Merry Christmas to All!

Wishing everyone the warmest of Holiday Wishes! Here is a shot of our christmas tree this year.

These are some embroidered kitchen towels I made for my Mom - now that she has them I can post a photo of them.

Embroideries Finished - YEAH

I finished my initial holiday embroidery projects this week and finally took some photos to post here. The towels look great in our pink 50's bathroom! And the tablecloth looks better than the photo - my chalk markings didn't exactly wash out today either! Oops!

Now it's on to finish a bunch of embroidered gift items and the tree skirt - which I hope to get done by Christmas Day!!!!

Christmas Embroidery - Finally!

OK - so I finally am getting around to putting the embroidery machine to some work with some Christmas embroidery projects. I am working on a tablecloth that I hope to finish in the next couple of nights!

And I made up a few towels as well - still have to stitch the border fabric to the towels but i'll take some photos of the completed projects at some point in the next week or so.

Look what the rain did to us!

We had an incredible amount of rain yesterday - close to eight inches fell here locally in our area and well, I guess this carport was not meant to be or it just didn't hold up with all that water and the gutter didn't keep up with the rain fall - or we are just unlucky these days -- who knows - and this thing is just 2 years old!!! What a mess - but we can't touch it until the insurance adjuster comes out - who knows when that will be. I hope it's before Christmas!

Guild Loot

We had our Stitchin Sistas holiday party the other night and this is the holiday loot I came home with! Our group is great and everyone walked away with a door-prize bag that was FULL of great items. I also had a stack of fat quarters (over there on the right in front of the fall rag-bag) that we give to the birthday person each month and it so happens my birthday is this month - I asked for red and brights! Yeah! I just love the embroidered coffee warmer wrap and the mini cutting mat with three rulers, that will be great for classes and I can take them along with my new scissors in my patchwork project bag that I got from our Santa Gift Exchange - everyone that wanted to participate brought a wrapped gift worth up to $20, I got the project bag -- yeah!

Great Calendar Give-Away

Check out this great barn quilt calendar giveaway that Ryan is having on his blog - be sure toclick here to check it out and enter the giveaway!

Noodle Swapping

Last month I joined a Swap-Bot noodle swap - aka - 5 inch strip of fabric swap and I just wanted to share what i've been receiving the past several weeks. I joined two swaps and each of them I was assigned 5 swap partners to send noodles to, both national and international. I love it! I love receiving packages from all over the world and I love sending things all over the world too! Today, I received a wonderful package from Holland that was beautifully wrapped in polka-dot paper and tied with ribbons and inside, what a great noodle.

Don't ya just love the fun fabric in black, white and hints of red!

This is what I've received over the last two swaps so far, still more noodles to come for November's swap but I jut love the variety. I already have plans to make some simple coasters with some of the christmas fabrics received and some swappers even send some minie blocks put together - that's ambitious but gives me an idea for the next swap too! If your'e interested in joining in on the fun, go on over to Swap-Bot and look for the 5 inch Noodle Swaps - they are coordinated by Ryan, another guy quilter like me!

Binding on a roll

I recently acquired via the wonderful world of Ebay several old wooden textile bobbins/spools and they not only have that great vintage appeal, they are utilitarian as well. The first purpose I have found is to roll my quilt and project binding on them to store until i'm ready to attach the binding to my project. I just keep them on the roll and set the roll in a box on the floor and it just unwinds as I attach the binding. Great! I am going to acquire a few more of these in smaller sizes and use them to store ribbons and ric-rak and such. Loving it!

Great Give-Away

Vickie over at Spun Sugar Quilts is having a giveaway on her blog -- go check it out and be sure to enter to win!

A new Welcome sign in time

I was able to finish machine quilting and bind a new Welcome hanging just in time before guests arrived today for drinks and dinner. I started working on this project last month with embroidering the fall-letters on the yellow fabric and last weekend I pieced everything together. It's about 70 inches in lenght and 12 inches in width. I just did some free-hand machine quilting with varigated brown/tone thread.

Home is Where the Heart Is - Update

The other day I was able to get my log cabin blocks stitched together and added to my quilt. I have to cut and attach the borders yet but I will make the December 15th deadline to complete this top! Yeah! Now, If I can also get the mini version of this quilt finished too then I'll be able to have two entries into the Bernina machine drawing - not sure what machine will be given away yet but any of them will do just fine! Another prize is to have your quilt machine quilted for free! That's a great prize too!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just wanted to wish everyone a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Home is Where the Heart Is BOM progress

OK so I actually do make quilts! I joined a BOM program at my local quilt shop earlier this year and although this should have been a 12-month program, it got condensed down to about 9 months so this is as close to giving birth as I'll ever get - LOL -- OK that was probably bad comedy but oh well -- So we are just about finished with the quilt tops - we have until December 15th to complete them the tops so we can have a chance at winning a Bernina sewing machine! I have my center done - that was a monthly progress you see on the bed. I have to add the log cabin blocks and the border this week and I'll be done with the top. YEAH!!! I bought my background fabric and some extra fabric from the line to make a couple pillow cases or shams, not sure which i'll make. This is a bit more country than I usually would like but it was a great exercise for a beginning quilter like me!

2009 Houston Quilt Festival Slideshow

I put this slideshow together from the Quilt Festival - they are not coming up in the correct order so you can just click on it to see the whole gallery of images in order with the credits for each quilt I photographed.

2009 Houston Quilt Festival

I have been remiss on posting updates to my blog latey so I will be catching up a little! Last month Mom came in for a visit and we headed westward to Houston for the 2009 International Quilt Festival - we had a blast! We took a class with Roberta Horton on scrappy quilts that was a real great class for us both - we both learned a lot about color value and combination to create some funny fabric combinations for a scrapy quilt.

Our trip was not complete of course without a few runs through the show floor for some shopping. We bumped into Elanor Burns and had a quick photo op - -- Mom's expression was not the best in this image but we only took one photo but it works.

The quilt exhibit was incredible! I think it was better than 2008 from my experience. We saw an amazing embroidered quilt created by Susan Stewart and her mother, Gloria Meyer - it's called "Gloria's Garden" and its just incredible to see up close. Free Standing Lace border- the entire quilt - three dimensional free stand lace throughout and not to mention the beautiful embroidery stitching - all by machine.

We had a great chat with Susan and her mom Gloria who were standing nearby behind Mom and I while we admired and were awe struck by the beauty and workmanship of this quilt -- we wondered about the time invested in this quilt - I think she said 5 or 6 months was involved in the contruction of this quilt which has over 7,000,000 stitches in it! Holy Smokin Embroidery Machine! Susan used Zundt Designs embroidery designs in her quilt - click here to see more about that on Zundt's website.

Here is Susan and her mom, Gloria. It was great meeting them and speaking with them. What great inspiration!

Stash sharing and using 2010

Judy L. over at Patchwork Times has challenged us to showing our stashes as they are right now and then posting a photo on January 1, 2010 and then again at the end of 2010 - goal: use your stash for your projects in 2010. So if you want to join in the fun - hop on over to Judy's blog and join the fun of the challenge. Here's my stash as of a few weeks ago - it's mostly organized at this point but there are a few piles of new items here and there that are not incorporated into the stack stacks.

Satin Moon Quilt Shop - Victoria, BC Canada

Satin Moon Quilt shop was truly a treat! First, I didn't expect to visit a quilt shop in Victoria, BC Canada but of course I asked since we only had a few hours to kill that morning in town but I just love this city - it has to be one of the cleanest cities I have ever visited, twice now. This shop was great and we were led there after asking a couple locals if there was a quilt shop within walking distance and there was, and it well worth a couple extra steps to find it near City Hall in downtown. The shop was full of wonderful fabric and patterns and great quilts everywhere. I stumbled upon a small sale basket of fabric at $6 per meter (Canadian) - that's just under $6 a meter US since the exchange rate that day was $1.08 CA to $1.00 US. Most of the fabric in the shop was anywhere from $12 to $16 per meter Canadian. I thought that was a little pricy in comparison to most US quilt shops but i'm sure taxes and the such play into that. The shop keeper was friendly and she informed me that there are over 3,000 quilters in the greater Victoria BC quilters guild -- OMG - did she say 3,000 members -- YES she did! My jaw dropped. Lot's of quilters all over that part of Canada!

I picked up a couple meters of sale fabric, found a fat quarter of balloon fabric and a great eagle pattern made by a local artist Shania Sunga.