Travel the country with American Made

In just one week, on May 19,  you can start traveling across the country, state by state, with American Made Brand fabric on the blog tour!  Each day two bloggers will reveal a license plate block for their state. Collect all of the states for your own virtual trip across the country. Along the way, bloggers are giving away free stuff.  And at the end of the tour 50 fat-quarter bundles of 8 colors each (shown below) will go to 50 lucky readers.

American Made Brand solids are not only made in America, but the cotton is grown here as well.  Go check out the blogging schedule to follow along. And come back here on June 16th for the Washington block!

Sharing quilts

Sometimes our heart & soul are stitched into the quilts we make.  It’s a little bit uncomfortable to share the story behind the quilt. What inspired it. Or what we were thinking about as we were making it.

I have a little mini quilt show hanging at our church at the moment.  My first ever art installation.  And probably my last!  I don’t feel like a quilt artist… more like a quilt maker.   It is kind of exciting, but intimidating at the same time.  I chose some of the more meaningful quilts that I’ve made and it feels weird to be sharing them with the (sort of) public. At least the public/people at my church.  The quilting world feels like a whole other planet sometimes.  It’s hard to explain my quilting to non-quilters.

I’ve been stitching away on my 4-Letter Words quilt but it’s still not done!  Just done enough to hang for a bit.  Then I’ll finish it properly when it comes home again.

How do you feel when you show your quilts to other people?

I finally finished something

Woohoo! I finished something!  How about that?  On top of that it is an unusually gorgeous day in the Pacific Northwest.  I am getting tired of take photos of quilts on our shed. But I just haven’t found any other location that works as well.  I need an old barn like this for photo shoots.

The blocks were made by the ladies in the Faith Circle of Do.Good.Stitches.  And I assembled them into a quilt.  I asked them to make wonky log cabin blocks similar to those I found in this inspiring quilt.

Then I put three borders around the blocks. The first one is Kona Cotton, color lime, from Robert Kaufman. The second one is Kaffe Fassett’s Spots in China Blue. And the third one is Kaffe Fassett’s Radiation in Pastel.  All of the border fabrics were left over from other projects. Even the binding was a stash fabric.

I decided to straight line quilt it in a diamond grid.  It seemed like a good choice with all of the busy, wonky fabrics in the middle.

Then I had this crazy flamingo fabric that I wanted to included on the back. But there wasn’t enough for the whole back. So I added some Denys Schmidt Chicopee that I found at the shop where I work.  And two more blocks that came in after I had already sewn the front together.

Here’s a shot of the whole back.  The quilts we make in the Faith Circle are all sent to Restore Innocence, an organization that rescues young girls from human trafficking.

Hmm… which unfinished project should I work on next?

Star of Chamblie

Remember this quilt?  Well…. it’s now a kit available at my LQS, Gathering Fabric.  The kit includes:

• all the fabric for the top & the binding (Clothworks’ American Made Brand solids)
• Marsha McCloskey’s Star of Chamblie pattern booklet
• the color key (the light & dark values have been reversed)
• the Feathered Star ruler
• and the Precision Trimmer ruler.

If you are interested in a kit, give the shop a call or send an email and they will set you up.

I just brought mine home today!  The shop is going to try to set up a class on how to use the rulers and tips for sewing feathered stars.  I hope my piecing skills have improved since my first attempt at a feathered star block long, long ago!  Because I can’t wait to see this one finished!

A few of my favorite things

I know people say this all the time… but where has my week gone?  In between or at least in the evenings I’ve caught the knitting bug.  This is my second pair of the Mohair Ballet Slippers.  These are going to be given to my sister-in-law.  It feels good to be using up yarn from the stash!

Random quirky fact… these were my favorite colors in high school.  Spring or lime green – the color of the leaves in the spring when they first come out – and yellow.  I wish I had a photo of my ruffly, totally 70’s bedroom.  You would laugh.  I am not a ruffly kind of girl so I don’t know where that came from.

Everything is bursting into bloom right now.  And on the random sunny day like we had yesterday, it is glorious!  The crab apple tree is getting ready to bloom.  So are the lilacs.  The flowering current is already blooming along with the rosemary.  The tulips are nearing the end of their season.  And I put some compost on the raspberries & rhubarb.  I love urban gardening!  I even bought a blueberry bush yesterday.  We just need to figure out where to plant it.  If we had just a little bit more property we would get some chickens in a heartbeat!  Our city requires at least a quarter of an acre, though we know that there are some neighbors who aren’t following that rule.

A side note…  last year we planted micro clover in our yard. It is supposed to be good for the soil, putting nitrogen back into it which in turn helps make the grass stronger & healthier and then hopefully makes it harder for the moss to grow.  We do have a reason for our madness!  However… we didn’t spread the clover very evenly in the back yard and it looks like mostly clover and hardly any grass.  Oh well.  At least it is green.

Slipper stats:

Yarn – Cascade 220, this yarn felts nicely and not too fuzzy like the first (Ravelry link) pair of slippers I made.
Size – Small
Pattern – Mohair Ballet Slippers from the book Felted Knits, the sole is a double thickness so I knit the inside yellow and the outside green.