A quick hello!

I haven't posted in almost three weeks!  Wow.  Sorry about that.  We are in the process of moving and as you can imagine it is a lot of work.  Moving day is August 10th.  I have squeezed in a little sewing time but I didn't have any time left over for blogging.  A girl needs a break every once in awhile doesn't she?  And a little quilting time is the perfect way to relax.  

As for the move, we couldn't be more excited.  Its a much bigger place and closer in town.  Right now our morning commute to work is about 30 mins.  The move cuts it down to 5 minutes!  My work is a mile and a half away!  I can even go home for lunch!  Both of the kids schools are within walking distance.  My daughter's school is five driveways down the road.  And here is the part I am most excited about.  Our new place is an older New England style home and has two living rooms.  We are not a formal type of family so we don't need two.  So guess what that means!  One of them is going to be mine for sewing!  Ok.  Not the whole thing but most of it.  Its also going to be where we put the family computer and office area but its a huge improvement over what I have now.  

Anyway,  on to some sewing items!  The main thing I have been working on is the quilt along at the Quilting Gallery.  A block is released every Thursday and I have been trying to stay caught up on it.  This quilt is promised to my son for his new bedroom when it is done.

Week 3 block

Week four block

This is a mock up of what I have together so far.  One of the girls I am doing the quilt along with figured out how to do layouts like this with an app from Apple.  It is named Juxtaposer.  It is an amazing app.  I am going to use it for most of my quilt layouts from now on.  It is super simple to use.  All you do is load a base image and then load other images on top of it.  You use your fingers to resize and place the image where you want it to go.  All you need to do is make sure that you try to take the pictures straight on so you can get the best result.  I obviously didn't do that with one of my blocks.  I just haven't had time to go back and fix it.  Because I was able to see my quilt in progress like this I am debating on redoing the block on the left.  The colors are more muted in that block than the others and it just doesn't go.

This week I am linking up to Freshly Pieced. 

Friday Finishes

Not a lot of finishes this week.  I spent most of the week plugging away at my Jamestown Landing.  I posted the other day that I was all done my broken dishes blocks.  All 210 of them.  Well, I was wrong because I apparently miscounted along the way.  I only have 200.  I must have counted a group of ten twice.  Grrrr.  Now I need to cut enough different HST's to make it keep its scrappy look.  That should be fun.  Not.

Block 2

I did the block above for the quilt along at Quilting Gallery.  It was a pretty fun, quick block to do.  Its huge.  It's 16.5" x 16.5".  I have been pressing my seams open on this quilt and I am really starting to like it.  My blocks are coming out perfect.  If you are interested in checking out the quilt along and maybe join us, its never too late.  Just click on the banner below and it will bring you right where you need to be. 

Last weekend I needed a fun quick project to do to take a break from Jamestown Landing.  I had been wanting to make some pillow covers for our grungy pillows on the couch for a long time.  The picture above is what I came up with.  Pardon the wrinkles but I decided to take a nice little nap today on the couch before I remembered that I needed a picture of it. 

This is the back.  Just a simple cover that we can take off and wash when needed.  Next time I make one I am going to have it over lap just a tad more. 

I got the pattern for this pillow from Tula Pink's City Sampler: 100 Modern Quilt Blocks.  I have been eyeing this book since it came out.  Last week was my birthday and when I received an Amazon gift card, this was the first thing in my cart.  Blogs all over the internet are doing a quilt along with it and I have loved every block.   I am probably not going to join the quilt along as I have too many projects to do but this book is full of so much inspiration.  When I was trying to decide on a pattern for my pillow I grabbed this book and so many blocks would have been perfect.  I decided on No. 24.

One of the things I loved most about this book is that it has every block diagrammed over graph paper.  It made it super easy to enlarge this 6" block to 18" for my pillow.  I could very easily see that I only had to multiply all finished sizes by 3. 

I am going to try to get a second pillow cover done this weekend with a different block design.  I will share it when I get it done. 

Thanks for stopping by this week.  I am linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts, Link a Finish Friday, and Confessions of a Fabric Addict.

Errors, Errors and more Errors

I finally finished part 3 of Lazy Sunday Mystery.  It took me a lot longer than I thought it would.  Perhaps if I didn't make 300 errors it would have been better.  I was listening to an audio book while I was sewing and was so very close to finishing it.  I was listening to The Eye of the World by Robert Jordan.  It is part of the Wheel of time series.  Anyway, I was very intently listening to the last two hours of the book and I realized a bit too late that I had sewn every single block the same.  So instead of two piles of 78, I had one pile of 156 all with the same orientation.  Luckily that was after sewing only one of the white squares on and not both.  But at this point I had already trimmed that corner and there was no saving my mistakes.

This is my sad abandoned pile of squares.  The good news is that I can trim the ends off and end up with 2 1/2" half square triangles.  I think I am going to use these to make a pillow or pillowcase to match the quilt.

And to top that off after I cut 78 more rectangles and white squares I proceeded to sew another 20 or so wrong again.  But this time all I had to do was unstitch.  Sigh.  But I finished my book and it was amazing.  I already downloaded the second one and started that as well.  Do any of you listen to audiobooks while you sew?

I also picked out fabrics for my next project.  I don't really need another but there is a quilt along over at Quilting Gallery that I really wanted to join.  It's called Aiming for Accuracy.  It looks like a fun quilt and I owe my son one since I am pretty sure my Lazy Sunday is going on my daughter's bed.  He picked out orange and blue and I am going to use black for the background.  There are a couple colors in there I might pull out but we will see how it goes.  I needed 24 fat quarters but most of these are half yard cuts.  I think I am going to duplicate some colors.  I have been collecting fabrics for a quilt for him for awhile and I don't want to buy any more.  Click the banner below if you want to check out the quilt along.  

This week I am linking up to What a Hoot Quilts.