Happy New Year!

New Year's Resolution #1:  Blog at least once a month!  I definitely get the Bad Blogger Award this month.  I just realized I haven't blogged since Halloween.  Guess I missed Thanksgiving and Christmas entirely.  We did all the correct activities - I just didn't plan ahead enough to take pictures and blog about it.   I think we'll just start with some New Year's Plans!

My first plan is to participate in Patchwork Times' 2012 UFO Challenge.  The list of 12 UFOs is listed in my sidebar.  I'm really looking forward to Judy's challenge, and am working diligently on Item #5 for January.  It's a wool project and not quilting, so I hope that's not cheating!

I also joined the Orca Bay bandwagon (a little late).  Progress is being made, but it won't be done anytime soon.  There is a lot of piecing in this one!  This is the first time I've done one of Quiltville's mysteries, and it's been fun, but there just aren't enough hours in a day for everything.  I had never done string piecing before, so that was fun to learn.  This whole quilt is being made from stash fabrics, and it doesn't appear to have made a dent, so maybe a few more scrap quilts would be in order for 2012! 

This bunny table mat is finally finished!  Maybe I should say it's for THIS Easter and it's already finished.  The picture at the top of the post is my December banner from Primitive Gathering's Banner of the Month.  My goal is to get each month's banner done before I get the next one - we'll see how that goes!

We've had great weather this winter - warmer than normal and no snow.  Lots of Wisconsinites complain about the lack of snow, but I've really been enjoying it.  It would be OK to get one big snowfall so we could all ski and snowshoe, but I'm really fine with no snow, too! 

Time to get back to working on UFO #5!

Happy Halloween!!

Halloween is celebrated the Sunday before Halloween in our area, so today is the day. Our trick-or-treaters have already been by, and there's still lots of candy left. I don't know if that's good or not!

My Halloween decorating became extra fun this year when I won a giveaway from Brynwood Needleworks!  Donna sent this fun embroidered pillow, along with several other goodies.  I just love my new pillow - Donna's work is so nicely finished.  This pillow has ties on the back so that I can slip out the pillow form and store the cover easily.  I'm going to start making my pillows this way - that would certainly cut down on the storage area needed.  Anyway, thanks for picking my name, Donna!

The only finish I have to show is the the Flip Flop Tablemat that is finally done.  I'm ready for next summer's decorating!  We have a long winter to get through first, but at least we didn't get the storm yesterday.  Our fall weather has been great.

The finishing kit for the Primitive Gatherings Block of the Week arrived yesterday, so I've been working on that.  This project may take the rest of the winter - there are a lot of little pieces to it.  It will be a fun project to finish.

Have a Happy Halloween!

Still Here!

This has been a very busy summer and fall - I can't believe it's been over two months since I've blogged!  Plenty has been going on.  I guess I've just been too busy to write about it.

My son's going-to-college quilt got finished, a couple weeks ahead of schedule, even!  It's all music-themed - mostly black and white notes, instruments, etc.  If you're ever looking for a specific fabric, I can recommened Equilter.com.  They had a great selection of black and white prints for this quilt.  No affiliation - I just liked their selection and service.  I also made a pillowcase and two throw pillows to match the quilt.  I'm looking forward to seeing this quilt on his dorm bed!  We moved him in, but left before the room was put together.

And I finally finished my Primitive Gatherings 2009 Block of the Week quilt:

I really like how it turned out, but the white daisies really jump out at me.  Do you think some instant antique would fix that?  My version of the quilt is the wool on cotton one.  The 2011 BOW blocks are finished, and I'm anxiously awaiting the finishing kit for them.  The 2010 BOW blocks are also done, and waiting for inspiration on how to finish them!

Today, while the weather is beautiful outside, I sat on the deck and put the finishing touches on four mini table mats.

The acorns and sheep are from the Mat of the Month club at Primitive Gatherings (can you tell I'm a Primitive Gatherings groupie?)  The other two are Bareroots patterns.  All of these mats are about 8" across.  These have been in various stages of completion for awhile, so it feels good to get them done. 

Our weather has been outstanding here!  It's been sunny and high 70s all last week, and the trees are beautiful.  We'd better enjoy it, because the leaves are falling off the trees and I'll be whining about snow soon enough.

Thanks for stopping by!  I promise I'll get back to blogging more regularly.

Hands2Help Update!

It's time to reveal our quilts made in the Hands2Help project.  The quilt I made from the fabrics received from my swap partner is this one:

The fabric had cute turtles, frogs and caterpillars, which I fussy cut and added borders around for the blocks.  The outer border is a border print from the same fabric line.  This quilt is much cuter than the picture shows!

I also sent two additional charity quilts to Green Fairy Quilts.  These blocks started out to be a full-size  quilt, and I don't even remember now what the pattern was supposed to be, but somewhere along the way the plan changed, and they are now two lap-size quilts.

I'm looking forward to hearing about the trip Judi and Clint take to distribute these quilts in Romania!  I hope we can do this project next year - it was a lot of fun.  Thanks, Sarah, for getting this all organized and getting us all together for this project.

Vegetables, Dogs, and a BOW

Those are my excuses for not posting for a whole month!  I can explain...




Vegetables -  This year I joined a Community Supported Agriculture deal at a farm near here.  The way this CSA works is that you pay a certain amount of money at the beginning of the season, and they deliver a box of vegetables each week for 12 weeks.  You are taking a little bit of a risk because what you get depends a lot on the weather and what they are able to grow.  I only bought a half-share, and despite the lousy growing season here, I have been up to my elbows in vegetables for the last six weeks.  We've had arugula, broccoli, kohlrabi, kale, garlic in various forms, several different types of lettuce, radishes, carrots, fennel, zucchini, beans, beets, potatoes, popcorn, strawberries, spinach, basil, parsley, and a bunch of things I've left out.  I joined this so I would be forced to try some different vegetables and get out of my comfort zone cooking-wise.   I have and I am, and nobody in my family has moved out.  Yet.  If I give them one more salad, they may!  Tonight we had a neat kale salad from a recipe I found here.  It was good, but I'm not sure I'm totally into kale yet.  We'll probably move on to okra or something this week anyway.

Dogs - I've been spending a lot of time with Holly.  We finished our obedience class and are now enrolled in a beginning flyball class.  We're having fun with it, and she's the star of the class in my biased opinion.  Of course, her classmates are two poodles who won't fetch, and another dog who has yet to come to class.  If you don't know what flyball is, Youtube has some good videos.  My goal is for us to be like the ones in the Crufts championships LOL.  It's good exercise for her and she seems to have fun with it.  We've been walking three times a day, too, so we're both getting a lot of exercise.




BOW - My other time-consuming summer activity is the Block of the Week from Primitive Gatherings.  I love it this year, and I'm keeping up...pretty well.  The first six blocks are done, block seven will be done this weekend, and block eight just arrived today.  Sitting on the deck and working on these blocks is a big part of my summer, but it's been so hot I've mostly been inside with the AC on lately.  I can't wait for the weather to cool off a little bit.

I've also made some charity quilts this summer, but I'll post about those next week when we have the Big Reveal.

Hope you're all having a nice summer.  If you don't hear from me again, that means the vegetables did me in.  Is there such a thing as vegetable poisoning?

Middle of June Already???

Wow, I can't believe it's already the middle of June!  I sure haven't been posting much lately, have I?

Well, I have a good excuse.  Seven weeks ago we adopted a new dog, a 10-month-old English Shepherd named Holly. 

She's a very nice dog, but needed quite of bit of training, so we had a six-week obedience class which we completed Saturday.  Here's her graduation picture

She even got to wear the hat.  It used to have a tassel, but some previous wearer chewed it off - LOL.  I'm having a lot of fun with her, but a new dog is really time-consuming.  She and the cat are still not best friends, but we're working on it. 

Not too much quilting has been going on in the last few weeks, but I did finish Town Square and sent it off to a friend.

The colors didn't come out too nicely in this picture, but this was made with the Lovely fabric line from Sandy Gervais.  It reminded me of a beach vacation with the turquoise and peach colors. 

So that is about the extent of my quilting lately!  I joined the Block of the Week from Primitive Gatherings, so I've been stitching on the first couple of blocks of it.  I'll post pictures when I get a few blocks done.

Hope everyone is having a nice spring.  It has been beautiful in Wisconsin the last few days. 

Hands2Help Update

A little quilting has been going on at Troublesome Creek Quilts!  Not too much, since spring is finally here and flowers need to be planted, but I have made some progress on my Hands2Help quilt.

The top is finished, and it's ready to be basted and quilted, which will hopefully happen yet this holiday weekend.

The fabric Joy sent to me was very cute, so I fussy-cut the little animals for the blocks.

I found some border print from the same line of fabric, so I'm really happy with how this turned out.  The quilt is about 60" square.

Hope everyone is having a great Memorial Day weekend!