Here we go again...

The once emptied basket is now full again. This time all the quilts were started in this decade!
Eight quilts tops ready and waiting to be quilted. These are tops that I made in the last 3-4 months. They are all now sandwiched and pinned.

I LOVE starting a new quilt.

I LOVE selecting fabrics and making a plan.

I LOVE seeing how that plan changes as I get into it.

I LOVE seeing it all come together.

That is where the love affair is put on hold because I don't LOVE to quilt them. I have a new machine with a bigger throat, which makes it much easier, but still not fun to me. Thank goodness that I also LOVE hand stitching my binding or I might not ever make it through the quilting stage.

Reality Check...

I hadn't made a baby quilt for a while and had also been thinking about making a word quilt recently. Then I got a great bag of scraps at our MplsMQG scrap-bag-swap the other night (thanks Karen!) and this is what happened...

Not sure where it will end up, but I hope that some new parent with a sense of humor will appreciate it.

Something new...to me at least.

I belong to the Minneapolis Modern Quilt Guild and we have been doing a block lotto for the last few meetings. It has been so fun to try out new things that I wouldn't ordinarily have tried. This month we are each contributing a string block. I had to do a little googling to get a handle on exactly what that was. I found this great tutorial to get me started.

I dug out a bag of OLD scraps and got after it. I have never paper-pieced before, so that was an interesting process in itself.

One suggestion from the tutorial was to shorten the stitch length to make the paper more perforated in order to remove it more easily. Removing the paper was not necessarily difficult, just fussy. I tend to like my gratification to be more immediate, but the added time to remove the paper was balanced out by the preciseness and stability of my block.

The finished block...may not be perfect, but it sure was fun. Not too sure that I will be making 20 of these for a whole quilt, but I see a string block pillow or two in my future.

One Man's Trash...

..is someone else's treasure. A while back, I was walking my kids to school and it was garbage day! There was a pile of stuff at the curb of a house that had just sold, so of course we started digging through it. The kids scored a fabulous rock collection, very fancy labeled rocks. And I scored this treasure packed box of goodies. I have always wanted a gromet tool and there were two different sizes in there, along with lots of gromets. I also found a classic metal seam gauge, just like the one Grandma Tag had back in the day. I couldn't have been more excited, and my girls learned to dumpster dive. A lifelong skill!

A winner!

Well, It was so great to hear about all of your completed and in-progress goals. Very inspiring! My new mini-goal is to figure out how to get the random number generator image to upload to my blog post... I gave it a good effort and have decided that you will just have to trust me that the winner of the Moda bag is lucky #8 who commented...

lroghair/lparksJan 27, 2012 01:19 PM

Good job on completing your quilt!! I'm glad I found your blog. I'm in Mpls area too!! Always good to find another quilter in Mpls/St Paul. Other people have pointed out that it's Dell Fabrics. I'm working on completing a bunch of projects and admittedly, I started another one today instead. Oops! I call it ADHD quilting. Can't complete one project before moving on!! :)