Winter Wonderland Redwork WIP

Good morning! I woke up at 6:00 on a day off so I could sign up for a half marathon in March, in a town 15 minutes from my house. Last year the race filled up in an hour. So happy I got a spot. Then I checked at Quiltville for Bonnie's latest Easy Street clue. How exciting this is getting!!! Tomorrow she will give us our last clue.

Whenever we go to the Farm, I have lots of time for hand sewing and reading; our trip over Christmas was no exception. Besides finishing my November and December CQJP blocks, I finished up one of the redwork blocks for my "Winter Wonderland" quilt, a Work In Progress (WIP). This block is called "Snowball Fight". I'm a bit frustrated with the creases in the fabric. I have pressed it and steamed it and pressed it and steamed it and I thought having it in the embroidery hoop would help, but it's still there. Hopefully quilting it will get rid of some of that?

Since I haven't shown any other parts of this quilt, here's some background: Two years ago, I saw a quilt called “Winter Wonderland” hanging up at one of my local quilt shops. (Have I ever told you that I’m lucky enough to have 6 awesome quilt shops that are between 5 and 45 minutes away from my house?) It’s a redwork pattern by Crab*apple Hill. Since I love red and I love embroidery, I wanted to try it, with its fun snowmen. This is a great project to take when we travel. I only need to bring the block, one skein of red embroidery floss, and my needle, scissors, and hoop. (No, I do not have any affiliation with the Crab*apple Hill company.)

Since I know the embroidery will take me awhile, I slowly make one or two of the pieced blocks in between other projects.

Here are the blocks I’ve finished so far:

Toboggan Ride

Snowflake verse

Skier

Snowman Family (taken on a different day...bad lighting)

                                     
The three blocks above will finish to 6 inch squares.

These two blocks will be 9 inches finished.

This is a 12 inch block (finished size).

Here's another 12 inch block (finished).

You've seen some of these same fabrics in my Christmas "Easy Street" mystery quilt! I naturally went overboard in buying fabrics for this "Winter Wonderland," so I had plenty to choose from for "Easy Street."

I'm linking up to Judy's "Design Wall Monday."

Happy stitching!

CQJP November and December

 

This afternoon, I went to see the new movie, Les Miserables. It was very good, but you’ll want to bring a few Kleenex when you go see it. Although it is a sad movie, it has wonderful themes of forgiveness and redemption. Anne Hathaway did a fabulous job singing Fantine’s songs.

 
In all the fun of the Easy Street Mystery, I have not forgotten about my Crazy Quilt Journal Project. While we were at the Farm over Christmas, I finished both my November and December blocks. For my November fan block, I got the idea for all of the seam treatments from Carole Samples’ book, Treasury of Crazy Quilt Stitches, although I altered some of them for my purposes and added beads and buttons.
 

In the center arc, I stitched the city and state where we live, but I’ve blurred that out in photo shop. We have lived in this city the entire 22 years we’ve been married. It’s where Mike was offered a teaching job after he graduated from college.

 

The left seam has silk ribbon flowers with pearl centers. The next seam has two different zig-zag seams, using a thicker velvet thread and a thin embroidery floss, topped with two different sized beads. The lace towards the bottom has gold triangle beads in the bottom holes. Small transparent seed beads attach the top of the lace to the block.

The next seam has a wavy fishbone “vine” with silk ribbon buds made of French knots. The final seam is a zig zag made of chain stitches, topped with mother of pearl buttons and seed beads.

The larger lace around the outside of the fan has cream-colored beads in the little holes near the bottom and transparent beads in the center of the swirl.

My December block is Mike’s and my monogram. I know this doesn’t really look like a crazy block, but it’s going to be the center block out of 25 for my anniversary quilt. In Penny McMorris’ book, Crazy Quilts, there’s a photo of an antique crazy quilt that has a monogram in the center. I like the look. It gives the eye a bit of a rest among all the beautiful busy-ness of the rest of the quilt.

I enlarged the letters from an alphabet that’s in the back of Carole Samples’ book, Treasury of Crazy Quilt Stitches, making the S in the middle larger than the M and the J. I traced the letters onto dupioni silk using a thin Pigma Micron pen.

Confession time: I started stitching this block back in about January. I find doing this much satin stitch by hand to be rather monotonous, so I’ve been slowly working on it all year. It was a relief to finish it this week!

Head on over to the CQJP 2012 blog to see other eye candy. Lots of people have finished up their year-long projects.

Happy stitching!

Easy Street Mystery Clue #5

I hope you had a merry Christmas!!! Sunday we went to the Farm where hubby grew up, about a 6 hour drive from our home, and we came back today. My in-laws do not own a computer, so of course there’s no internet. We had a very relaxing time.

Glory Hallelujah ~ Bonnie said that we’re done making flying geese. Although I don’t mind them, I’ve definitely had enough of them for now!

I’m quite excited…before we left for the Farm I got all caught up with the Easy Street Mystery Quilt. Clue 5 was an easier one: make“sitting turkey” units, as Bonnie calls them. Since I’m only making 75% of the blocks, I had to make 48.

Bonnie suggested having the needle “kiss” the right side of the drawn line on the smaller square, rather than stitch directly on top of the line. This really worked well for me to get my units the right size.

While I had my camera in my studio, I took a photo of my sewing machine. My in-laws gave it to me (used) for Christmas 21 years ago. Based on the photos in the manual, my guess is the machine is from the mid to late 1960’s, or possibly the early 1970’s. This has been a faithful machine for me through the years, as I’ve made Christmas dresses for my daughter when she was younger, Halloween costumes, stockings for the kids, curtains for our first house, and lots of quilts.

Progress Report

Clue #1: four-patches: 144 of 144

Clue #2: flying geese: 96 of 96

2 X 3 ½”bricks of white background fabric: 48 of 48

Clue #3: Shaded 4-patches: 48 of 48 (see this post)

                 Green 3” squares cut in half diagonally: 2 of 2

 Clue #4: Stacked geese: 48 of 48

                 Green 3 ½” squares: 110 of 110

 

Clue #5: Sitting turkeys: 48 of 48

I’m linking up to Bonnie’s Easy Street Part 5 post. Tomorrow, clue #6 will go up…can’t wait!!!

Happy stitching!

Easy Street Mystery Clue #4

This has been such a sad weekend for our country! It is just unfathomable that someone would go into an elementary school and kill innocent children. As I've worked on Bonnie's 4th clue, I've been thinking about and praying for the people affected by this tragedy. May God comfort them all.

We had a busy weekend, so I didn't get real far on clue 4. We took the kids to see "The Hobbit" in 3D on Saturday afternoon ~ excellent movie ~ and we went to a Christmas party Saturday night. Then besides going to church Sunday morning, Sunday night hubby and I went out to dinner to celebrate our 22nd wedding anniversary. I've made 31 of the new flying geese. (I'm using golds in place of Bonnie's purples and reds in place of her turquoises.)

I just had to make one stacked flying geese unit to see how it looks. Bad photo, I know. The white fabric was hard to capture. With the flash on, it was all washed out. With it off, it looks muddy. And it doesn't look like I'll be getting much natural sunlight for a few days. Oh well, at least you get the idea :)

Progress Report
I'm making 75% of each unit, because Bonnie's finished quilt sounds too big for a lap quilt, and half of that seems too small.

Clue #1, 4-patches: 71 out of 144 completed

Clue #2, Flying Geese: 14 out of 96 completed (I haven't made any more since last Monday). Click here to see the latest photo.

Clue #3, Shaded 4-patches: 48 out of 48 completed last week. Click here to see them.

Clue #4, Flying geese: 31 out of 48 completed
              Stacked geese: 1 out of 48 completed

I'm linking up to Quiltville's Easy Street and Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times.

Happy stitching!

Easy Street Mystery Part 3

I'm happy to tell you that I've finished my Shaded 4-patches for clue #3 of Easy Street. I'm still behind on my first two steps, but I've made some more progress this week; more on that in a bit.

I pulled out 13 different reds from my stash to use in place of Bonnie's turquoise. I have more red fabric than these, but some had too much white, some were too dark, and some I just plain didn't like anymore (what possessed me to buy that one?).

I don't think that I've mentioned before that I'm not doing the full quilt as Bonnie Hunter has designed it. Hers will finish at 84 X 84 (or 96 X 96 with the optional border). I want to make this a lap quilt, so that's too big. Her suggestion was to make half the blocks if you want a smaller quilt, but that sounds too small to me. So I'm making 75% of the blocks. I think that will be a better size for my purposes, but I can always make more if I need to.

I made 48 Shaded 4-patches. I absolutely LOVE how the colors in the block look together. Of course, add red to anything and I'll probably love it :)

After making my first flying geese block last week, I decided to use the same background fabric for both of the "wing" triangles in each block. I did the same for these blocks.

I apologize for the quality of these photos. It was already getting dark outside when I got home from work today, so I couldn't use natural sunlight for the pictures.

Progress Report

Clue #1, 4-patches: 64 out of 144 completed

I'm using these as my leaders/enders, so I'm slowly accumulating a big pile of these.

Clue #2, Flying Geese: 14 out of 96 completed

I will be using different fabrics for the "wings," but I've only had time to use the green polka-dots. I'm following Bonnie's suggestion: if you're not done with the current step on Friday, stop that and do the new step. That way you've at least started each step and you know what's going on. I'm hoping to get at least a few more flying geese made this week before Friday.

Clue #3, Shaded 4-patches: 48 out of 48 completed

I'm linking up to Quiltville's Easy Street and Design Wall Monday at Patchwork Times.

Happy stitching!

December Daily Day 8

I don't always have time to post my December Daily page, but I actually got day 8 done last night, so I thought I'd show it to you. For my daughter's Honors English class, she had to get with a group of students and do community service. Some of her friends are in band, so they played Christmas carols for the Salvation Army. Since my daughter isn't in band, she rang sleigh bells.

Ever since I started doing December Daily in 2008, I've used the 8 X 8 inch red binders from We R Memory Keepers. Most of my pages are digital, and I print them at home on letter-sized photo paper and trim to size.

For this page, I resized one of Ali Edwards' 12 X 12 templates (from her December Daily Volume 2 set), then I rotated it to better fit the orientation of my photos. I also resized Ali's 2012 December Daily Overlay and rotated it. The digital papers are from Katie Pertiet's "Fa La La" paper pack. All digital elements are from Designer Digitals.

I'm linking up to Ali Edwards' December Daily - Day 8 post. Go check out all the great inspiration.

Happy scrapbooking!

December First Friday UFO

Happy First Friday of December! Can you believe 2012 is almost at its end?

This is the block I made in November for my All Stars UFO quilt. The block will finish at 12" square. For the center, I used a pattern from the August 2001 issue of American Patchwork and Quilting magazine. This was one of the borders in a quilt called "Working my Way Around," designed by Jill Reber.

To see all the blocks I've made for this quilt so far, click the "All Star quilt" label at the end of this post.

I'm off to work on clue 3 of Bonnie Hunter's mystery quilt, Easy Street.

Happy stitching!

Two Mystery Quilts

This week I've been working on two different mystery quilts:

American Patchwork & Quilting Mystery Quilt

This weekend, my husband took our two sons to a city about 5 hours away to go to an NFL game. His parents, his brother, and brother's wife and two sons met them there. They had a great time, and my daughter and I, who don't really like football, shared a quiet weekend at home (no football games on TV, no arguing over who gets to use the family computer...) While they were gone, I sewed the middle and outer border onto this quilt. (The patterns for all the blocks, the setting, and the borders have been featured in all the 2012 issues of the AP&Q magazine.)

With a blog called "Crazy for Red," I'm sure you're not surprised that I pulled more red into this quilt with the outer border! I had my hubby hold up the quilt for this photo; you can just barely see a bit of his white sock under the quilt top.

I'm very excited to have this quilt top finished! I will probably wait until Christmas Break to do the quilting.


 Bonnie Hunter's Easy Street Mystery Quilt

Bonnie Hunter at Quiltville is on week 2 of her mystery quilt, Easy Street. Instead of Bonnie's purple, I'm using gold fabrics. These are most of the golds I'm using for this quilt. The top three in the photo all have stars, although they're different sizes.

Saturday, I realized that I don't have any green-on-white fabrics, so I headed off to a nearby quilt shop. Lucky me, they were having an anniversary sale, and all Christmas fabrics were 20% off. I probably didn't need any more gold fabrics, but I couldn't resist the gold snowflakes. The green polka-dot fabric wasn't Christmas, but it totally works for me. The multi-colored polka-dot fabric was another Christmas one. That bottom fabric is actually for Saint Patrick's Day!

Here's a larger photo of the St. Patrick's Day fabric. I couldn't resist this green and gold on white. I figured that, after I cut the fabric into 2" strips, and then the smaller units, I should be able to use most of it in my Christmas-themed Easy Street quilt. Some of the smaller shamrocks may need to be set aside for another project.

 I've got 30 four-patches sewn so far. I'm using these for my leaders-enders.

I've only got this one flying goose patch sewn so far. (I had trouble getting a good shot without a shadow, so it looks quite wonky. But trust me, it is a good rectangle in real life!!!)

And that's all I've got so far. Be sure to go check out some of the great projects at Patchwork Times and see other quilters' versions of Easy Street at Quiltville.

Happy stitching!