Retreat at Lake Tahoe

Last weekend I got to get away from everything except friends and sewing, with a little wining and dining and lots of fun. A group of quilters that started as an off-shoot of the Dear Jane ™ group, but has expanded, has been retreating yearly, working on quilts, chatting, and generally having a good time. This year I brought along handwork, the Farmers Wife Sampler binding, the Loving Hearts binding and the Celtic knot border for Women of Faith. Both bindings are done! (Thank you Rita for helping with the Hugs for Marilyn Quilt), and two Celtic knot borders have been basted!

“Loving Hearts” is a group quilt made for Marilyn, the organizer of our retreat. Many women contributed heart based blocks and I set them into a quilt, and quilted it. It was a secret until we could show it to Marilyn, but now she knows about it and I can talk about it. That was the big reason I was so silent on quilty progress earlier this year!

I also got signatures for my album block quilt. And I thought of a working title, “An Album of Quilters”. The old blocks are now up on my design wall, 24 of them, got 9 more signatures this weekend, for 33 blocks, need between 42 and 49 blocks, so need a few more. Currently have 44 done, we will see if I need more.

Women of Faith - next WIP

My Women of Faith quilt, aka Women of the Bible Quilt (WOBQ), is my next UFO to see the light of day. Several years ago I went through a yearlong study of women in the bible led by Carol Honderich, and made quilt blocks reflecting something about 81 of these women. The original Women of the Bible quilt, made by Carol, had 53 six inch quilt blocks. As we went along, Carol had some additional blocks based on other women in the same story. I also added a few, and modified a few, to get my quilt to my standard large quilt. The original WOBQ had a grape and leaves appliquéd border. I opted to do a different Celtic Knot border based on a Scarlett Rose design. It got stalled on the appliqué. I pulled it out last night so I can mark the last three borders and get ‘er done. Carol’s patterns can be seen here. Scarlett Rose’ designs can be found here. This picture was taken the last time I worked on it, clearly a ways to go.

Quad P a top!

Not a great picture, but this quilt top is big, about 103" square, and pretty flat considering the angst I was having about block sizes. And the borders! I remarked the red borders a lot, and think I got one of them marked correctly, or maybe not. But it all worked in the end, amazingly. You might have noticed that the border is different than the EQ rendition. Not enough of the dark blue, and this was the original border fabric. Next is figuring out the quilting, but not this week. I want to take it just as a top to an upcoming retreat. Need to get the stuff ready for the retreat next.

This shows the whole quilt, although I think the picture above is better color-wise.

Quad P Progress

Quad P, formerly known as the Prairie Paisley Patchwork Party quilt, is moving along.

You can't see the part on the other wall very well, so it is below.

After these borders are attached, there are just two plain borders to go!

Gardening in early May

Clearly the summer squash are thriving. Saw some blossom beginnings while watering yesterday!

Tomatoes are also coming along. They seem to like the new space better than last year. I think they get more sun, a good thing. These are the cherry tomato, Early Girl and Mortgage Lifter, respectively.

The bush beans, eggplant and bell peppers are growing.

And the new addition to the garden this weekend is corn. Varying heights from two different purchased starts are all Golden Bantem. Then I started some more from Renee's Garden Casino (an early sweet corn). These were planted two seeds to a section in three six packs. I hope to plant a couple more six packs in a couple of weeks.

Painted Circle Scarf

While sorting out yarn this last weekend I came upon my cache of Lion Brand Homespun yarn that I bought as a newbie knitter. I didn’t pay a lot of attention to Lot number, big mistake! And a lot of the yarn was missing its label anyway. So I have some random skeins, and some colors with 4 skeins each. Anyway, I ran across this one skein that I had started something with, then ripped it out, and I don’t know where its label is and wanted to start something while waiting for my sweater needles to show up, so I started the Painted Circle Scarf from the Lion Brand website. It takes two skeins, but I don’t think a lot change will matter that much in this pattern, or maybe one skein will be long enough (directions were originally one skein). Fairly mindless, like how it is coming so far, but really not a fan of knitting with this yarn. I do like how it feels when knit though!