strings are fun!

It's a good thing I like string quilts, because I've had literally bags and bags of pretty little fabric strips fall into my lap over the past couple of months. That's in addition to the strings I cut myself when I first got excited about string quilts.



The front and back sections of Alex's cat bed have been pieced for a while, but I decided that quilting them to some heavy batting would make the whole thing more durable. I'm still having fun stippling, so that plan worked out just fine. (Note to self -- remember to put the presser foot down after you lift it to shift the fabric!)

And at some point during the process, I decided that it would be a good idea to add a zipper to make it easier to take out the stuffing and wash the cover if disaster struck. Would've been a perfectly reasonable idea if I'd put in a zipper during the last twenty years, or even remembered how to put in a zipper.

My google search for zipper tutorials only turned up results for installing invisible zippers into the sides of skirts. Skirts are the deep dark root of my secret zipper hatred. I found a tutorial for adding a zipper to a bag, but it told me to follow the directions on the package, which my thrift store zipper didn't come with.

So I borrowed the zipper foot from my twelve year old daughter's machine and winged it. The zipper is attached. She's been warned not to ever ever unzip it unless there is a laundry emergency, because I'd rather trash the entire project than try that again.

The cat, of course, wants nothing to do with her new bed and spent last night sleeping in the bathroom on a wet towel.



I also got the string blocks for that baby quilt assembled. Now I need to figure out what I can back it with. I really want to find some more cheap thrift store sheets!

Today's quilting was derailed by a migraine and a hundred mile drive to replace a water bed mattress with a split seam -- just what I felt like dragging four kids along to do when it was 102 degrees out there! On the bright side, my migraine meds did work and we caught the leak before it flooded our bedroom too badly.

I've got higher hopes for tomorrow!

The lengths I'll go to to preserve my quilting time...

It's going to be hot today, hotter tomorrow, and hotter than that the next day, going on for at least a week. We don't have air conditioning, but the house is shaded by trees and if I'm careful to keep doors closed and drapes shut it stays a decent temperature inside.

As long as I don't use the stove or oven or anything else that'll heat things up -- like my iron. The whole thing is a ridiculously delicate balancing act, and last year or the year before I would've put up the quilting and knit a sock. This year, though, I refuse to let go of my current quilting binge.

If that means I've got to get up really really early and use my iron while it's still cool outside and I can have the windows open...well, that's what was doing at dawn this morning.

My first plan was to finish piecing the buzz saw blocks, but I don't need the iron for those so I set them aside for later and finished piecing a bunch of string blocks for a baby quilt. Those went together quickly enough that I was also able to press the Layered Squares top and would be pin basting it this afternoon if I hadn't decided that it needs a border so the binding doesn't hit up against the edges of the squares.

This afternoon while I'm ironless, I'll finish the buzz saw blocks, or start quilting the cat bed, or trim the strippy blocks and see about putting them together into a top.

My list of twenty-six WIPs has shrunk to twenty-one. And I'm making a list of new projects to start soon. This morning, I found two more at Mel's Own Place. I'm absolutely definitely going to do Bread and Butter and All Abuzz. I'm printing a stack of patterns as I type this.

Including an absolutely fantastic rooster quilt. The pattern (which for some reason doesn't have a picture) is here. I need that quilt on my kitchen wall!

After three days of what felt like endless meandering, my rail fence (which has been waiting its turn since November) is quilted and the binding is machine stitched into place and it really shouldn't take all that long to get it hand stitched down into place.



This is the most densely quilted of my quilts. The purple thrift store sheet I used for my backing isn't terribly photogenic, but can you see all of that wonderful texture? It's making me a bit giddy.



In an unusual example of using what I've got, I used thread that came in a gift pack with my sewing machine. It's a funky shade of purple that actually blended nicely with the color of the sheet. Until I ran out and had to switch over to charcoal, but the quilt is so busy that I dare anyone to find it without serious searching. And it's a utility quilt -- if I can do a scrappy binding, why not use my thread the same way?

I probably would've had enough purple if I hadn't made the quilting so dense.

What really surprised me was the amount of lint left by the obscenely overpriced thread that came from the Janome dealer. It actually gummed up the machine's needle threader.

Makes me feel much more confident about the thread I usually use -- Essential from Connecting Threads. I've always been happy with it, but I keep hearing stories about how linty it is. There's lint when I clean my machine after a lot of sewing, but nowhere near as much as the "good" thread left.

I thought I was tired of meandering and reading to switch back to piecing for awhile, but now I'm not so sure -- this has been fun!

I got the top done this morning and it wasn't nearly as tedious as I expected it to be. Simple Pleasures isn't an example of precision piecing, but it's a completed quilt top.

And the thing is HUGE.



I could have easily have made it a little or a lot smaller, but I didn't realize how big it was getting until I'd already picked out oodles of different prints and I wanted to use them all, and to use lots of pieces of each one...and the pattern told me to make it 70x86... Reading a set of measurements and then picturing what size quilt they'll be is not one of my talents.

I suppose we really do need a few bed sized quilts along with all of the throws.

and diet Coke is on sale at WalMart!

Our phone rang very early this morning -- early enough that when it woke me up, I thought it was still night and someone in the family must be dead or maimed. Maybe some people might want to consider that making last minute car pooling plans at 4:44am isn't the best phone etiquette? I had planned on getting up early, but not quite THAT early.

I did get myself motivated enough to finally assemble the Bento Box top. And I finished piecing the blocks for Simple Pleasures, so if my luck or motivation or whatever holds out, I hope to get that one assembled tomorrow morning before the kids are out of bed.

Bill is back at work after two weeks of vacation and when it's just the kids and me at home, I can chase them out of the front room to lay out blocks and pin rows and do all of that other less-than-fun stuff that you have to slog through if you're ever going to finish a quilt.

This stretch of vacation was very low key -- we rattled around the house and made a few day trips. Yesterday's was to take the kids to the fish hatchery near Sisters. I could never get quite the camera angles I wanted, but it was so cute watching Leif toss in a couple of little pellets of fish food at a time and then jump and clap his hands every time the fish went after them.



The diet Coke? I really needed the caffeine today and it was on sale cheaper than I've seen it in ages. Now there's enough in my kitchen to last quite a while. I'm happy.

This might work

I took another look at the fabrics I'd decided not to use in the buzz saw quilt and picked out the two that might possibly work. The others are either too light or too pretty to use. Why sacrifice the gorgeous dandelions if they would be in little strips that butchered the print?

My current plan is to finish the center blocks with what I've got and decide from there if I need the extra fat quarters or not. They're halfway done already and if I lose my momentum, I'm afraid this'll be another red quilt.

I am furious with myself!

Last week, I cut the pieces for the cheery buzz saw quilt I've been planning (I can do that -- it's on my list!) The fabric was a bundle of fat-eights that I got on sale from Connecting Threads -- not expensive, but I really love that fabric so it was too special to mess up. I'd pulled out twenty-two of the fat eights and got all of the pieces I needed with some tiny scraps left over.

Today, I started piecing and discovered that three of my 6 1/2" squares were 6 1/4" along one side. And of course I couldn't remember where I'd put the fabric I wasn't using in the quilt, so I had to totally ransack my sewing room. But I found it!

I thought that saved the situation, but it turns out that I don't want to use those fabrics in this quilt. That's why they were put away back in the sewing room and not part of the quilt in the first place.

I can't piece scraps to make the squares I need. I could order three more fat quarters, but I'd wind up spending half as much as I spent on the sampler I started out with and buying far more fabric than I needed. Did I mention I got it on a really good sale? I could splurge and buy enough of the yellow tossed dandelions for the backing, but again, that would cost a ton.

What makes me the whole thing so darn aggravating is that I brought it on myself with one little mis-measurement.

What if I bought one yard of gorgeous yellow dandelions for the back and surrounded it with a wide border of the muslin that's left over from the front? And bought three fat quarters to make up the missing squares and used what was left from those for the binding? That'd only cost around eleven bucks...

I need to piece some blocks and see how much I really like this quilt.

More than half of the Simple Pleasures blocks are done and I've had a chance to lay them out. My concerns about this quilt are rapidly disappearing. The only one left now is how I'm going to quilt it!



As great as that is, it's left me without a leaders/enders project, which is slightly annoying. I've got a thousand or so two inch squares that need to be randomly sewn together for a quilt I fell in love with and then abandoned a couple of years ago, and the best part of using leaders and enders is that they help you slog through endless piecing like that, but I keep losing the bits I've sewn.

I'm looking for a container with a lid that'll sit next to my sewing machine and keep them together. I actually bought one at Walmart last week, but when I made it to Target without kids yesterday, I checked out their plastic storage stuff.

They had the perfect little storage thingie, with three compartments that snapped one on top of the other so I could've kept the squares in one and the pieced units in the others. It was only three-fifty.

I don't have one sitting by my sewing machine.

Because I stepped to one side to see if it came in different colors and got distracted by the flat plastic bins that are just a hair smaller than the twelve-inch square containers I use for current projects and less than half the price.



I bought half a dozen of the big plastic containers when they were on sale at Thanksgiving and thought at the time I had more than I needed. Once I realized how wrong I was, I couldn't find any more good sales on them.

These little boxes have enough room for a magazine or book and whatever else I need to keep together as long as the blocks aren't huge. I really need to go back to Target and pick up a few more -- and the neat little thing with the snap compartments -- before they get rid of the college stuff.

I've also decided that those Zip Loc Big Bags are perfect when I have to lug quilts around to use the long arm or play show and tell. Why it took me so long to figure that out, since I've been using them for yarn for ages, I don't know.

binding and binding and binding

At five-thirty this morning, the printer started running. I thought the cat had stepped on the copy button or something, but it seems to have spat out an ad for HP products all by itself.

I couldn't go back to sleep, so I slipped out of bed and headed for the dining room to cut the binding for Birds in the Air before the house got too warm to use the iron. Got that cut and pressed and some more 2 1/2" squares for Simple Pleasures cut, and no one else in the house had surfaced yet, so I decided to take the risk that the noise of my sewing machine would wake someone up.

I got the borders machine sewn onto the bird quilt, AND the teapot quilt, AND Dot to Dot before Quinn finally bounded out into the kitchen a few minutes after nine, followed by the rest of them. That was my quilting goal for the entire day!

Dot to Dot and the teapot quilt have been sitting quilted but unbound for months because I couldn't figure out which fabric to use. Then, a couple of days ago, I went up to the sewing room to get backing for my rail fence and absolutely perfect fabric choices, fabrics that won't work in anything else I'm doing or plan on doing, were staring right at me.





I've got so much binding to hand stitch! And it just hit me yesterday that every quilt on that looooong list of WIPs is going to go into this same pile. Judy sent me a great link to a tutorial for doing it by machine, but my last attempt at that was such a disaster I'm not trying again until I have a quilt I'm willing to take chances with. In the meantime, I'm telling myself that a stack of quilts ready for the hand stitching is better than a stack of quilts waiting for me to cut and machine stitch the bindings so I can get to the hand stitching.

Dad has always been tremendously supportive of Mom's hobbies and mine. He's the one who bought my Janome as a Christmas present when I already had a working machine packed away someplace.

Yesterday, he went above and beyond by offering to take all four kids -- including the four year old who has been an absolute screaming terror for the past couple of weeks -- to the park so that I could quilt Birds in the Air. It's the first time he's taken all of them anywhere, so I had my fingers crossed that they wouldn't drive him nuts before I could get the quilt done.

On a good day, they'd all play happily and my daughter would keep the little ones corralled and they'd just need an adult there because kids can't play at the park alone. It hadn't started out as a good day, so I wasn't optimistic.

But Grandpa did it! I hear there was one tantrum, but he survived it.



It is SO much easier to get good results without a preschooler wrapped around each ankle. I always had a hunch that it would be, but this was my first chance to actually try it.

Birds in the Air is one of the tops that I've been hesitant to quilt because I was afraid to ruin it. I've been waiting until I got more practice, but while I wait the pile of "too good to learn on" quilts grows...

I'm so glad I took the plunge with this one. The quilting is exactly what I wanted it to be, better than the triangles or the applique!

I know exactly which quilt I want to throw on the long arm next, but it's going to be at least a couple of weeks before Mom's schedule and mine mesh again. While I wait, I've got the rail fence (another "too good" top) pin basted and ready for another attempt at meandering on the Janome. I'm getting a little better at that.

I've tackled the list! Two sides of the Weed Whacker are sewn down. I got the background of the little chicken wall hanging pieced and the bits of wool felt cut out. I also got the baby cat quilt finished --- not as nicely as I'd hoped, but it's done. I'm not sure if done really is better than perfect in this case, but I'm not trying to pick out the quilting and redo it.



I was going to start quilting Layered Squares the other night when I went over to keep a friend company while she started a new project, but it turned out that the yellow and white gingham I'd planned on using was really nasty. I don't know if I'd never looked at it closely, or if I'd hated the quilt so much I didn't care how bad the fabric was, but when I finally got ready to pin, I couldn't make myself do it. So my friend and I went shopping and now I've got a very nice purple and white print to use.

And I've got a date with the long arm later this week -- hopefully Birds in the Air will be ready for binding soon!

mustn't start anything new....mustn't start anything new...mustn't start anything new....

That's the mantra over at Stashbusters these days, and although I'm not sure I agree with it, it might just be possible that I should come up with my own variation. While Bill was in Safeway picking up some stuff for dinner and I was stuck in the car with the kids (because sometimes it really is much faster to do it that way than for all of us to go in and trek through the store)I made a list of my WIPs. Not UFOs, projects that I'm really working on and expect to finish. Just the ones that I could list without really thinking too hard.

There are twenty five of them.

That might actually be a lot.

Weed Whacker -- needs binding sewn down

Bento Box -- blocks need to be sewn into a top

Simple Pleasures -- lots of piecing left to do - but the snowballs are done!

Lover's Knot -- 250 blocks left to piece

Courthouse Steps -- I've been cutting strips, but not started piecing

Chicken Kit -- gotta make sure there's enough wool

Bagsket

Dino Quilt -- need to piece back and quilt

Cat Baby Quilt -- need to quilt and bind

rail fence -- need to quilt

layered squares -- need to quilt

red quilt -- finish last six blocks and assemble

scrappy cats -- more blocks to piece

lattice strippy -- 13 more blocks

cat bed -- quilt and figure out zipper

flower baskets -- lots of applique

A's Scrappy Mountains Majesty -- sew down binding

my own Scrappy Mountains Majesty -- quilt

Dot to Dot -- choose fabric for binding

Tea Pots -- choose fabric for binding

Leif's Snails -- quilt

Cheery Buzzsaws

Glittering Gems -- quilt

Blue Bargello -- Quilt

Birds in the Air -- Quilt

North Pacific

And, as if that wasn't bad enough, there's another list of projects I can't wait to start, which I probably can scrounge up the fabric for. (Aren't scrappy quilts wonderful!)I might feel guiltier if I hadn't just finished three other projects.

So my thought is that if I try to finish at least one project from the list each week (based on my husband's weekly work schedule, not the actual calendar that the rest of the world follows), I can start new things from my stash without guilt.

Even keeping it up for ten weeks would make a huge dent in the list. Not counting whatever new projects I add while I'm at it!

Although I love the way that snowball blocks look in finished quilts, I'm not all that excited about piecing them. My latest pet project needed eighty.

Eighty is a lot of something you don't really want to piece. The corners snag on my quarter inch foot. But if I use the foot that doesn't snag, I can't alternate the corners with other things. But, as of tonight, I don't have to worry about that until I decide to make another quilt with snowballs.

Because my eighty blocks are done. Now I've got to piece together about seven hundred little 2 1/2" squares to make the sashing that goes between the snowballs. Sound like excellent leaders and enders to anyone else?

I laid a few out to see if it was really going to look anything like I had pictured in my mind. Controlled scrappy quilts still make me a bit nervous, especially when I have firm ideas about how I want them to turn out.

I think I've got what I wanted --



And I know I've got what I wanted here --



Last night, I cut the last of the fabric for my Bento Box and got the lights and darks paired together. Tonight, I sewed the last twenty blocks. And, given my recent track record, I had to lay them all out to reassure myself that I'd counted right and that I really did have all sixty-four.

I'm torn between the urge to assemble the top right now and getting it quilted as soon as humanly possible and my reluctance to sew the blocks together because then the layout will be permanent and there's no more shifting things around. I'm also not sure what I want to back it with. Unlike most of my other quilts, this one is mostly quilt shop fabric. Maybe I should try to find some nice (and affordable) fabric for the back.

I tried piecing letters today, inspired by the fantastic ones at Lazy Gal Quilting. Doesn't that Halloween sounds quilt make you wannt to start one of your own? There are some directions for pieced letters here.

Just the thought of machine quilting has been making me skittish. Using the machine at all makes me a bit nervous. Not enough to keep me from quilting, but still -- I guess piecing the tip of your little finger back together with steri-strips will do that to you.

My quilting opportunities have been too limited to give up, but I'm very aware of that rapidly moving needle and what it's going to do to me if I don't keep my fingers out of the way. I've never had to concentrate on that quite so much. (On the bright side, my two preschoolers have received a very graphic illustration of how the sewing machine can hurt you and why they should never touch it. Leif was helping me sew this morning by standing there and reminding me not to sew my little finger again.)

I'm not sure if my new semi-phobia had anything to do with it, but assembling the blocks of my Weed Whacker took a lot longer than I expected it to. The blocks weren't going together quite right (my blocks rarely do), and I had a feeling that I was going to wind up trashing the whole thing. That feeling's been with me through most of this quilt.

It took two nights to get it sewn together and then I decided to pin baste it while I still felt the slightest glimmer of hope. It looked good, but the thing wasn't anywhere near flat. (Most of my quilts aren't.)

I got a sheet from the sewing room that I thought wouldn't clash too horribly, and some of the polyester batting I bought on sale a while back, and my pins, and crawled around on the floor. And it came together. It smoothed out enough to make me content and the backing actually went with the front, and the next thing I knew I was clearing off the table around my sewing machine and looking for my darning foot.

I did half of the quilting last night and the rest this morning. I'm not about to show it to any experienced machine quilters for fear that they'd laugh at me -- or try to convince me to rip it out and do it again -- but it's so much better than my last attempt I can't believe it.

I decided to use the leftover sheet for the binding and got that cut and machine stitched on and it's all ready for me to snuggle up and do some hand-stitching.

I think I've been afraid that if I turned my back on this one, it was going to fall apart on me. (I really thought I'd wind up tying the thing and shoving it into the boys' room where I could pretend it didn't exist.) Now that it's done, I'm almost giddy.

I liked this Mountain Mist batting more than I expected to. Not as much as Warm and Natural, which I absolutely love, but it's considerably cheaper and if I'm making utility quilts for the kids out of scraps, it'll work. As long as it holds up in the wash.

Now I've got a stack of other tops that I'm dying to get quilted, but I should probably make some more progress on the sewing room excavation.

I am so in love with this quilt that I've even lost my bitterness about the selvedge bag with no selvedges in it. I might've made a Bento Box if that hadn't happened, but it wouldn't be this one. And I really really like this one.



I think it'll be done soon, but I'm not in a big hurry. I'm having too much fun watching the fabrics come together into blocks to rush.

I do want to rush Simple Pleasures, because I don't have enough faith that it's going to come out the way it looks in my head.

And I want to get started on North Pacific.

A few weeks ago, I was blindsided by an ad in one of my new quilting magazines -- you know, that sudden urge to grab the car keys and head out the door to search for that particular yarn or fabric or magazine or piece of wood from Home Depot. I rarely -- more like never ever -- have that reaction to quilt shop fabric. But the ad for Moda Shirtings 1875-1900 got me.

I'd been wanting shirtings ever since I read Scraps and Shirttails, even without Moda trying to seduce me into the fabric shop with descriptions of "Kittens, dogs, horses heads, sewing tools such as thimbles, needles moving thru fabric..." Actually, I'm more tempted by the ad copy than the fabric in the line. And just look at the log cabin border on that quilt in the picture!

Turns out that the line isn't even available yet, or wasn't when I was keeping an eye open for it on that shop hop with my best friend. But I did find a fat sixteenth of a needle moving through fabric. That little piece has already been incorporated into the Bento Box and is one of my favorite prints in the whole quilt so far.

That North Pacific quilt absolutely demands white fabric with little blue or black prints on it. Joann's doesn't have anything even remotely appropriate. I've got a few suitable fabrics in my stash, but not nearly enough.

It was exactly the wrong time for Moda to be tempting me with something that would be absolutely perfect if it wasn't so pricey. Aren't I lucky that those fabrics don't seem to be available quite yet?

And aren't I lucky that I saw the discussion of Whittle's Fabrics when it happened on Quilting on a Budget not long ago? THEY have shirtings, which I like better than the ones in the Moda collection, and which are four bucks a yard.

I am completely in love. I want to roll around in this fabric. I want to order lots of the other fabrics on their site. (It's a bit harder to have self control when the fabric is so gorgeous and so affordable.) But I'll try to finish a few projects first and have faith that they'll still be there and have pretty stuff when it's time to shop again.

We did some thrift store shopping with Grandma yesterday and I found a perfect sheet to use for the back of Simple Pleasures. And another perfect vintage sheet that had to stay at the thrift shop because it was full of cigarette holes. At least I saw them before I bought it.

Quilting on a Budget is giving away the Quiltopoly board game. Wouldn't that be fun to win?

the excavation continues

I'm slowly sifting through the mounds of fabric and patterns and half finished projects that've accumulated in the corner of the dining room. No one else can tell by looking, but I'm making progress.

The last few blocks for the cat bed are pieced and the leftover strings are put away with the rest of my strings.

I sorted through my piles of potential Bento Box fabrics and cut what I had, then counted to see what I still need. Only two darks and seven lights, and I'm optimistic that I can pull those from my stash.

I emptied out a storage box for the pieced sections Simple Pleasures and sorted my light and dark squares into a box that's within easy reach for leaders and enders.


But my happiest accomplishment for today is redoing the quilt ladder. It's been buried in lace shawls ever since Grandpa made it for me. This morning, the lace went up to my sewing room and the quilt tops came down. THESE are the ones I'm waiting to quilt on Mom's longarm. The ones I keep almost forgetting because there's always another quilt top I've finished or want to finish.

I hope that having them right there in front of me will motivate me to schedule some time to go up and quilt them. It's not all of the tops, not by a long stretch. Sparkling Gems should be there (it's hiding behind the log cabin), but as much as I love that quilt top, it looks awful folded and hanging on the ladder and the goal here is to encourage myself.

My deal with myself was that if I stayed strictly no-buy (which I haven't managed), I could start as many new projects as I wanted. So I've been starting new projects right and left and have a dozen or so more that I want to start.

That'd be fine if I hadn't done a hurried clean up of my sewing area and totally lost track of what I was working on and where it all was. I've got a scary mess on my hands, which I decided to tackle last night.

I assembled the pink and blue applique cat blocks into a top and went out to the sewing room to find something to use for the backing. I've got some big hunks of pink and blue gingham, but since I don't like gingham and didn't want to deal with it, they're deliberately buried.

I did find a huge length of soft yellow stuff that would work great, and another top for a baby quilt that I wanted to finish. A little quick outlining around the pinwheel shapes, fold the backing around to the front and sew it down as a binding...

It all seemed like a quick and easy finish until I was fighting to get the quilt turned around a tight corner and hit the foot pedal before I got my little finger out of the way. It's been almost twenty years since I machine stitched my own finger, and I'd forgotten how gruesome and painful the results are.

A couple of hours, some butterfly bandages and a bit of Neosporin later, I worked up the nerve to go check on the quilt, if only to make sure there wasn't a bit of broken needle unaccounted for. I don't know how it didn't get bled on, but it was like I'd just got up to take a break.

My finger had mostly stopped throbbing, so I sat back down and got the rest of the quilting and the binding done. I've had so little quilting time lately that I'm not going to give up any good opportunities.



And, since it was only midnight, I finished hand stitching the binding on this one:



I still think I made a mess of it, but it'll make a serviceable baby quilt for some little guy. I've just gotta find one whose mother can appreciate flawed utility quilts.

Now that I've found my new packages of safety pins, I've got two more baby quilts to get pinned and ready for quilting.

And this one, which is going to be for Leif's bed --



I can't get over how much nicer it looks with the borders on. Wide borders don't usually appeal to me, but I love these. Now I've just got to figure out the best way for me to quilt them.

Does having two new FOs count if those projects weren't contributing to the chaos? I did find the blocks for the cat bed so I can work on that tonight. Then I can put away the strings that I've been trying to keep separate for that project.

Today was errand day and we were on the road for hours. I really didn't think I'd get it all done, but the kids are signed up for the library summer reading club, the mail's been picked up, groceries bought, karate classes taken... and even though I had to double back to the house because I'd forgotten the torn couch cushions and the pharmacy filled our prescriptions at the wrong location so I had to drive across town an extra time, I'm feeling pretty cheerful.

The apron book I've had reserved at the library came in and most of the patterns (except for my absolute favorite) only call for a yard of fabric. I've got some cute one yard cuts of fabric!

I ducked into Joann's for the new issue of Quiltmaker because I wanted to check out Bonnie Hunter's new mystery and absolutely fell in love with the cover quilt. It's got curves. And I really really like Dusky Meadows, which strikes me as very Bento Boxy. I'm thinking Halloween prints, because I've got a ton of those.

There's a new Knitty, and the patterns actually loaded on my computer. I've gotta make The Deadliest Crab. Because that's what you do after you knit a disappointing lobster, isn't it? And a Trilobite hat for one of the boys. If I had a little girl, I'd be knitting Elenka I think I've got some pink cotton that was going to be an apron....maybe I could knit one for charity? And there's Kingdom, a gorgeous pair of cabled gloves. And Treetop Socks, a cabled pair of kneehighs that makes me drool. And Outside In, another pair of gorgeous socks.

Now I've gotta put the couches back together and start some laundry. Hopefully my energy will hold out a bit longer and I can do a few more string blocks.

This afternoon, while I was trying to pretend that I thought my noisy little boys were actually taking a nap, I played with strings.



Yes, I've already got a scary number of UFOs, but I wanted to play with something that didn't matter. And I was pleasantly surprised when I laid the blocks out on the floor to see if I had a disaster or the beginning of a baby blanket.

There are several more big pieces of solid fabric in my sewing room, so this may be the first in a batch of baby quilts.