Baby chicks and BATS!

Well, I have two newly hatched Moran chicks, with a third currently pecking its way out.  I have sixteen eggs, so hopefully there will be a hatching frenzy tonight!

There was a bat in my house today!  It was sleeping, hanging by its feet from the molding above the door.  Really cute, as long as it stayed sleeping ... Ben came home and scooped it up in a fishing net and let it go outside.  Well, he tried to let it go; it was clinging to the fishing net and didn't want to be "let go".  It finally crawled out and flew away.

I am still trying to decide which quilt to make next;  soooo many designs to choose from, sooooo many fabrics to select.  And, should I make a quilt to use up some of the fabric in my stash, or should I start working on a gift quilt (for Christmas)?  I probably should just dig through my stash, select fabrics to work with and get working; whilst my hands are busy with that project, I can be turning over gift-quilt options in my mind.  The key words here are "get working".  Just dreaming doesn't accomplish much.  I know; I have dreamed away a lot of this year.  But, does making quilts for nobody really count as accomplishment???
 

Jeans quilt ...

I finally finished a jeans quilt!  My daughter has been donating old jeans to my stash for several years, and last year I started cutting out circles.  The plan was to cut circles from the jeans, squares from scraps, and put them together with a square of batting.  This is a picture of the circles and squares: 

Circles cut from old jeans, squares from cotton scraps.

I was cutting out circles whenever I had a few extra moments (usually while watching T.V.).  My two-year-old granddaughter liked this part; she played with the circles whenever she was visiting.  (Once my dad, her great-grandfather, was sleeping on the floor and she covered him with circles!)

Eventually I had enough circles (around 200) to start putting the quilt together.  It was really kind of neat;  I sewed fourteen circles together to make one row.  I then sewed three rows together, and THEN starting adding the cotton squares (with batting underneath).  By doing it row by row this way, I could quilt the circle flaps down easily on my regular sewing machine.  This picture shows it almost complete:

Row of circles waiting for cotton squares

The next step is sewing another row of circles to the unfinished edge, and then insert the batting and cotton squares into this row.  What is really cool about this technique is the quilt-as-you-go aspect; the edges are finished as soon as the flaps are sewn down!





 

Back of jeans quilt - shades of blue!

Completed jeans quilt

Here is the finished quilt, front and back.

The edges of the circle flaps are unfinished, so they will fray and give the old-fashioned "cut-off jeans" look to this quilt.  I love it!!

And, since it is made of denim, it is nice and heavy and should be durable to use as an outdoor quilt.  I am planning on using it to place my grandchildren on (ages 2,1, and 6-months) when we go outside... I hope it gets a LOT of use! 

Quilting, then and now ...

Well, I spent several hours on the computer this morning job-hunting, and then, somehow, ended up with my quilt design software opened up and ready to go!

I started quilting when my first baby was one, over thirty years ago! As a sewer, I had plenty of scraps, so I made a twin-size scrap quilt, machine pieced and machine quilted. I then sewed a full-size top, using the traditional basket pattern with alternate plain blocks, and started hand quilting it. Instead of completing this top, I had three more babies and life took off from there!

I took up quilting again when my oldest was a senior in high school. I made a quilt (hand quilted) for his graduation, and then one for each of my other four children (all hand quilted - what can I say, I really like hand quilting!).

And then, the weddings started! As of now (seven years after the first wedding), I have made each couple a wedding quilt, all hand quilted, of course. I also made a double wedding ring quilt for my mom & dad, to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The picture at the top of this blog was made for my oldest son and his wife.

Between all the hand quilting, I have been learning to machine quilt. Since all I have is my regular Viking machine, I sometimes have to quilt in sections, but .. I am improving all the time, hooray! I have made several sofa quilts for my house (much to the amazement of my husband, who says I always give everything away), and am now working to make a sofa quilt for each of my kids. (All ten of them - five originals and five in-laws!)

Last year for Christmas I completed one for my daughter and one for a son-in-law; this one is all flannel, snuggly and warm. You can't see the quilting, but there are snowmen quilted in the smaller rectangles, and snowflakes scattered around the rest of the space.

And this one, with the dragon applique, I made for my son-in-law. The son-in-law who is crazy about anything with dragons. (It is really not pink, the colors in the photo are not true, I don't know why.) This one is quilted with flame-like coils, in keeping with the dragon imagery.





And now, I am hoping to complete two more sofa quilts for this Christmas, one for each of my daughters-in-law. That is what I was designing this morning. One I want to make entirely of flannel again, which kind of means I should stick with four-sided pieces (no triangles, *sigh*), but the other just needs to be of greens and browns and can be whatever I want. :)

Those two quilts will both be machine-quilted (faster, and, I think, makes them sturdier for the heavy use a sofa quilt can receive). To alleviate my itch to hand quilt, I also am working on a design for another quilt for my mom & dad, per mom's request. She would like one in blues and greens; since blues and greens are my absolute favorites, I am happy to oblige!

I Am, I Said ...

I have been unemployed for over a year now. Last summer was GREAT, kind of like my college days (many years ago), with the summers off. I completed a hand-quilted quilt I had started in January (the green/brown quilt on the right). And in three months I made a hand-quilted, full-size quilt (with chickens on the back, shown above turned over to the right side) for my middle son. In three months!! Life was good.

Last fall was GREAT; I have five kids, all married, so that makes a houseful for Thanksgiving and Christmas. It was nice to have time to focus on them without work interfering. I was hoping to make a sofa quilt for each couple for Christmas, but I only finished two. (I also made a wedding quilt and several baby quilts, all machine-quilted.)

After Christmas, my first grandson was born. (One of the afore-mentioned baby quilts was for him - incorporating Sunbonnet Sam as a fisherman. I used this block in the quilt I made for his father when he graduated from high school. Both quilts were extremely fun to make!)

And now, it is summer again... I am working on a jeans quilt, using up a box of worn out blue jeans my daughter gave me. It is pretty neat, I found the idea on line. When I figure out how to post links, I will do that.

And when that quilt is finished, I want to make a petroglyph quilt! We went to Las Vegas for my niece's wedding this spring, and toured around Arizona and Nevada a bit - Grand Canyon, Zion National Park, Red Rock Canyon, AWESOME places!! One of them (Red Rock, I think) had petroglyphs, and I think they would be really cool in a reverse applique quilt. Since a petroglyph is made by carving into the rock, the upper layer of rock is removed; in reverse applique, the upper layer of fabric is removed, revealing the bottom layer. Get it??

Well, that gets me caught up, I guess. Happy quilting!