First picture is my sand pail quilt, like the one in Gwen Marston's book Liberated Quilting. One shovel is appliqué, one is pieced. Don't you love the cute little feet my quilt rack has? Of course, these are both just tops right now.

The second one was made by cleaning the floor under and around my sewing machine and sewing it all together. I think I will make it bigger, ans then I can give it to the ladies at the homeless shelter. I heard a cute story from the social worker who is my contact at the shelter. The ladies there are there for a fairly long time, as it is the kind of place that gets you on your meds and helps you clean up and get a job. When my friend came with the first two quilts, she explained that the quilter was just one person and not an organization, and so that when I could, I would send a quilt, but it might take a really long time to make 22 ( number of beds) quilts. I had said that if the quilts caused jealousy or rocked the boat, that I would stop, because the last thing these ladies need is more boat rocking in their lives. So the ladies called a house meeting and proposed various ways of distributing the quilts.This was a main topic of discussion for about a week! Finally, they settled on drawing names from a hat, and that once you got a quilt you didn't put your name in again. I was quite pleased and proud that the quilts were such a commodity!

Scrappy Mountains

 

 

Here is my version on Bonnie Hunters pattern, which is a variation of delectable mountains. The pattern is found on her lovely website here. Really, you should go check out her site, even if you don't quilt just to see the wonderful pictures, and if you are at all curious to see the cool names that quilt patterns have. I'll wait!

The only difference is that I used 10.5 inch squares for my starting size, because ( as I also learned from Bonnie), this gives you the least amount of waste of fabric. I liked all these fabrics, but some of them were a little difficult to figure out what to do with. The other difference from Bonnie's pattern is that I did not measure the vertical cuts I made, I just eyeballed them, and I did not stop and make the squares more square shaped until I had four blocks sewn together.

At one point in the making of this quilt top, I was going to change the name from delectable mountains to dyslexic mountains, because I kept reversing the way the block should be. Those of us with dyslexia have an unfair advantage when it comes to making original, liberated quilts. We can get things backwards with no extra effort at all!

I'm so happy that I have found quilting. My stupid arthritis makes it so that I cannot knit for hours at a time any ore. ( Note to universe: I am really grateful that I can knit at all. I don not require an increase in arthritis symptoms at this point. Arthritis is the wookie. I know that. The wookie will win. I am happy that the wookie lets me play chess with him at all.) Quilting is a nice change in what part of my hands are used. Pus, you know, it makes quilts. Bonus!

I am Lazy, or a Genius

Or both. May I present waffle toast. When it is the first day of summer vacation, and the kids are hoping for a special breakfast, but there is a slight energy issue, well, then, butter both sides of the bread, smash it down in the waffle iron, and serve with cinnamon sugar.

Spinning Wheel for Sale

Ijust don't spin on it. I am, of course, fairly sad that I don't but not sad enough to spin on it! And, both son'c are taking music lessons, so the extra cash would be nice. I wish there was some fool proof way to figure if if a big purchase was going to work out before making the big purchase. Anyone got any ideas on that? ( Here's the link to the ad for it: http://kbbspin.org/node/7230

I am slowly getting over the pneumonia, went back to work for one day and a full week coming up next week. Need to find th camera and upload some quilt pics.

Still Here

among the living. Really grateful for all the good care I got from my co workers while in the hospital. Saw my MD on Thursday and she laughed out loud when I said I wanted to go back to work this weekend. I am really not so good at judging these things. She wants me to be able to walk three blocks without stopping or getting short of breath. Today I did two.

I've been knitting 5 hour baby sweaters ( this version). They take less than one ball of Plymouth Encore and are pretty fast, if not five hours. Or I am still slow.) Having fun using up partial balls or Encore ans the buttons I have that are a bit young for anyone that currently lives here. I'll see how many I can make this summer for the Teen Mom program. I'm already having fun picturing taking a big box of cute sweaters over in the fall.