Four American Hero tops

Michelle had helped me sewing up enough rail fence strips that we were able to make one Rail Fence top and one Heart top using what was left over from the strips. The hearts were fused and then button hole stitched.












Then from the pre-cut fabric for shaded 4-patch blocks that Robin sent I was able to create two tops as well, adding my fabric for the alternating squares, setting triangles, and borders.



So these four tops are ready to be mailed to Sue for American Hero quilts and I have some more blocks in preparation for two more tops. Those will take me a while longer though, with the blocks all being of a different size and my kids going on summer break soon.


This is the beginning of one top I'm working on with blocks of varying sizes. Once the center is pieced, I'll add a narrow red border followed by a 6" wider border.

As always, to get a larger view of a picture, just click on it. :o)

Table topper for Mr. Garrett

Michelle wanted me to make a wall hanging for her favorite teacher (Mr. Garrett), but with the time I had on hand this little table topper had to do. lol
I was able to piece and quilt it while the kids were at school.
You can enlarge the picture by clicking on it.




This is the label I put on the back.
I had ordered a Bubble Jet kit from softexpressions. com, because I could not find the Bubble Jet set or the rinse here locally and I like their service.
The reason I like the Bubble Jet set over the prepared fabrics is the price for one, but also that I can choose any cotton fabric to print on. When I prepared enough fabric for 4 sheets the other day I hung the wet fabric over a clothes hanger outside to dry and it just took minutes before I was able to iron it on to freezer paper and cut my 8 1/2"x11" sheets to print on.

Two American hero tops in the making etc.

Robin had sent me a nice stack of partially prepared shaded 4-patch blocks (among an assortment of other finished blocks that I'll show below) to use for American Hero tops. I went right ahead and finished the blocks and squared them up to 7" and put 4 of these units together in one larger block.




Here I was playing around with a layout option of the blocks.








With the amount of blocks that I have I'll be making this center for a top. In this picture I simply laid out the pieces to take a picture last evening, I'll try to get everything sewn together over the weekend. Today I will have to purchase some more fabric for the setting triangles for two quilts and the border.







This is the second version I'll sew up.
Michelle likes the first center better, I like this one. :o)










The border fabric I intend to use on these is the same I used for several other quilts. It seems to really pull out the colors of all blocks.
The rail fence top is another American Hero top. It's ready to be mailed, but I'll mail it together with the other two tops as soon as they are finished.
In this picture are some more of the blocks that Robin had sent and I was playing around with them to see how I could incorporate all of the different sizes into one top. I don't know yet if I want to float the blocks on a white or blue background, but might have a clearer thought about that once the other two tops are completed.



Here is my completed "1st quilt", well complete, other than the label. I couldn't find Bubble jet set anywhere around here, so I ordered some yesterday online. Once I have that, I'll print a label out for this and quite a few other quilts, like the deployment quilt, on which the quilting is also finished. The binding is attached by machine on it, so now I just need to sew the binding to the back by hand. Another quilt I'm sewing the binding on by hand right now is the Lone Star wall hanging, so things are moving along nicely and I should be able to finish quite a few more UFO's by the end of the year. :o)

Deployment quilt

I just did some browsing on a Yahoo group that I belong to (WASIQ) to see when exactly I received the 12 star blocks that are shown in the quilt and it was April 18th, 2003. Boy, time flies I tell you!
Members with deployed family members or some close family member in the service were gifted with these deployment blocks. At the time Cliff had been on an 8 month tour, so having been gifted with the star blocks touched me deeply.
I used EQ5 to design a setting for the blocks and came up with a quilt that has 50 stars total. Go ahead and count them. ;o)


Well, as you can see in the close-up of one of the star blocks above, I finished outline quilting all of the stars (1/4" inside and outside of each star) and did some loops on the red border of each star.
To quilt all 12 blocks in this way it took me two hours, which I spread out over two days.
Now I'm debating how I want the blue sashing and white sashing stars to be quilted, but in the meantime I'll sew on some bias binding I made yesterday to the "1st" quilt, before I get back to working on this quilt again and maybe inspiration will have hit me by then. LOL

MY FIRST QUILT EVER!

This is the quilt that started it all!

After I got burnout from running a licensed daycare for almost two years without a break, I decided to do something nice for myself and took a quilt sampler class from Dawn Kucera in Hawaii.

The class started in March of 2000 and I had the top complete by the end of the class. I even was able to get together with two other gals, who also completed their tops to thread baste the quilts and that was as far as I got with it. At one time I tried to squeeze it through my machine (Pfaff), but that was not too much fun due to lack of space and inspiration how to quilt the sampler blocks and then it sat again. With the Juki set up with matching red, white and blue King Tut thread I spent the last several days working on it and took my last stitch yesterday. Now I just need to find matching blue Moda Marble somewhere for the binding. Good thing that there's still Moda Marbles on the market. :o)

It feels really good to have this quilt finished. It wasn't that it took so long because I no longer liked it or got tired of it. I've always liked r/w/b quilts and for my first quilt the piecing even looks good. lol There are also two blocks in it that represent my kids. One is the palm tree applique block for Michelle, because she was born in Hawaii and the other block is called Star Wars that I made for Aaron, who liked Star Wars at the time. :o)
My hang-up was how to quilt it (for hand it seemed quite large - for machine it seemed quite large hehe) with method and design. I just need to let loose on the design part. Seems I make the decision making harder than it has to be, so I just leafed through some Pam Clarke design booklets and started puttering away. Don't think there's just one PERFECT design anyway. The fabric is so busy that the quilting isn't dominant on it, other than on the sashing and borders, but you'll see that in the pictures.

Oh, and of course my official quilt tester had to jump on the quilt as I was trying to take pictures. He gave me his paw of approval. ;o)

See-through toilet?

Now how comfortable would you be using a toilet with one-way glass?
This public toilet was photographed in Switzerland.




You can find more info on this on:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/arts/toilet.asp