Saturday, February 2, 2013

Well, color me happy! I just took the QOV from the Craftsy class by Kimmer Brunner off Queenie! Now to trim & bind it! That'll cross one off my February list!!
All kidding aside, this pattern may have been easy peasy for Kimmy, but it was sure a big learning curve for me! I learned a lot on this one. First of all, have your drawing, design, whatever you want to all it, always handy for reference.  On that, make sure you identify what rulers or templates your using for each area to quilt! If you use the wrong one, you wind up frogging!  (ask me how I know!)  This one had a whole lot of starts & stops, so you get real good at them after awhile. I also learned a whole bunch about Queenie too. She's a pretty basic machine. Only "bell" she's got is stitch regulator & needle up/down. I discovered that I can play with her on/off switch to get my bobbin thread up top so now I don't have to go to the back of her & turn the fly wheel!! Hooray!! Getting really good at turning her on/off without looking, either. Well, enough. Suffice it to say, I learned a WHOLE lot on this quilt. So now, here it is!!

Friday, February 1, 2013

February goals

I forgot to include the goals for February in the post yesterday!

1. Finish the QOV on Queenie right now, get it bound.

2. Quilt customer baby quilt

3. Get the other 2 scrappies finished pieced, quilted & binding on.

4. Finish New Years QOV. Have blocks done, need to get it put together, quilted, binding on.

5. Quilt the Queen size Delectable Mountains & binding.

6. Get Santa finished put together!

7. Continue design work on new wholecloth wallhanging.

8. Work on coloring the baby quilt sized wholecloth.

9. Find time to work on Grandma's Flower Garden!!


Is that enough to keep me busy this month??

Thursday, January 31, 2013

January's progress

Well, here it is the end of January. What's been accomplished this month? Not as much as I'd like, that's for sure!
First thing off the bat while Floyd was remodeling the guest bathroom in preparation of our niece & her other 2 girls arrival on Feb 6th, I hid in the studio & designed & quilted a little wholecloth quilt. Came out pretty good too!

 
Then I finished cleaning out the fabric bins & scrapping out anything under a 1/4 yard to strips or usable size squares or rectangles. I now have a huge collection of charms, enough 2" X 3 1/2" rectangles to make several scrappy quilts, enough strips to make lots of scrappy things & I can see what I have cloth wise for bigger projects! This project has been on the "to do" board since I put the studio together last March! Glad it's finally done & better organized too as I also did some re-arranging of the studio at the same time.
The New year found a new mystery quilt on the quilting board. This time, Paintmejudy did a quick scrappy. Just 3 weeks worth of clues rather than her usual 6 weeks. Since Dusti now knows how to sew, she wanted to do this one with me. Also my Grandson. So we decided to make 3 of the mystery quilts that were crib sized to be given to charity when finished. Grandson bowed out early on, so Dusti & I decided to turn two into one & make a lap sized. Now she's spending time next door with our neighbor, so will turn it back to 2 crib sized ones. Mine is done & already given to the guild for the local fire or police depts.
I had finished the top for a QOV for a Craftsy class given by Kimmy Brunner on templates. After finishing the scrappy one, I got it loaded up & now is about 2/3 done. A lot of learning curves on this piece, as I've ripped out probably as much as I've quilted! It's not going to be show quality, by any means, but my hubby will love it! Here's a picture of one of the designs.
I hope to have this finished by this weekend, as I have several waiting to be quilted, including a customers quilt! WOOHOO!
So, what did you do this month??
 
 
T

Tuesday, January 15, 2013

Well folks, looks like a good day to get some quilting done...it's SNOWING! Yep, that white stuff that's a dirty word falling right here in Texas. Sure glad I don't have anything super important to do today!

Monday, January 14, 2013

Well, it's cold here in Texas. Low's in the upper 20's, highs in the low 40's. But the sun is out!

It took me several days, but I got all the fabric bins organized & all the smaller pieces cut into usable scraps. Boy did my charms drawer grow! Also have enough 2 1/2" X 3 1/2" rectangles cut to make another scrappy quilt like I made for Dusti for Christmas.

I think that this blog is going to be an adventure thru the quilting world from my point of view. As some of you know, I retired from driving an 18-wheeler this past March. Our shed had burned down just before Valentine's Day & the insurance company paid for what is now my studio. Also, as a retirement gift to me, I finally got my longarm. I bought her used, but she's a good machine. My hubby, Floyd, is still driving a rig, but hopefully for not much longer. He applied for full disability from the VA & we're still waiting for the approval to come thru for him to give up the road too.  In the meantime, I turned a pre-fab shed into a working quilting studio. All it had was insulation in it when we got it. We had to do all the electrical, walls, carpeting, etc. That took me about 2 months, including moving everything from the house over to the studio. It took me til the 1st of August to get all the kinks out of "Queenie" (my longarm, she's a QueenQuilter18). But since then I've been devouring everything & anything related to longarm quilting. I just love to be creative & really want to do some awesome quilting like I see at shows.

I'll put some free patterns up from time to time that I've found or created. I'll have to figure out how to do that. But, in the mean time, come along with me for what I hope is an interesting ride!

Sunday, January 6, 2013

Happy New Year!

Whew! The holidays are officially over! With the kids getting back to school, now I'll get some piece & quiet around here. I don't know about anybody else, but I don't make New Years resolutions because they tend to get broken within a week, so why bother?  But I did set a couple of goals to accomplish right off the bat. When I first got my studio, I had decided to go through my cloth bins & weed out all the smaller stuff & turn it into useable scraps. I've started doing that & over half way through with it. I've decided not to do any quilting til this is accomplished. I also did some re-arranging of the studio that was desperately needed for better convenience. After I finish with this project, it's back to finishing up what's on the design walls now.  Stay tuned for the outcome!

Saturday, December 1, 2012

 Here is the latest quilt finished. This was a mystery quilt from Quiltingboard.com. I had no idea what the pattern was going to be til the very end. I think my color combinations came out great!
 Here's a close up of the red Friendship star. All the stars were done like this, but it really stands out on the red ones.
 I know you can't see this really well, but there's a feathered wreath in all of these blocks.
 Here's a shot of the side & border. As another longarmer pointed out, had I done a different design here, it wouldn't have near the impact this one did.
A view of the back. The quilting actually shows better on the back than the front.
I'm so pleased with how this quilt turned out!
While I was hand stitching the back of the binding, I was looking at all that quilting & really feeling proud of myself for accomplishing all of this freehand. Another thought was that a year ago I had rented time on the LQS's very simple longarm & all I could do was meander, & it wasn't even that good! Look how far I've come in just under a year!  How am I going to improve on this? Where will my talents take me in 2013? Well, I think my goal for 2013 is to put a quilt into a major show for 2014! What do you think?