Quilt Doodling

My sister's quilt is basted.  It took a good hour to get it all tacked down.

I have lots of ideas how to quilt in the circles, but not so much how to quilt the space between the circles.  I doodle before quilting, often sketching the pieced pattern before drawing in where I'm going to quilt.  The idea of drawing all the circles in the right place, though, was overwhelming.  I played around with LibreOffice Writer and came up with the layout.  Printed these on a bunch of scrap paper and started doodling.

My sister wanted the quilt to give an impression of clockwork and stars/suns.  So I've mostly been playing with cogs and curvy rays.  I really like the cogs, but I'm not sure what I'd do to fill all in with them.  The rays by themselves look to spidery.  Or maybe sea anemones?  My sister wanted rounded corners on the quilt, so the last batch of print outs have the corners cut.  I'll see if that changes how it looks and feels.

Like the rainbow colors?  The sunroom windows added a lot more pizazz to the plain pen and paper. 

I Like Thursday: Greens, Reds and a Bit of Blue

I loved the green from last week.  This week there's a lot more gold in those trees.  Even some reds behind our house.

In the green of last weekend I found little red mushrooms.  Aren't they so bright?




Did you read about the porcupine we met last week?  How crazy is that?

Porcupine

We're returning from Thursday morning's walk when we hear click-click-click.  We look up to see a dark animal loping towards us.  Rob asks, "Is that a dog?"  At the same time I'm thinking: is that a porcupine?!  He's seeing the tail wag, I'm seeing an odd body shape, odd lope, and a head that's too small to belong to a dog.

It's still heading towards us.  As it gets closer, we can finally see the quills.  That's a porcupine!  I fumble for my phone and fail to get the camera working until after he passes us by.  Dude's got no interest in us - he's on a mission. 

Camera up, I jog after him.  He's going at a clip and I don't want to run too fast after him, so all I mange to snap are these two blurry, slightly-from-behind photos.

I Like Thursday: More New Things

The weeks are flying by.  Work continues to get crazier, but home life continues to settle in.  It's nice to have a weekend that's not booked solid running errands.  I caught up on some shows.  Did a little sewing.  Went dancing.  Even had some time to start this post.  All good stuff.

I bought this pendant during Chick Weekend.  The guy had wonderful stuff.  There were pretty pastel teardrop pendants.  He had round ones, too, and some shaped like sea turtles.  One looked like an octopus tentacle (complete with suckers).  Really cool.  The pastel colors were so pretty but I kept gravitating towards the shapes.  I love this one.  Makes me happy!

Traction

My sister's quilt has been languishing.  It's not right.  My sister will be the first to agree.  (And at this rate she'll finish my chair mat before I finish her quilt!)  I finally started to work on the backing.  I had ideas, but upon laying them out, I wasn't fond of any of them. 

Back to the drawing board. 

The idea was to lengthen the backing with a  minimum number of seams.  Well, that's not happening.  On the plus side - this will give one last hurrah for a number of the leftover fabrics.  Unfortunately I cut a few of them into strips too small to cut a 6" square.  But who says all the blocks on the back strip need to be the same width?  So I jammed in a few of our favorite colors with whatever width was left. 

Sew this together, insert it into the backing then I can sandwich this baby.  I've been admiring lots of pretty quilting patterns.  Time to get into freemotion mode.  Ooh! 

Design Wall

I promised myself that when we bought a house I'd put up a design wall.  Well, we bought a house!  My office/sewing room has a big bare wall that looked great for a design wall.  We spent weeks discussing and finding the materials to create the design wall I had envisioned.

We eventually bought a 12 foot dowel and hooks and were all set to put it together.  Three days later Rob tells me we should ditch my idea and install picture rail molding.  I cried.  I had it all planned out and knew what I wanted to do and it was a good idea.  And now I was to ditch it all?  But his idea was better (he was inspired by the picture rail at the Whately barn he saw when we went English dancing).  So we hunted down picture rail molding.  The second lumberyard I called knew exactly what I was talking about.  Turned out to be cheaper than the dowel/hooks combination, went up easily, and looks a whole lot nicer than my original plan.

I Like Thursday: Cape and Companions

Had a great time down at the Cape for an annual Chick Weekend.

The morning I left a neighbor had harvested a bunch of her sunflowers.  They were in a bucket at the end of her driveway, marked FREE.  She urged us to take a few as we passed on our morning walk.  I did.  I was afraid they'd be dead by the time I returned home, so I packed them with me to the Cape. They had a rough trip, but perked up quite nicely when we arrived.  The were cheerful all weekend.  Everyone liked them.

She still had a few left when I returned.  I had left these ones behind (I hope my aunt liked them!) and picked up three more at home.

Ramp Revision

When we moved, I couldn't run the guinea pig ramp the same way I had in Rehoboth.  It would have terminated in the corner under the cage.  I did a quick fix to have it start at the same point in the cage, but the ramp stuck straight out into the living room.  I kept tripping over the end of the ramp and Mabel didn't like it (too exposed and too wobbly).

Cape Chick Weekend 2019

We were discussing how long we've been doing Cape Chick Weekend.  Turns out this is number thirteen.  Amazing.

One set of castle builders, the crazy wind, home with ribbons

Hurricane Dorian's leftovers were enough to cancel much of Saturday's Windmill Weekend events.  The website said that stuff would start at noon.  So my sister and I headed to Encounter Beach to participate in the Sand Art contest.  The parking lot was nearly empty, there was no bandstand.  There were as many car leaving as arriving.  But when we got close to the beach, we could see a family digging in the sand.  I stepped out of the car and said "Is it canceled?"  The organizers had left one intrepid guy to tell us - it's canceled.  We stayed long enough to photograph my sister in the crazy wind and get a little sandblasted.  The guy knocked on my car window just as we were about to go home.  He handed us a pair of red participatory ribbons.  He said: you showed up, you earned these.

Three County Fair

Submitting quilts to the Three County Fair earned me a free ticket.  Cool!  My mother came out for the weekend, so we attended the fair on Sunday.

We passed through the agricultural barn first.  Lots of terrific looking fruits and veggies.  This sunflower greeted us on the way out.  Look at the size of it!  Balancing in that tiny pot!  And so many sunflowers.  It was truly impressive (and of course had a blue ribbon hanging from it).


Next up was the art exhibits.  Lots of stuff from some very talented kids - especially photography.  I got a kick out of a blue paper mache llama.  And isn't the little sleeping fox cute?  The cross stitch sampler was by an adult - the light was too dim to get a good photo, but the stitching was wonderful.  It was certainly worthy of best in show.  My mother and I admired a lot of nice sewing and painting (and checked out the ribbons my quilts won).

I Like Thursday: Shopping Trips and Errands

It's been a busy weeks, picking up a lot of things.

Saturday included a trip to the Greenfield farmer's market.  I got to use my guinea pig and bunny picnic bag.  Isn't it cute?  Mabel thinks it's even cuter filled with carrots.  (Although Kiki and Mason ate the majority of the carrot tops.)

I was very excited to bring home a 25lb box of tomatoes to make sauce.  The house smelled delicious on Tuesday as we cooked them down.