Monday, July 28, 2014

I'm sew excited!!! I ribboned!

I finally took time to enter my quilting and machine knitting into our county fair this year at the encouragement of a friend. Sew glad I did-I entered 13 things and recieved 10 blues, 2 red, 1 white, Grand Champion, 2 Reserve champions and an honorable mention!!  It's been many years since I entered into the fair so I am really happy and wanted to share my good news with all of you. I really didn't know if I would get any ribbons because I apply all my bindings with the machine, the comment was good job on it but that I should sew those little miter corner shut on my bindings :-)
We were on vacation all last week so I didn't get to go to the fair until last night for picking up stuff. I thought I might get to see some of the other work but they had it tore down by the time I got there.

Here are the items with their ribbons...

I pattern tested this tubix quilt for Sue and I got a blue and Reserve champion on it.


This is my Best of Show item, a machine knit sweater-ribbons and a plaque, my first Best of Show ever!!!






































The pink sweater is all knit on my knitting machine. The mint is fleece for the body of the sweater and knit sleeves and bands on the machine and then sewn onto the fleece.























I'll be linking up with some of the parties on the left side bar-be sure to check out all the eye candy as there is always a good show each week!





Monday, July 21, 2014

Modern runner

I almost feel like I have been MIA for a couple weeks, well in blog land I have been. But I have been truly busy, not lots of quilting sadly. We are replacing 12 windows so I had to stain and varnish all 12 by myself last week, what a chore-I really hated doing it.



 So this runner was finished before that and I just didn't get it posted. The pattern is from Mountain Peak Creations, what a fun one to piece and quilt.

And this star runner I saw on Deb Tucker's You Tube video-I think she called it Banded Lemoyne Star. I have several longarm rulers that I sometimes forget to use so I dug out my Deloa Jones cable for the border.


And the wild black raspberries are ripe-oh so yummy! I do admit I feel a little like Laura Ingalls Wilder on Little House on the Prairie out pickin' my berries! But they make oh so delicious smoothies :-)
 

And I will leave you with a pic I snapped during a little R & R today while kayaking...

Wednesday, July 9, 2014

The whole runner

 As I promised yesterday I would post the entire runner pic's today-here they are.  These are mostly all batik, there are a couple backgrounds that are not. The 2 on the left are from A Quilter's Dream pattern called It's Good to be Square. On the left are 2 Disappearing nine patches.
These 3 are from the Scrap Basket Surprise. Instead of the quilt I just used 3 blocks and added my own borders to make table runners. Since I really like making runners I am always looking at a pattern to see if it would work to make it smaller or just use less blocks.
I used Heather Mulder Peterson's new book On the Run again and a pack of Fat Quarters I had sitting around. Now of course I have tons left over to make more runners :-)


If you would like to see the close up of the quilting check out yesterday's post.
Thanks for stopping by!

Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Quilting feathers

I have been trying to get a whole bunch of table runners quilted that I have pieced earlier this year. These have been quilted for a couple weeks but we have been so busy that I hadn't taken time to get their picture taken.
Amy over at Amy's Free Motion Quilting is talking about and showing feathers this month so I thought that would be a good place to start-my runners with feathers.



These 3 runners all have the same freehand feather quilted with my Nolting longarm.  Judi over at Green Fairy Quilts has a video on how to stitch these out. At first I couldn't get the hang of it, but after some practice at drawing them out, then stitching them, it became fun and easier the more I did them the more I liked them!

Come back tomorrow and I will post the whole runner and also show the same pattern with different quilting on it and different fabrics.

Linking up with Connie and Lorna along with Amy(link above).

























And just for fun-here is DH and I kayaking on the 4th of July in our new kayaks!  Our son and daughter in law went with us-so much fun-and he spotted this gorgeous Bald Eagle.


Tuesday, July 1, 2014

I'm back!

No I haven't fallen off the grid, just incredibly busy and have not gotten much sewing done.
But we did finish our landscape redo last Tuesday and are very happy with the results. We pulled out/dug out old Spirea's, Japenese Yew, hosta's, Stella lilies, layed new landscape fabric down and hauled in 5 ton of rock! Talk about hard work, I am so not used to that kind of physical labor. Plus a month ago I painted the shutters a rusty red along with the front door, it's like our house got a face lift!
Here is a before picture...








And now the after...Of course since I took the pic the Stella lilies are starting to bloom.

 We divided the Stella's and hosta's to reuse, then added a new flowering hydrenga tree. Kept the cascading spirea in place as we did for the 2 dwarf busning bushes. It looks fresh and new and now we can enjoy it. BTW you can see the new color door and shutters in this pic.

Another reason I have not posted was because we were gone for 5 days to Country Fest is Cadott, WI. What a wild place but we sure enjoyed the music, best ones for us Blake Shelton, Braid Paisley, Rodney Atkins, Randy Houser, Carrie Underwood. We did get rained on a few times-actually it poured down but we ran for cover before we personally got soaked. We would liked to have heard more of Gary Allen-it started pouring down after he had been playing for only 15 minutes.

But here is a scrap quilt I am working on little by little in between other things. I am using lightweight interfacing as my foundation and it is working out nicely.


And I made up this little basket-I have been seeing them posted all over the internet and thought I just had to have one too! Sorry I don't remember right now who's tute is was. Super simple though.
Joining in the Linky Parties at Freemotion by the River and Let's Bee Social.