I can't remember the last time I had so much fun playing around on Ravelry! I've found twenty-three new patterns to add to my queue this morning, and can't believe how many cute (and free!) cowl patterns have been added since the last time I looked. And the shawls. And the owl cables -- there are knee socks now! I've got to find some yarn in my stash to knit a pair of those.

There are also some gorgeous things in new Knitty that I can't imagine myself not knitting, so I did a birthday shopping this morning. I'm getting one of Knitpicks' new ball winders and some blocking wires. And some yarn.

While I wait for that to get here, I'll play with my other present. DH bought me boards for blocking my quilts with. And a little screwdriver to replace the one that came with my sewing machine and escaped during my bad day last week.

So I cleaned the machine, which wasn't all that dirty because I've been cleaning it regularly, and machine stitched the binding onto One Thrifty Quilt. Between this one and the turquoise one, and the three little quilts, I've got miles of handsewing to do.



Lately, I've heard a lot of quilters refer to tops as "flimsys." It's such a wonderfully descriptive term. My tops, evne the ones that don't have problems, always seem so fragile, like they're going to fall to pieces. Once they're quilted, it's a fanstic transformation -- suddenly they're so solid and stable!

None of my quilting shows up in the pictures, but it wasn't meant to be seen across the room, let alone across the internet. For the Thrifty Quilt, I stitched between the binding and borders, then between every second or third of the piano key strips and diagonally through the nine patches. I'm going to put a button in the center of each snowball block before I'm done.

For Mountain Majesties, I outlined all of the jagged edges. It was a hassle turning the whole quilt every inch or two, but the result was worth it. I'm working up the enthusiasm to do it again on my own quilt.