Challenge Quilt

I am doing my local quilt shop, Cottonfields challenge.  This is my first challenge and yes I know I am not supposed to show it but I am so excited about it I cannot keep quiet.  This is part of it.  I have had so much fun with it.  You know I love making stars.

This is another part of,  including the border.  I am enjoying spiky sawtooth borders these days.
























June is going to be such a busy month for us,  full of family time and beach time.  My cousin from Tennessee  is coming with her family this weekend.  I have my high school class reunion the following weekend,  don't ask how many years.  Fathers Day weekend my son from Charlotte and his wife are coming.  I am already tired!!  By the way,  my son won his neighborhood pie contest with a Key Lime Pie.  I hope we can talk him into making it for us.   The last weekend in June our daughter from Indiana will be here.  I love summer!!

I like to post pictures.  Since I could not show you more of my challenge wall hanging I will show you my huge hosta.  Somehow I have not done much yard work this spring. 

Thanks for all the suggestions about my found nine patch squares.  I have several things going right now and I am not going to do anything with them until next fall. 

Back from across the pond

My friend and I are back from London.  We had a great time.  The first thing we did was get on a "hop on hop off" bus and we got to Buckingham Palace just as they were changing the guard!!  I could have come home then and been happy.  Who does not want to see the changing of the guard?

On Friday we took a day trip to Stonehenge.  It was so so impressive.

A view of the London Bridge.



This is a picture of some tapestries in the Cathedral at Bath.  They were so quilt like. 

We had a great great trip although it was short.  I even learned to use the Tube to get around, not bad for a retired grandmother!!

My daughter in law has a friend who is having twins boys in August and she asked me to make them quilts.  Is this too bright? I want both quilts to be similar but not exactly the same.

In cleaning out my mothers house I have found so much fabric and I found these squares she made.

Any ideas on how to use them.  They all have the plaid or print in the corner squares. There are 109 of them.  What a strange number?  For one thing it is a prime number so you cannot make it into a rectangle. 

This was one of my ideas,  put a solid of the same width as the square between each one.

I have a pet peeve that is really bothering me.  I read lots of blogs.  I try to comment on as many as possible.  If you comment on my blog I do my best to respond.  I have commented on several blogs lately and did not get a response.  I even sent one blogger a personal email and didn't hear from her. I love my blogland friends.  I really appreciate all of your comments and I feel like I should acknowledge the fact that you stopped to read my blog.  Is it wrong to think that consistently not responding is rude?

NC Ferry

Happy Mothers Day to everyone.  I got these beautiful strawberries in the mail from my daughter.  I would rather have had her but the strawberries are good.

We decided to ride the ferry on the way to the beach on Friday.  North Carolina is so fortunate to have a great ferry system and for the time being it is free.  This is the ferry from Minnesott Beach to Cherry Branch.  It takes about 20 minutes and it is a beautiful ride.  It is a great thing to do with the kids.

We are meeting the ferry going the other way.

My aunt is always an inspiration to me in so many ways.  She is the one that really inspired me to start making quilts.  She introduced me to Gwen Marston and I will be forever grateful.  She encouraged me (pushed me) to go to my first Gwen workshop and I was hooked.  Since then we have worked with Gwen two more times.

My aunt is making a quilt for her daughter's friend who adopted a baby.  I just had to post these stars she made.

And now look how great these stars look in the quilt.   My aunt is into a phase of doing 9 patches with 3" squares.  The stars look like they are just tossed on the quilt.

















My daughter in law asked me yesterday to make quilts for a couple of her friends,  one who is expecting twin boys!!  I think I might try this idea. 

Fun with Friends!

What a great week.  Thursday my cousin and I visited her friend who has a long arm quilting machine!! I had never seen one in use before and I was fascinated.  Here is my cousin pinning the back of my quilt to one of the bars.

Here is my black and white quilt being quilted on the machine. 

This is my black and white quilt with shots of color.  I have not put the binding on yet but I hope to do that this weekend. I am very excited about this quilt and how it turned out. 

Here is the back.  My $1/yard Elvis fabric!!

















A close up of the quilting,  Betty did a great job.

For the Royal Wedding my friends and I got together,  wore our hats and watched.  Darlene took the top off of her Easter tree and put it on her hat. 

Our hostess did a great job of making us feel very English.  Her table was beautiful. Of course we had to have ham biscuits. 

 Here are all of us in our hats! What a hoot,  we had a great time.

New Things

We have been at the beach for the last few days.  I finished my black/white quilt top.  I don't have my camera with me so I will post the pictures of that later.  I finished the sawtooth border and it looks great.  My aunt saw it and said the pictures don't do it justice.  She had not seen it in person before.  I always feel a letdown after working and thinking so hard about a quilt.  I worked on those black and white blocks during the winter of 2010.  It is a good feeling to finish but still you have so much thought invested.

Our new quilt group, Non-traditional quilters,  met last Monday at my dear friend Lori's quilt shop,  Cottonfields.  She has a great blog too.  There were only 4 of us,  hopefully there will be more this week.  She showed me curved piecing!  I know should have done it before but I am scared of curves!!  Since I was trying to motivate myself this morning I decided to try it.  Wow!!  It isn't hard at all. 
This is some of the fabrics from my black and white quilt and "shots" of color.  Now I have to decide what to do with it.  I think I will piece the back of the black and white quilt and use it there. I have some great Elvis fabric for the back.  I do love pieced backs.

I have some great starfish fabric that I have had for years.   I was playing with it yesterday afternoon and made these blocks.  Maybe I will make a few more.  It would make a charming quilt.  I thought about black and white log cabins  but I am honestly ready for some color. 

Did you see Tonya's post on Unruly Quilting?  She is trying to do without her rulers!!  I am not sure I am ready to be that liberated!!  I am sure my grandmother never used a ruler or a rotary cutter and she made great quilts.  Tonya also has some links to other blogs with very interesting stuff.  Daintytime is very interesting.  I really like her ideas about Mod Mood Quilts.   I think the first one I posted is sort of a Mod Mood quilt. 

Thanks

I so appreciate all the comments about my black and white liberated quilt.  I have been very busy this week.  My son and his wife went on a cruise so we have the grandsons.  I have been able to sew a little bit but not much.  This weekend I am going to devote myself to making more liberated sawtooth and see what happens from there.  I got some more of the black from my local quilt shop,  Cottonfields.

I ordered this cool book.  I found it on some other blog and honestly I can't remember what blog.  It is a great book with tons of ideas for modern quilting.

 

I like making log cabin blocks and it seems like I am in sort of a black and white period.

I made this little star the other day.  My aunt is really into 9 patches and stars are a great combination for 9 patches.

Liberated Confusion

One finish this week. For a friend of mine whose daughter is expecting her first child.


























Last Friday a friend of my cousin called and said Hancock had a dollar table. WOOHOO!! Elvis fabric for a dollar a yard. Notice I didn't tell anyone until I had gotten all I wanted!













I have discovered this last week that being liberated at times is confusing and definitely not easy. I put together this black and white quilt top last winter but never finished. I was imagining a sort of piano key border. My cousin's friend has a long arm machine and offered to do a quilt for me. I started thinking, how about spiky sawtooth. What do you think?


















I thought spiky sawtooth at the bottom and top and then make a border of stripes. I cut some strips and put them together. This DID NOT speak to me at all.

















At this point I am very frustrated and feel like I have wasted time putting together a border that I am not going to use. I decided to go to the master of liberated quilting (Gwen Marston). I had been using her Liberated Quilting 2 as a guide for the spiky sawtooth. I randomly turned to a page and saw this sampler!

















Talk about a AHA moment! This is it. I will make more spiky sawtooth and put a star at the corners. This is just a random block at the corner. Really another idea I tried.
What do you think?


















I love liberated quilting but honestly following a pattern and knowing what you are going to do is easier at times. I also feel like I wasted a couple of afternoons of precious sewing time looking at options that didn't work. I also don't have quite enough of the black and white print so