Spring table runners

It was bright and sunny over the weekend, so naturally thoughts of spring came up.  I played around a bit with various scraps of turquoise and lime, using a specialty ruler I bought last summer.  I don't like to buy specialty rulers, so I am determined to use the Mini Quick Curve Ruler for more than one project.  Last summer, my class involved curvy flying geese with the ruler, and before Christmas I made a poinsettia hot pad with it.  Now I wanted to try some melon shapes.

The result was pretty good, even though I can only make 5" melon blocks with the QCR mini.  I quilted the spring table runner very simply, and it measures about 10" x 42", great for a rectangular table.  I may be making some other items using melon shapes, and the QCR mini would also be nice for making Drunkard's path blocks, even though I already have a set of template/rulers for those, too.

Next, I turned my attention to my basket of strings which seems to have grown quite a bit over the last few months.  I saw a simple wool appliqued pillow pattern in the latest issue of Quiltmaker and decided to adapt it for another table runner with applique on a string pieced base.

I thought wool pennies would be too bulky for a table runner, so decided to use cotton circles instead.  I will add a little embroidery and maybe a purple or blue border when I finish appliqueing the circles.  I really should be sewing the binding down on my Long Time Gone quilt, but this is more fun!

Honeycomb

I put the last stitches into the Honeycomb quilt binding Saturday.  I was planning to go to a library program on decluttering and downsizing, but I decided I am pretty good at that anyway.  So I stayed home to sew, and I'm glad I did.

Honeycomb is basically a string quilt, and I have an ever-growing basket of them.  I have made quite a few basic string quilts, but I wanted something a little different.  When I saw the pattern in another quilter's blog, I bought it right away via etsy.com.

When I looked up the designer, I found she, Karen Griska, lives in Connecticut.  She has also written a book (out of print) on using selvages, another thing I like to do.  Wouldn't it be great if she could be the spring speaker at the state quilt guild meeting?  So I sent her a message, and she said yes!   Her sister lives in Montpelier, the next town over from Barre.

I got busy making the quilt which is a little smaller than the one in the pattern.  I used lots of low volume prints left over from my Splendid Sampler, and it ended up about crib-sized.  I also didn't make any half-square triangles for the border, but I really like the way the border turned out.  You probably can't see the echo quilting using my walking foot around what I think of as "wheels."  That took some time so I'm glad it was a small quilt.  I look forward to meeting Karen in May.

A sweet little quilt

Yesterday, I finished quilting and binding this little melon quilt.

I love appliqueing the melon shape and used all scraps for this quilt.  It took about a year because I only worked on it at monthly quilt guild sewing sessions and a little over the summer.  It has a mix of cream backgrounds, pieced tea-dyed muslin back, and pieced batting.  The binding came from a partial jelly roll I bought at a neighbor's yard sale.

It's always nice to use stash.  Brown is one of my least favorite colors (khaki is even less desirable), but my artistic aunt using it a lot, especially with pink.  I'm ready to move on to another colorway, though.  

I am hand sewing the binding to the back of the honeycomb quilt, so it is taking a little more time.  I also need to make a binding for the Long Time Gone quilt I got back from the long arm quilter yesterday.  It looks fabulous - can't wait to show it to you.  

Old photos

We have had two days when it was smart to stay inside.  Thursday was a mixed precipitation day with snow, sleet, and freezing rain.  Yesterday we had that in the morning but heavy snow in the afternoon.  I'm not sure how much we got, but it was heavy enough to put several statewide TV stations off the air.   This morning the pine trees' boughs are saggy, and it's in the single digits outside.  The sun looks like it's going to come out, but I suspect the roads will stay icily packed, so I won't be going to quilt guild this afternoon.

For 10 years, I have been saying that "the next snow day, I'm going to go through that box of old photos," and that's what I finally made myself do yesterday.  In a very heavy box, I found albums and tons of envelopes of prints from the drugstore I had never organized.  Did I need them all?   Remember when we used to get two copies of prints so we could share them?  Many of those envelopes contained both prints.

I whittled most of the box down to half a shoebox-sized decorative box and arranged the photos more or less chronologically.  I suspect I won't add too many more from the two binder/albums I haven't gone through yet.  Since Chris was born on a Friday, I used to take his picture every Friday for at least a year.  And then there were the cute shots in between.  I sent many to my Mom who, several years ago, made albums for both me and Chris with them.

There were some treasures, though, like this picture of me and Paul from 1993 in front of his old library at Norwich Univ.  This was years before we got together, and I was touring some foreign librarians around the state.  Paul showed us the old library and also the new one under construction.  The librarian from Pakistan sent me the photo, and they were all very nice.  I think the woman was from the Philippines and the man on the far left from Indonesia, but I can't remember where the others were from.  I told the Indonesian that I had read all the books by Pramoedja Ananta Toer, and he was shocked, saying "he's a Communist... banned."  I explained that in this country, we can read whatever we want, and that's what public libraries are all about.

I kept that photo on my desk for years, even when I moved desks and offices, so I must have imprinted Paul's image in my brain - and heart.  We enjoyed looking at it yesterday.  He asked how I got so tall, and I said it was my heels and hair with its perm.

There were more such nice memories yesterday, but today I'm giving myself license to quilt!  :-)