It's going to be a busy few weeks!

I have got so much going on right now my head is spinning. Tuesday is my day in the It's for the Birds! blog hop over at Sew We Quilt!  Next week, I'm participating in a virtual book tour for Sinister Entity, a new horror novel by Hunter Shea. I've got two new baby quilt tutorials in the works, more socks on the needles... and a couple of other things I'm not ready to share yet.

Life is good!

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric Used this Week: 1 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 39 yards
Added this Week: 0 yards
Added Year to Date: 87 1/4 yards
Net Added for 2013: 48 1/4 yards


Yarn Used this Week: 400 yards
Yarn Used year to Date: 1150 yards
Yarn Added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Added Year to Date: 7100 yards
Net Added for 2013: 5950 yards

To see more weekly stash reports, click over to Patchwork Times.

Quilter's Favorites - Share and Learn

Geta at Geta's Quilting Studio has invited bloggers to share what makes their quilting more enjoyable.



I love my AccuQuilt Go! and Sizzix Big Shot. I do a lot of scrap quilting using fabrics from thrift stores and estate sales. And I make a lot of baby quilts to donate, so it seemed like a die cutter would help me finish more quilts than I could if I was cutting them all with a rotary cutter and ruler.

I can't tell you how much fun I've had with these machines over the past couple of years.

I've used my Go! to quickly cut enough units to piece a two-color Drunkard's Path quilt while I was recovering from knee surgery, to trim someone else's unevenly cut squares so that they were all the same size. It's great for cutting things that would be time consuming or impossible with a rotary cutter and ruler.

When I've just been in the mood to play, I've experimented to see if I could use the Apple Core die to make Halloween bats, or the Dresden Plate and Drunkard's Path dies to reproduce a traditional pieced turtle block. The more ways I can find to use a die I've purchased, the happier I am.



I've used my Big Shot to cut intricate shapes that I just don't have the talent (or time or desire)  to cut by hand with an Exacto knife. There is no way I  would have cut all of those typewriter keys by hand -- not when I could buy a die for ten bucks that would do it for me over and over!

Depending on what shapes I'm cutting and what fabric I'm starting with, I also love the Easy Angle Ruler and Companion Angle.


I also use template plastic, or even cereal boxes, if I want to make something that I don't have a die for, but I sure do appreciate what I've been able to do when I've got the right size die or ruler!

It's swarming season!

I've seen two stories on the nightly news lately about bees swarming neighborhoods and how terrifying it was for local residents. One woman had a mass of bees on her decorative flag.

 

Something like this...

 

 

The only terrifying thing about the mass in this picture was that they're our bees and had decided, for whatever reason bees decide to do what they do, to leave their hive.  If hubby hadn't been out tinkering with one of the cars and heard the louder than usual buzzing, we would have lost them for good.

 

Instead, we suited up, cut down the branch they were hanging from, and shook their annoying little bee butts back into an empty hive box. They're at the far end of the yard now, and hopefully they're happy with their new residence.

 

See where Hubby is standing? The swarm is that darkish shape directly to the right of his arm... and I was standing in that same spot a few seconds later, sawing through the last of the branch so that he could lower it into the box. Did I mention that I don't have gloves for my suit?  (Teenage Son has been boasting that he's taller than me now, but he stopped that as soon as I told him that being taller meant that he got to help cut the next swarm out of the trees.)

 

I wish I'd taken time to learn how to shoot video with my new camera, because this was definitely an experience worth filming. All went well and neither of us got stung. Swarming bees don't have a hive to defend and have gorged themselves with honey before leaving their old hive, so they're at their gentlest. If you have allergies or if you live in an area with Africanized bees, I'm not going to argue with you.  But for the rest of us, swarms aren't anything to be afraid of.

 

When a hive swarms, the queen leaves the hive along with half of the bees, leaving behind the rest of the bees and a new queen.  Bee populations are dropping dramatically due to pesticides and Colony Collapse.  There are beekeepers out there who would be thrilled to come capture a swarm and set them up in a new home. Google "swarm list" along with your city and state and you should be able to find a whole list of them.

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {week 19}

I often get asked what the name of whatever baby quilt I'm working on at the time is going to be, and I usually don't have an answer. Most of the names come later. Sometimes I think of the perfect name while I'm still in the middle of making the quilt.  Steve got a last minute name change when I decided to use Blue's Clues fabric for the backing. Emily was going to be Amelia until I decided to save that name in case I ever make a girly airplane quilt.

And sometimes I start with the name. This quilt was always going to be Sadie and it was always going to have pink churn dash blocks on a brown background.

Coming up with names for these quilts is so much fun!  No one but me and my blog readers will ever know these names, but they make the quilts feel more distinct.

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules:

Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned, but it's got to be about baby quilts. While we're still gathering steam, you're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

this week's finishes

This week, I finished a quilt that I can't show you...

It's driving me absolutely nuts that I have to wait until Monday night to show you this one. It looks so much prettier in reality than it did in my imagination.

I also finished these, which I don't have to keep secret...

Toe up, plain stockinette feet, short row heels, k2 p2 ribbing for the legs... 60 stitches on size 2 (maybe) Harmony dpns. The yarn is Knitpicks Sock Garden, in the Zinnia colorway.

They were originally going to be an entry in the pooling sock yarn challenge, but the yarn didn't pool. That doesn't matter, though -- I've got a new pair of hand knit socks and just a tiny bit less yarn in my stash.

 

This post is linked to to Finish it Up Friday, Can I get a Whoop Whoop?, and Freedom Fridays,

What are we scared of?

What Was I Scared Of? from The Sneetches and Other Stories by Dr. Seuss is my absolute favorite picture book. It's got a pair of empty green pants that ride a bike and row a boat...and prickly black Brickel bushes and the most amazing color combination. I think I might need an applique quilt based on this book...

 

Lots of quilters seem to be scared of half square triangles and willing to make all sorts of contortions to avoid those scary bias edges.

I'm working on a tutorial with about a hundred half-square triangles and I just know that someone is going to scold me for the way I do them -- the same way I've been scolded in the past for cutting individual squares instead of using quick strip piecing methods.

I cut the squares because I don't want the prints falling in the same combination every time.  And I do my triangles the way I do them because I think it's easier to make the half square triangle units that way.

I cut squares in half to make two triangles and sew the triangles together. For me, that's a lot faster  than drawing a line from corner to corner of each square, then sewing a quarter inch on each side of the line, then cutting. (I've done it that way, too.)

Back in high school Home Ec, I made a matching blouse and skirt out of red and black plaid cotton. The teacher suggested that the square patch pockets would look nicer if I cut them on the bias. So I did. She did warn me to watch out for the stretchy edges, but they were no big deal.

After a gathered skirt with a button and zipper, and the yoke and collar and more buttons on the blouse -- not to mention matching plaids! -- those bias edges weren't that scary. Maybe that's because I'd never a bunch of warnings about bias edges.

How do you make your half square triangles?  Have you tried just cutting them and sewing them together?

{yarn along} I killed my sock!

Remember that sock I showed you last week -- the one that was done up to the heel?

I made a mistake. The stitches got redistributed a bit, so my heel stitches were off. And I was starting to get a bad feeling that the sock was way too big.  I tried it on and that bad feeling got worse. After I'd pulled the needles free, I tried it on again to see how badly I'd miscalculated.

And the darn thing fit!  But getting those live stitches back onto the dpns sounded like more of a hassle than reknitting the foot of the sock, so I gave up.  I love these colors, so I'll cast on again later with an actual stitch pattern. That heel would've bugged me.

And next time, I'll try to remember to count my stitches before starting the heel!

In a Yarn Along post a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about Liver Let Die, the first book in the Clueless Cook mystery series. I wasn't very far into the book and hadn't decided if I liked it or not.  Now that I've finished Beef Stolen-Off, the second book in the series, I can definitely say that I'm hooked and will be watching for the next one. 

Jordan McAllister aspires to be a sports reporter, but she's been making her living writing personal ads. When the newspaper's culinary reporter is injured in a jet ski accident, Jordan is thrust into the job. There's just one problem -- she doesn't know much about food beyond take out pizza and Hostess Ho Hos.  But with the help of her neighbors, she's come up with recipes and slapped fancy sounding names onto them, making the Kitchen Kupboard column more popular than ever.

In Beef Stolen-Off, Jordan is sent to the Cattleman's Ball. The plan is that she'll write about it in her column and get her readers to eat more beef. But  her blind date for the evening winds up dead.  There's cattle rustling, and a haunted house (have I mention that I love haunted houses?), and a fake seance...  It's a fun read!

Silly disclosure -- the books came from the library.  For more pretty knitting projects to drool over, check out On the Needles at Patchwork Times and Work in Progress Wednesdays at Tami's Amis.

When did this one become a UFO?

Teenage Daughter wants a big-girl version of this quilt --

That just means making it bigger and leaving out the fabric with baby bottles and diaper pins. Easy, right? I pulled out the fabric leftover from the little quilt and cut some more squares, pulled more  fabric from my stash, got it all ironed....

And then I got sidetracked. That freshly ironed fabric got moved... and that's how UFOs tend to happen around here.

 

I'm linking up to Judy at Patchwork Times and her Wednesday UFO Report.

not what I thought I was making...

I'd planned to use these little hourglass units as sashing for something else entirely...but then I couldn't find enough 1 1/2" strips to make the background blocks and I didn't want to go dig around in the dark sewing room....

And I'm pretty sure I like this better anyway.

Would you believe this started out as Orca Bay? To see more design walls, head over to Patchwork Times.

{Whatcha Reading?} my growing book collection

Every day or two, I scan through Amazon's list of  free Kindle titles to see if there's anything interesting. That's one of the things I love about my Kindle -- it's let me amass a huge collection of books that I think I'm going to read someday.  It's the same thing  I used to accomplish by shopping used book sales, except it's far cheaper and takes a lot less space...and the books are all right there in my hand, whenever I do decide to read them.

This week, I downloaded 3500: An Autistic Boy's Ten-Year Romance with Snow White. I always enjoy the chance to glimpse parenting through someone else's eyes, and I've got an ongoing fascination with Disneyland, so I thought it might be interesting...


 

I carried my Kindle around with me for the next day and a half, hoping to find spare moments of time to read just a little bit more.  It's the story of Ben, an autistic boy who had such an amazing reaction to the Snow White ride at Disneyworld that his parents moved from Seattle to Orlando to give him continued access to it. Over the next ten years, Ben and his parents went on the ride 3500 times, stopping only when the ride was permanently closed.

 

The book is being offered as a free download through May 6.  

 

By the way, I checked -- Snow White's Scary Adventure is still part of Disneyland in California.  So there's hope that I'll get my own kiddos there one of these days. And in the meantime, I think I'm going to watch a few ride through videos on You Tube when I'm done posting this. :-)

When's the last time you cleaned your machine?

When I'm doing a lot of sewing, I clean my machine several times a week, sometimes more than once a day if she's being persnickety. It's when I'm not doing a lot of sewing that the lint creeps up on me. I'll tell myself that I haven't done much sewing at all...and I'll keep telling myself that until the machine is absolutely full of lint.


Some of the quilters I know claim to clean their machines rarely, if ever. I want to know how they get away with that. There's a point, not far from the point my machine was at when I took this picture, where she just throws a fit and won't sew properly until I fix the situation.

That explains the twice a day cleanings -- and that brand of thread I won't use again.

Weekly Stash Report

Fabric Used this Week: 2 3/4 yards
Fabric Used year to Date: 38 yards
Added this Week: 0 yards
Added Year to Date: 87 1/4 yards
Net Added for 2012: 49 1/4 yards

Yarn Used this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Used year to Date: 750 yards
Yarn Added this Week: 0 yards
Yarn Added Year to Date: 7100 yards
Net Added for 2013: 6350 yards

To see more weekly stash reports, click over to Patchwork Times.

another reason to love old books

I've told you before about how the smell of old books makes me giddy.  My oldest son and I had a long discussion last week about what old books are supposed to smell like, as opposed to what mildewy books smell like. Sadly, the mildewed example was an original text Nancy Drew that I would have really wanted if it was in halfway decent condition.

Except for my growing stash of vintage children's mysteries, I'm not buying a lot of books for myself lately. My Kindle has won, assuming that the price of the Kindle edition is actually less than the price of the paperback. It's a happy combination of having the book I want right now and not having to keep track of it once I do have it.

I still have real ink and paper books, and I adore the special ones. Even though I've found a much nicer copy of the same edition, I'm still keeping that Bobbsey Twins book that came from the small girls room.

And I'll be keeping this Nancy Drew that  I picked up at the thrift store on the same day as I had to pass up the mildewed one. I've got a nicer copy with a dust jacket, but look at what's written inside the front cover --

Beverly Jean Iverson
Devils Lake, North Dakota U. S. A.

Christmas "1945"   a  Christmas "no one" will ever forget, for it is the year of "Victory and Peace" of the second world war Thank You

I assume that it was Beverly's book, but I wonder who wrote the inscription.  Was it Beverly, or one of the adults in her life?   (And yes, I did Google her name -- I found one woman who would have been about the right age, but Iverson was her married name and she lived at the wrong end of the country, and one who was born a few years too late.)

There's something about this book that just makes me want to hug it tight and protect it.  Do you save books with strangers' inscriptions in them?

This post is linked to Time Travel Thursday, Ivy & Elephants & Vintage Thingie Thursday.

Let's Make Baby Quilts! {week 18}

This week, I've been playing with block sizes. I wanted to make a pink version of this baby quilt, which I made a couple of years ago.


This time around, I wanted to add a pieced border. The scrappy churn dash blocks in the blue quilt measure twelve inches. Adding the borders bring my new quilt up to 48", bigger than I want my baby quilts to be.

The answer? Make my churn dash blocks with 2" cut squares instead of the 2 1/2" squares I use in most of my baby quilts.  With the blocks reduced to 9" square, I could add my border and still have the final quilt measure just under 40" square.

Here's Sadie. Even with that pieced border, she went together quickly. (I made up for that by spending three hours on the free motion quilting. That may be the longest I've ever spent quilting a baby quilt. But I love the results!)

Let's Make Baby Quilts Linky Party Rules:

Link directly to your post or specific Flickr photo. Your post can be about a baby quilt that's finished, or in progress, or you can be writing about what you have planned, but it's got to be about baby quilts. While we're still gathering steam, you're welcome to link to baby quilt posts that aren't brand new, but please don't submit the same post or picture more than once. I'd love it if you linked back to my site, either with a text link or the Let's Make Baby Quilts! button.

Sadie {a baby quilt tutorial}

Meet Sadie! I've been planning this baby quilt in my head for months, watching my scraps for just the right pinks.  Now that she's together, I'm seriously in love with this little quilt. I think she just might live here with me.

 

I've used the scrappy half square triangles before, first in Extra Scrappy Pinwheels, then in  blue sheet quilt #1 (see why I started giving the baby quilts people names?), and later in Dashes in the Woods. 

Want to make your own? You'll need about a yard of pink scraps and about two yards of background fabric.

 

Cutting --

Cut pink scraps into 2" strips. From those, use your Easy Angle ruler to cut 72 triangles. Cut 200  2" squares (108 for blocks, 92 for pieced border)   (Not using the Easy Angle for your triangles? Cut 2 3/8" squares and cut those in half diagonally.)

From background fabric, cut nine 3 1/2" squares for block centers.  Cut thirty-six 2 x 3 1/2" rectangles.  Cut  background fabric into 3 1/2" strips and use the Easy Angle ruler to cut 36 triangles. (Not using the Easy Angle?  Cut 3 7/8" squares and cut those in half diagonally.) You will also need 2" strips for the sashing and borders. I used eleven WOF strips.

Piecing --

To make the scrappy half square triangle units, sew two print triangles to one print square as shown and press. Sew to a large background triangle and press. 

To make the bars of the churn dash block, sew two print squares together and press. Sew to a 2" x 3 1/2" rectangle to form a square and press.

Lay out four half square triangle units, four bar units, and a 3 1/2" center square and assemble the churn dash block as shown. Make nine blocks.

 

To make pieced border, sew 2" squares into two strips of 22 blocks each and two strips of 24 blocks each.

 Using 2" cut strips as sashing, assemble the nine blocks into three rows or three. Add a border of 2" cut background strips, then sew the shorter pieced border strips to opposite edges of the quilt and the longer pieced border strips to the remaining opposite edges. Add another border of 2" cut background strips.

Quilt and bind. As always, if you make this quilt I'd love for you to send me a picture or link up to my weekly Let's Make Baby Quilts! linky party. There's a list of my free baby quilt tutorials over in the sidebar and you  can find out when new ones are added by either following my blog or liking the Let's Make Baby Quilts Facebook page.

Is it just me?

Does anyone else love that stained glass look that quilt tops get when you hang them in front of a window?

I'd be tempted to keep her hanging like this for a while if I didn't know first hand what sunlight does to quits hanging in windows. In my defense, it wasn't my quilt and I'm not the one who hung it there.

 

This one, though, is my quilt, and I'm going to take care of it!

 

{yarn along} Picture Perfect Corpse

I'm still knitting socks, so many of them that the backs of my hands are starting to ache when I'm not knitting. I should probably take a litle break, but I don't wanna...

At least I've got good books to read!

I've been waiting and waiting and waiting for Picture Perfect Corpse to come out. And, because I've been reading all of the new short stories that came out while I was waiting, I'd managed to forget exactly why I was so anxious to get my hands on the next book in the series (aside from the fact that I'm always anxious to get my hands on the next book in this series) ....

Luckily, author Joanna Campbell Slan did a great job of  quickly reminding me where she left off in the last book. To save herself, her mother in law, and her friend Johnny, Kiki has just shot the man behind her first husband's murder, in the head. Brenda, the estranged wife of Kiki's boyfriend, tried to shoot Kiki, but the bullet only grazed her temple.  I've spent almost a year waiting to find out what happened to everyone.

This book picks up right where the last one left off.  Just as things start to settle down a bit, Brenda's body is found in an abandoned farmhouse. Casings from Detweiler's gun are found next to her body and he's immediately arrested. Kiki is absolutely sure that the father of her unborn child and love of her life is innocent, but she's forbidden to meddle in the  case for fear that she might uncover something that could be somehow used to damage his defense.

Kiki is also trying to track down the young woman who appeared at Time in a Bottle, the scrapbooking store where she works, and announced that she was responsible for the death of Kiki's employer's son. There's also another puzzle involving Kiki's daughter Anya's best friend.

I highly recommend the Kiki Lowenstein books, but I wouldn't start with this one. There's a whole lot going on and I think it will make more sense if you already know the characters and their backstory.  Once again the book ends with a cliff-hanger and once again, I'm going to be very impatient to find out what happens next.

Edited to add a giveaway -- shortly after I posted this, Joanna emailed and offered to give away a  copy of Picture Perfect Corpse to one of my readers. To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment on this post before 11:59 pm May 6. I'll use the random number generator to pick a winner and announce it here next week.

Silly disclosure -- I pre-ordered my copy from Amazon with my very own money.  For more pretty knitting projects to drool over, check out On the Needles at Patchwork Times and Work in Progress Wednesdays at Tami's Amis.

I'm in no hurry here...

I tend to rush through the baby quilts and the projects I'm making for tutorials, because I'm usually anxious to share them with you. When it comes to the scrap quilts that I'm making for myself, though, I'm in no rush. Little trips is a perfect example of that.

The blocks are fiddly -- in case you haven't seen this one before, I'm doing Bonnie's Scrappy Trips Around the World in one and a half inch strips, so the blocks finish at 6" square. It's not hard, but it does require some focus.  My dream version of this quilt would be sixty inches square and only use each fabric once. I've got the scraps to pull that off, but I don't think I've got the organizational skills to keep myself from repeating fabrics, especially since the same prints tend to turn up over and over in scrap bags from different sources.

And then there's the color placement. When I was cutting scraps for the green baby quilt, I cut green strips. What I need will go into this quilt, the rest will go into the bin for my Lego quilt...but now I've got twenty green strips and they're going to have to go into twenty different blocks. So before I do any piecing,  I need to do more cutting.

So that's why this one is sort of a UFO, but not one I feel at all guilty about.

Free Kindle Mysteries

I've been downloading freebies for my Kindle this morning, and thought some of these mysteries might interest you --



It’s just an ordinary day for octogenarian sleuth Myrtle Clover—until her yardman discovers a dead body planted in her backyard. This death isn’t cut and dried—the victim was bashed in the head with one of Myrtle’s garden gnomes.

Myrtle’s friend Miles recognizes the body and identifies him as Charles Clayborne… reluctantly admitting he’s a cousin. Charles wasn’t the sort of relative you bragged about—he was a garden variety sleaze, which is very likely why he ended up murdered. As Myrtle starts digging up dirt to nip the killings in the bud, someone’s focused on scaring her off the case. Myrtle vows to find the murderer…before she’s pushing up daisies, herself.



Elly Blair welcomes the chance to escape her ex-fiance and job from hell when Grandma Imelda, ready to retire to sunny Florida, calls for her to take over her little southern cafe.

Elly has no idea her grandmother has baked up magic for the unsuspecting townsfolk for thirty years–and now Grandma Imelda insists that Elly use her own hitherto unsuspected magical powers to carry on the family tradition.

But Elly’s new at this stuff. Her dishes don’t turn out as full of smidgens of enchantment and dashes of wishes come true as she’d hoped. When handsome customer Rory Covington takes a bite of the wrong burger, he ends up capturing the attention of every woman in town. Elly doesn’t know if her feelings for Rory are true or based on her magic gone awry.

Tom Owenton is an investigator the National Organization for Magic sent to look into the magical mishap. Unless Elly can reverse the spell, the cafe will be closed permanently. Tom is more than willing to help Elly out of this magical pickle, but she’s not sure she should accept his offer.

Elly only has forty-eight hours to find a way to reverse the spell, or she’ll lose the cafe and never discover if her feelings for Rory are real.



Even ‘death do us part’ couldn’t halt her march down the aisle…

Cash-strapped Maui wedding planner Pali Moon can’t believe her luck when a prospective bride flashing a five-carat dazzler pops into her shop, “Let’s Get Maui’d,” to request a glitzy beachside wedding. But then Pali learns the lavish wedding must take place on Valentine’s Day—only nine days away. Oh, and one other little hitch—the groom’s been missing at sea for more than a week. But no worries, the bride assures Pali, with or without the groom the wedding will take place. She’s struck a deal with the groom’s best friend to be the proxy groom, if necessary. Two days before the nuptials, a male corpse floats ashore on a South Maui beach. Looks like the groom’s finally shown up. So now what’s it gonna be—a wedding…or a funeral?



“On this nice July morning in Parkland, North Carolina, the office of Madeline Maclin Investigations might as well have been an Egyptian tomb: hot, dusty, and dead.” It doesn’t help that her landlord Reid Kent, does a brisk business…and briskly hits on Mac to rejoin his agency. He maintains no one will hire a former Miss Parkland as a serious PI.

Mac has been friends forever with Jerry Fairweather. Jerry claims to be psychic and is, unlike his two brothers, somewhat screwy. And he refuses to claim a share in the Fairweather fortune. But he shares some good news with Mac—his Uncle Val has died and left him a house. The two friends drive out to Celosia, a half hour away, where they discover a local beauty pageant in trouble and a house just perfect for setting up shop. A Psychic Shop. The arrival of lawyer Olivia, Jerry’s shark-like girlfriend, rouses both Mac’s interest in the mystery at the pageant and the one in her own heart.

And then comes the first murder….

All of the descriptions are from the Amazon website. I haven't had a chance to read any of these myself yet, but I don't know how long they'll be free, so I'm telling you about them before they're back to full price. If you get a chance to read the before I do, let me know what you think!

playing with low volume pinks

I've been carrying the idea for this baby quilt around in my head  for the past few weeks. I had already cut my pink fabric into 2 1/2" strips when I decided that, if I don't want this to turn into a big girl sized quilt, I really needed to work with 2" squares instead.

So Thursday night I cut new strips. Not a big deal at all, but I've been carefully pulling together and hoarding all of my pinks to make myself Zuckerwatte! from Bonnie's latest book and it was hard to talk myself into parting with enough to make this quilt.  I can always cut the wider strips in half and make them into strips.

 

Anyone got some good tips for photographing low volume quilts so that the pretty piecing will show up better?

 

To see more design walls, head over to Patchwork Times.