A First, a Finished Project and Fabric

A First:  I got to mow the sod for the first time!!!  It filled the mower bag to the top - but I got it all done without having to empty it mid-mow.  Now I know what my husband knows: what he got himself out of!  That backyard is twice as big as the front!!!

There are a few burn spots from the first few days, but other than that, it looks great!!!

A Finished Project: Ranger's Pride is pieced, quilted, bound, labeled and washed!  It looks fantastic and the quilt poofed-up in all the right spots.  Doesn't it look great outside?  I can't wait to give it to the baby!

Fabric: We picked up some fabric for a few projects at Jannilou's in Philomath on the way home.  Any guesses on what I might be doing with them?

And a photo of Molly talking with Rowdy, the neighbor cat.

Tetris Block #1 - Done!

Hee hee, I have to admit - this was fun!  The Tetris Quilt-A-Long over at Happy Quilting started this week and earlier I showed you my fabric choices.  Here is my block!

I made one change to the colors, instead of white I am using the black animal cut-outs. 

Did I say this was really fun?  I can't wait until next week :o)

9-Patches

From my 9-Patch Quilt Along with Meadowbrook:

They're coming along!

I have a date with my strips and machine on August 5!

Mystery Solved! and some peaches and Tetris

We have solved a mystery and I am totally heartbroken!  But I'll save that for later.

Mom arrived this afternoon with Boo and Linda.  She brought a flat of strawberries and some pints of huge black berries.  And this: 

(the can is for reference on how big the basket is)

A HUGE basket full of peaches from her tree!  The close-up is the best :o)

I've also gotten the fabric together and cut for the Tetris Quilt-A-Long that I am participating in with Melissa over at Happy Quilting.

I love these colors and instead of a white fabric, I came up on this black fabric covered with all these multi-colored animal cut-outs. 

Cute huh?  I think I know a little girl that is going to need a "Welcome to Oregon" Quilt.

And on to the mystery.  Earlier, in this post, I had posted that one of the girls was being a cucumber theif.  I could have sworn until I was blue in the face that it was O.  Then I saw this:

Annie!  You're killing me!  My perfect child is a cucumber monster!  I can't even look at her - it was a great looking cucumber too.  Brat.

Scrappers BOM - July

This month Ginger picked the Kansas Trouble block for our July BOM.  The theme was red, white and blue.

Sweet Sunshine

A friend and I went berry picking at Springbank Farms for blueberries on Sunday.  I picked a whole flat!  I think I might pick another though, running out early spring stunk this year.  Childers Raspberries was closed so we picked up some raspberries at Grandpa's Produce Stand.

I also couldn't resist snapping this pic of O while she lazed OUTSIDE my bed.  Good girl!!

Mom will be up Wednesday so I hope to get a bit of stitching in before then.

Trottin' it up - Turkey Style

Today was Turkey Rama in McMinnville!  I participated in the Turkey Trot 5K and had a pretty good time, results will be posted soon.  I have learned, don't believe what the race pages tell you about the course.  It is all lies.  Mostly flat with one gradual hill my foot!  They had a theme - 80's - and I decided to dress the part. 

I bought a t-shirt and neon puffy paints at JoAnn's Fabrics.

I marked and cut out the neck so it would hang off my shoulder.

Then on the front I wrote out the race name and year - not too much on the front since that is where my race bib goes.

When the front was dry I put some paint on my hands and printed turkeys - kindergarten-style!  Fun huh?

I gave each a name too:

If you say it fast it sounds like McMinnville :o)

Then Tina agreed with me that I should fringe the sleeves and voila!

I left at 545am this morning and here is a shot out the garage.

The rest of the trip consisted of driving to Dallas to get a photo for my 36 Counties Collection (see page above).

Then I stopped at Grandma's Attic Sewing Emporium to pick up some scrap bags.  Grabbed a huge omlett at Tater's.  Then rode one of my favorite rides across the valley to Jefferson and stopped in at the Purple Frog to show Kim the Ranger's Pride Quilt and snap up some fat quarters for the guild BOM.  Then it was a quick spin by Springbank Farms to see when they're open for blueberry picking and a stop at Vinnie's Natural Foods to pick up some nutritional yeast (which really does smell like butter).  Home.  Couch or sewing chair?  To ponder....

Sunday Ride

So....we went for a ride on Sunday!  Since the 4-day trip got cancelled and Josh and I were working our butts off the other days, we were still hankering for a ride.  Troubador and Trobairitz agreed to go along and we set off early Sunday morning.  Was going to be hot in the valley so we set off into the mountains.  I have some great photos to show you!

But I deleted them.  Yeah, go me.

So, I am linking to Trobairitz' Blog for her photos and write ups - better than mine anyways.

9-Patch Summer Quilt Along

I am participating (and playing catch-up) in Meadowbrook's 9-Patch Summer Quilt Along.  Kristen started mid June and is shooting for us to finish the first week in Spetember.  Since I've got stuff going here and there, I figured out how many days that is and am shooting to get that many blocks done by quittin' time. 

I picked out some bright colors - bright green, pink, blue and some black and white prints.  I love paisley!!!  Each block is made from 2.5" strips and come out to be 6" square finished.  May need to do some serious sashing to make a lap quilt.

Here are the first 5 blocks.

7 Planter Beds and 7 Yards of Topsoil

This is over two days!

We got early Thursday and went to Willamette Greystone for stone and Home Depot for lumber and gutter supplies.

The backyard was ready - I had spread the bark dust earlier in the week. 

 Doesn't the yard look great!?!

 Even got a rainbow from the sprinklers :o)

 I unloaded the lumber while Josh got some work done: 40 2x8x8 and 10 2x4x8

 This is the front yard where I am going to put the stone down for a little sitting area.

 1200 pounds of flag stone from Willamette Greystone.

 Josh came back out after the lumber was unloaded and did the heavy work for me, did I mention 1200 pounds?!?1

 Now all the stone is stacked, waiting for me to put it down in the front.  Another day!

 Pieces cut and laid out, ready to put together.  O helped a lot.  At first.

 Box #1 all done and ready to go out in the yard!

 Boxes #1 and #2, box #1 partially filled.

 Annie supervising in the sun.

 Doesn't the box look pretty?

 Josh unloaded most of the topsoil and wheeled it back to the beds where he dumped it and I spread it.

 Box #1 is done!

 Box #2 is filled and #3 is ready to go!

 Day two:  #4 is ready to go.

 Oakleigh decided two days was one too many to help, so she just watched.

Boxes #5 and 6 filled. 

 Box #7 - last one ready to be filled!

Took us two days but it was totally worth it.  I still have the front yard to do, we need to put up the gutter when he comes home again and I need to start putting plants in the beds.

Quilt Guild: Nancy Bryant

Tonight our quilt guild, Santiam Scrappers Quilt Guild, had our monthly meeting.  Our speaker was a local Corvallis quilter who does amazing art quilts.  Her website is Alta Vista Studio.

Quilting Ranger's Pride

I got to Diane’s this morning and got to work as soon as I got there.  With about 45 minutes total breaks to eat and potty, I got the quilting done in 8 hours.  The machine said I had 4 active machine hours.  I look forward to cutting that extra 4 hours of messing around down as I get better at the designs on the machine.  In addition to the batiks I used for the top and backing, I used a single layer of Warm and Natural cotton batting, a navy blue Superior Threads and Superior Threads King Tut Line #927, De Nile (it is a variegated thread with all the blues to match the top).  The first step was done a couple of weeks ago: marking the quilt top.  I drew out the whole quilt (easy since it was a small baby quilt) in permanent marker on graph paper, then started to doodle in the empty spaces with a pencil and a lot of eraser.  This is what came out of the couple hours I spent on it. 

 

A close-up shows all the elements in a corner. 

Then I used a Clover Fine Tip White Marking Pen and started to mark the quilt with the designs I put on the sketch.  After one entire block of all the designs, I decided it would be best to just do the triangle swirls and do the flower free hand when I got on the machine. 

Next step was to pin the backing to the frame, then lay the batting and quilt top on top of that and square the top up.  I never really paid attention to this step much with my other quilts and I paid the price (luckily none of them were ever shown in any shows where they were judged), they came out wonky.  The long arm has horizontal and vertical stops so it makes it easy to line the edges up and make sure everything is square. 

Once that was done, the actual quilting begun!  I started with Stitching In The Ditch on all the seams that I drew out in permanent marker on my drawing paper.  These served to divide the quilt even more than the actual colors in the blocks did and also to really frustrate me.  Can’t seem to stitch a darn straight line with that! 

I used a tool called Linda Mae’s Ditch Stitcher and it worked great on the open areas when I stitched my diving lines in the borders. 

The borders I divided up into triangles that I put the triangle swirl in and flowers.  The triangle swirls were an iteration of the original triangle echoes that I drew on the sketch.  I learned in my practice quilting that the echoes were just not time effective since they weren’t continuous lines. 

 

 

I also jumped from each triangle to the next rather than clipping the thread and moving to each new spot. 

 

The triangle swirls were half the brown borders and in each brown pinwheel. 

I also did small and large flowers in the quilt.  The other half of the brown borders were in flowers.   

I used the jumping technique with the flowers too. 

The larger flowers I put in the half square triangles of the dark blue pinwheels.   

 All together the three look pretty nice, triangle swirls, small flowers and big flowers. 

For the filler in the light blue spaces of the blocks I originally had straight lines with hearts at the ends. 

 

I changed that up a little bit by adding squiggly lines to the straight ones and doubling the hearts. 

I hope it will puff up a little when I wash the quilt so you get some puffiness to the baby quilt to off-set the heavy quilting in the borders. 

The dark blue borders I just did straight lines.   

 

You can kind of see the variegation in the thread in the straight lines. 

In order to do the straight lines on the long sides of the quilt, we had to un-pin and turn the quilt 90 degrees and re-pin it to the frame.  Took a little bit of tweaking but we got it on right.  Everything looks pretty much like the original sketch, with the few tweaks I had to make. 

I was very happy to un-pin it and take it off the machine! 

Here is what I had looking over my shoulder the entire time – isn’t it cool?!?  Diane took a class where they enlarged a picture of something (in this case a dahlia), changed it to grey-scale, assigned each grey a real color, then translated it to raw-edge appliqué.  She FMQ it on her Juki and I think it looks great! 

 

This is the BOM for the Santiam Scrappers Quilt Guild for June – strawberry block. 

I just did mine as raw edge and whoever wins the block can quilt it as they like.  Needle turn is still wayyyyyyy beyond me.