It really seemed like I made more socks. but I guess five pair is pretty good. The ones in the middle took the longest because I kept putting them down. I think because the yarn was so plain compared to my other sock yarns and it was a little boring to work on them. Still, they are one of my favorites to wear. Nice and warm.

Here are the quilty things. Not all are totally finished, but at least the tops are pieced.

Here is a close up of the very last thing I made in 2011:

My friend, Sharon G. came over last week and brought most of the fabric and the batting and the pattern for this gorgeous bag. it is larger than the one I have been carrying and I think I am going to really like it.

Ok, that’s it for 2011. Let’s see what 2012 will bring.

Happy New Year!

Here’s an excerpt:

A New York City subway train holds 1,200 people. This blog was viewed about 4,700 times in 2011. If it were a NYC subway train, it would take about 4 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

I have been working on things, but mostly things I can’t show here yet (you know, because of the upcoming holiday).  One thing I can show you is the result of a wonderful workshop we had at Crazy Quilter’s guild on the mariners compass.  I have dabbled with paper piecing before, and this time I really ‘got it.’ Our instructor was Cheryl Smith, and she explained and demonstrated the technique so well that I managed to make a sample section in the workshop. Then I went home and over the next couple days I pieced my first compass.  I used Christmassy fabrics for this one, and am very happy with the result. Here is the picture:

It is about 26″ square and will be a nice little wall hanging or table topper. I doubt if I will have it quilted in time for this Christmas, but maybe by 12/2012.

I also worked on one of the brown bag round robin quilts, but can’t show you that, either. Oh, and I made a big tote bag for my friend Lynn and gave it to her when we were up north for Thanksgiving, but somehow I never got a picture of it.

Our artificial tree came out of the box yesterday and perhaps today we will get the lights and ornaments on it.  I have a new ornament this year — a “see rock city” birdhouse — that I can’t wait to hang on it.  If I don’t post again this year, have a wonderful Christmas.

My Crazy Quilters guild started a brown bag row robin at the October meeting. Each participant makes a center block for a quilt and puts it in a brown bag along with any fabrics or embellishments they thing might coordinate. Then the bags get swapped out and whoever receives the block designs and adds a border for the center block. Then that gets put back in the bag and is passed on to the next participant until everyone in the group has added a border.

All the center blocks were shows at the meeting, but after that the work will be done in secret until the end. Here is the block I made for my center:

I used one of my dyed fabrics for the background. The flower and leaves are fused and machine stitched down.

And here is the one I swapped it for:

Pretty isn’t it? And so appropriate for the season. I finished my border for this block yesterday, but sadly I can’t show you for a few months. I hope you can bear the suspense. I am full of anticipation to see how my little sunflower comes out.

That about winds up October.

I have to go shopping for more sock yarn before I can start another pair. In the meantime, I have some cotton yarn which I am knitting dishcloths out of.

I am in the process of recovering the little ironing board that I take to classes with some new silver fabric. Maybe it won’t get as scorched as the last one.  I also plan on recovering the big ironing board that stays in the studio, too.  Happy Trick or Treat day.

I am very pleased with these pieces, although I don’t know if I will want to cut into some of them because they are just too pretty.

A couple of my experiments didn’t turn out as expected, but I still learned a lot for next time. The picture with the rusty looking fabric is one example. I used a couple pieces of muslin that I had rust-dyed a couple years ago hoping that over-dying them would improve their look. I twisted both pieces in the nautilus pattern and dipped one side of each into a dye. One was a brown and I think you can see the brown spiral, but faintly. The other piece, I dipped in yellow, and it seems to have blended in with the rust colors too well.

The bright yellow one next to the rusty ones was suppose to be much lighter and kind of marbled looking, but the dye was stronger than we thought.

There are also four pieces with almost no color on them and that is exactly what I wanted. They will be good backgrounds for applique. In fact, I used one of them already. I can’t show it to you right now because it is part of a round robin with my Crazy Quilters guild and is suppose to stay secret till all the rounds are done.

I put together a couple cuddle quilts for Choo Choo Quilters. Some of us members got together one Saturday and stitched like crazy.  Here are a couple I pieced from kits put together from blocks we all made as homework. I like the contrasting values.

More of the same blocks, different layout. What a dramatic difference. Both of these quilts are sandwiched and ready to quilt.

This one is also from blocks we made as homework. I made all these and got to put them together at the cuddle quilt workshop. I love all the browns and how the wild animal print goes perfectly as sashing and border. This one is quilted and turned in. I hope the kid who gets it likes wild animals.

This is the last of my puppy panel fabric. I had just enough to make a quilt for each of my three guilds. This one went to Choo Choo.

This is a little block I made for Raymond for his birthday this month. It is a moon over the mountain block, but I used a brick like fabric and shaded it with crayon to make it look more like a pyramid. He hasn’t decided where to hang it yet, but I think he liked it. It is about 16 or 18″ square.

This is a little bag I made to carry at the East Cobb County Quilt Show this month. It was a wonderful show. I wanted a small bag that would just hold my essentials: keys, money, phone and camera. The pattern is sometimes called origami bag or sometimes called folded pocket purse. I learned how to make it via Seaside Stitchers in Florida. I made the strap long enough to go over my shoulder across my body so I could have my hands free. I used the latest fabric I bought at Sew Bee It. It has cute little buttons and stitching comments on it.  It worked perfectly.

I finally finished these socks. Seems like I have been working on them all summer. They will be nice and warm. I like the tweedy yarn, although it did seem kind of boring without any stripes. Maybe that is why it took so long to finish them.

In this picture one looks larger, but I think it is just because I had been trying it on more than the other so it is a little stretched out. It will go back to shape once it is washed.

I used a different technique on these socks. I saw a tutorial on Melody Johnson’s blog called  an “afterthought heel’ and decided to give it a try.  What you do is knit all the sock top to toe as a tube. Where the heel is supposed to go, you stitch in a couple of rows of waste yarn, and after the sock is done, you take out the waste yarn and put those stitches back on needles and knit a heel kind of like knitting the toe section. I will put Melody’s blog on my list of links and you can go search up afterthought heel and see what I mean. It was pretty easy, but I think I will stick with the regular way for now.

So, I finished those socks because I wanted to get working on my next pair. I got this beautiful yarn last time I was at Sew Bee It and wanted to see how the different colors would stitch out. I did this much in a day. Wow that was a lot of knitting. Then I noticed that I had too many stitches on and decided to take it out and start over.

I also decided to try knitting a simple pattern into the leg portion of the sock – a basket-weave pattern where you knit 4, purl 4 for four rows then purl 4, knit 4 for four rows.  I had thought that would look good in the previous pair of socks. Since they look kind of like a solid, I thought the pattern would make them more interesting, but I didn’t want to unstitch as much as I had done at the time of the idea.

When the new sock had gotten to the point that I noticed my error in the number of stitches on the needles (how I managed not to notice that for so long is a mystery), and I knew I had to unstitch it and start over anyway, I had seen enough of the stockinette pattern to know it would look good with the basket-weave. So, I decided to give it a try. And I am very happy with the result.

See the difference? I really like it. And I got so carried away with the pattern, that I finished one whole sock in about 4 days!  The rows of color are very interesting.  I have about 1/2″ of the cuff done for sock #2, too!

The bands of color are so wide though, that I don’t know if I can get them the same on both socks. I pulled out enough yarn to start with the bright pink at the top of the second one, but I don’t know if it will shade into that dark blue or go to the purple next.  Or, it may do something else entirely too.  I guess they will be fine however they come out.  They will be fun to wear, that’s for sure.

Here is a 10 minute block quilt I am working on for Chattanooga Quilters charity, Ronald McDonald House. It needs a back and quilted.

And Finally, although not quilt related, we saw Alton Brown at the Chattanooga Market last weekend. He was hosting a cook-off between local chefs. This is before the contest when he was signing autographs. We didn’t get one – the line was a hundred people long, and we didn’t stay for the cook-off, but it was fun to get a glimpse of him. He seems to have as much energy as he does on his TV show.

September is a wrap. I wonder what will show up here in October. I guess we will both have to check back to find out.

As you can see, I hunted up a few more things to put on the shelf, and hung up my ATCs (Artist’s Trading Cards) on a cord tied to the edge of the shelf with some tiny clothes pins. I think it is a perfect way to display them.

I haven’t made any ATC cards in quite a while, perhaps not since we moved here from Florida.  My crazy quilting group, Florida Seaside Stitchers, had an ATC swap, which is where I got most of these. Then later, I swapped with some of my Seaside Piecemaker friends and through a yahoo group just for ATC swaps. Some of my cards on display came from as far away as New Zealand and Australia.

This side view shows how the cord is tied to eye screws attached to the edge. It also shows how the curtain rod just sticks through one of the curlicues of the shelf bracket. Very simple.

Weed Whacker

This is a little quilt I put together from my bottomless supply of novelty print strips. It is a Bonnie Hunter design.   Now I have to get around to quilting it. It is going to Ronald McDonald house via Chattanooga Quilting Guild.

Remember Me

“Remember Me” is all together now. I spent the last couple days getting the final border on.  The pattern called for the border being all the same color of red, but I didn’t have a red that I liked enough to use that way.  Instead, I used some of all the fabrics in the applique to make a scrappy border. It was not as complicated as I had expected, and I am very happy with it. Now it will sit in the quilting pile with all its sister quilts waiting to be quilted.  Once completely finished, this quilt will hang on a wall in the house here somewhere. It hasn’t told me yet which wall. My friend, Sharon gave me the pattern and we have been working on it together, doing a block a month. Hers is nearing completion too. I can’t wait to see them together.

That’s about it for now. I have been knitting on the same pair of socks all summer. Hopefully, I will have them finished soon.

Oh and last Saturday I went to a cuddle quilt workshop with Choo Choo Guild. If you click on their blog link, you can see pictures. We had a lot of fun and got a lot of quilts put together.

I made myself a little roll up caddy to take applique blocks to groups when I want to work on them. This way, they won’t get wrinkled or big fold lines. Since I use a freezer paper method of applique, folding up a block can cause wrinkles that make it harder to manipulate the block while stitching on it.  The first picture shows it all rolled up.

This picture shows it unrolled with the outside showing, and the next one shows the inside. I put a piece of flannel on the inside. I used an orphan block from a Celtic applique class I took a while back and added a couple borders.

This one shows how it looks partly rolled up. I made a fabric tube kind of like a hanging sleeve on the one end and put an cardboard tube from a roll of shelf paper in it to stabilize the caddy. This is a smaller block, but I made the caddy big enough to hold my ‘pushing up spring’ blocks too.

Remember Me

I got the inner red border and a wider white border on the remember me blocks. Now I am working out the final border which I think I can make with flying geese units. Since I don’t have enough of any of the fabrics in the blocks to make a solid border, I am going to use little bits of all the fabrics used in the blocks and make it a little scrappy, but I think it will turn out looking pretty good. I have been experimenting with those one seam flying geese that I saw in the premier issue of Quilt Life magazine, and hope I can get them to come out right mathematically.

One Fabric / Green stripey quilt

I finally got the borders on this quilt top. It took a while to get up the courage to try mitered corners. They ended up going on quite easily once I got to it though. I think because I could just sew on the lines in the fabric.  I love how that red fabric frames all the rest of the blocks. Now I have to find a nice backing fabric for this and then I think I will have it quilted by a professional.

New Window Treatment

In the latest issue (October 2011) of American Patchwork and Quilting, there was an article about Monica Solorio-Snow’s studio and how she decorated it. You can go to thehappyzombie.com to find her blog and see her studio. She used lots of 30′s fabrics and it is very bright and cheerful.

I loved many of the little decorative things she has done, but what caught my eye the most was a little shelf she had put above the window.  I showed it to Raymond and we went right out looking for a shelf and brackets that would fit my window. We also got a wooden curtain rod which fits nicely through one of the curlicues in the bracket and I hung the valance that use to be in the kitchen on it. I plan on getting maybe a white lace valance one of these days, but in the mean time this is quite nice.

Monica had a little string of small quilted pennant triangles pinned to the edge of her shelf. That gave me an idea too. I am going to put some little eye-screws along the edge, run a cord through them and hang all my atc cards from it. I have a pack of tiny clothes pins to use to clip the cards to the cord. I think it will look great.  Here is a closer view. I will have to hunt around for more things to put on the shelf, too.

Ten Minute Runner

Last meeting at Crazy Quilter’s guild we had a demo on a ten minute table runner. I liked that idea a lot and the next day, I made one just to see how quick it was. I confess that I spent a bit more than ten minutes, but not much. It really was fast and easy. And it looks pretty cute.

That’s all for now.  Happy quilting, or whatever brings you joy.

I bet this one look familiar. This is the second one from this fabric. I have enough fabric for one mare after this.  I quilted this one last week at the Crazy Quilters sew-in for Project Linus. The third one will be for Choo Choo guild’s cuddle quilt program. It is just like the other one: same backing fabric, same puzzle quilting.

Not quilt related, but I just had to share. Raymond installed a beehive in the spring, and here he is with one of the honey-filled sections. His bees were so productive that was able to harvest some honey this year! Is that cool or what!

Here are some more cuddle quilt blocks.  These are a fun wonky nine patch. I made a mistake in the construction process, but I think they look good anyway. I cut some sashing strips from a wild animal print. I had enough of the animal print to make outer borders too. I think this will turn out to be a very nice quilt for some boy or girl.  I bagged up all the pieces to take to the Choo Choo cuddle quilt sew-in later this month.

I finished the last block for this little quilt. Once the blocks are sewn together there are a couple more little pieces to applique on the inside corners, then come the borders and quilting. This has been a fun little project so far.

I also managed a bit of knitting on my current pair of socks, but still have a long way to go on them so no pictures so far. So that wraps up another month. I wonder what next month will bring.

Here is the second block. I only had enough of this fabric to make four. They are really cute too.

Here they are squared up. 10.5″ again. still cute.

here is a picture of the bargello quilt from American Patchwork and Quilting magazine. Isn’t it beautiful? Those scallops on the side hang off the side of the bed. I’ve never made a quilt like this, but it seems possible so I am going to give it a try.

Finally, here is another finished quilt for Project Linus. I got the quilting finished and the binding on yesterday. The blocks were all drawn by kids and are cute all together.

That’s all for now. Oh, I got to visit a lovely quilt shop in Marietta GA: Little Quilts. It was a fun road trip and look what they had sitting by the front door of the shop:

A beehive bird feeder and an actual old time beehive.  The beehive is actually almost 2 foot tall. It is called a skep and is made kind of like weaving a basket. This gets me thinking of how cute it would be to have bee and beehive things around the house, kind of like I use to have black and white cows all over.  Since Raymond is so involved in having an actual beehive, it would be extra cool.