. i knew i didn't want to overdo the stitching, but i definitely wanted to do something other than stitch-in-the-ditch or just straight lines. so i opted to do some lovely little circles of various sizes in yellow handquilting. plus, the handquilting gave me something to do while sitting in the hospital waiting room, waiting on my hubby to come out of surgery last week.

the backing fabric is actually one of my favorite parts of this doll quilt. i'm not a huge fan of pink (and often not of orange and pink together), but after i got my partner assignment i had some ideas in mind. i saw this fabric at a LQS (sadly going out of business when i was shopping the last time) and knew i needed to use it somehow for my partner. if i had chosen one of the other designs, it would have been on the quilt top instead of the backing, or maybe the binding. it reminded me of summer. not sure why, but it did.

the past week has been a little nutso in my house, but i had something to work on while taking care of my loved ones. you know - the soothing repetition of handstitching binding and quilting stitches. now i can get back to working on the next QOV and try to finish knitting a pretty baby blanket for a dear friend.