Fat Cat Quilts

Three down...

I have been tackling my UFO List with a vengeance these past couple weeks. 

Attached bindings on UFO #59, #66 and #70. Check, check and check. I will hand sew them down this weekend while I am at our annual quilt show.

UFO #13 I gave away to a friend who was way more excited about it than I was. 

UFOs #7, #29 and #48 I sold on ebay. Who knew? May they rest in peace in someone else's house.

And #12, a set of six snowman blocks from a block swap years ago, I gave to another friend who needs to make a snowman quilt for a friend for Christmas. Win win. 

Last weekend, at our monthly sew-in, I finished the tops of four of my oldest projects. Two of them are over ten years old. It felt like such an accomplishment. And the surprising thing was that I still liked all four of them. While I was at it, I used my scraps to make bindings for them also. So now, I just need to quilt them up and BAM! I'm ready to go with the binding. 

This kaleidoscope quilt was a project I started at the first quilt retreat I went to when I began quilting. The fabrics were not my first choice, but the ones I had picked out initially didn't work properly to achieve the kaleidoscope effect. While I'm not a floral lovin' gal, this print had an excellent repeat for the kaleidoscope pieces. The black open spaces would be great for some decorative quilting, but I'm leaning towards just doing an allover design to finish it and moving on. And if I had been thinking, I would have picked up all those loose strings laying on the top before I started taking pictures. 

This eye-searing bright Mickey quilt is actually from a class I taught years ago. This was one of the models I had worked on for the class, and all it needed was borders. The pattern is called Hidden Wells. It's no longer in print, but you can find skads of tutorials online. It's an easy strip-piecing pattern, but every single seam is on the bias. I spray starched the tar out of it to keep it from stretching as I was assembling it. Especially as I was attaching the borders. 

Next up was my Native Rainbow, a quilt I started at a retreat with Laurie Shifrin years ago. Last year I had assembled the blocks at one of our sew-ins, but it took me a while to pull it back out and put the borders on. Now it's ready to be quilted. I love how this one turned out. I loved the grape fabric that I picked for the outer border and had so much fun pulling colors from that for the center blocks. I think I might have also been planning on enlarging this at one time, because I found enough cut pieces to easily make an entire second quilt. I wonder what I was thinking. Maybe I just wanted a variety of blocks to choose from. Who knows. I am very pleased with how this one turned out and look forward to quilting it.

I suppose I shouldn't really say I've completed this last top yet, as I still need to attach the last outer blue border. But I was able to get the bulk of it assembled last weekend, which is a step up from the box it's been in. This is a block draw from about ten years ago. Our group used to do a monthly draw, where each month, one person's name was drawn from a hat and they picked out a main fabric and gave a fat eighth to everyone in the group, who in turn, would make a 12" block and return them to you throughout the month. If you remember, in my early quilting days, I was in a relationship with anything patriotic, and this silver-specked blue tone-on-tone was high on my list of beloved fabrics. Yes, silver-specked. Yep.

I love the crisp contrast between the blue and bright white, but am a little less enamored now with the sparkly silver bits. I'm hoping that once it's quilted, I can run it through the wash a few times and the silver specks will wash off. I'm assuming it will, since it's left a gratuitous trail of silver glitter every where it been in the last ten years. Even as I put together the blocks last week and was cutting the strips for the outer border, it filled up the crevices in my cutting mat with silver residue and my rotary blade sparkles like a shiny new penny nickel. I can only imagine what the inside of my bobbin casing must look like. 

I am thrilled with the outcome of this top. I love that the blocks are made by my friends who I quilt with. While I usually do most of my own quilting, I would like to send this one out for a custom job. I'd love some feathered wreaths in the setting triangles and large open areas between the blocks, and continued around the outer border. 

I'm headed down South in a couple weeks for the holidays, so I don't know if I'll get to quilting these tops before the new year, but I certainly feel like I've made a productive dent in my stash of projects. I almost think I should reward myself and start something new...

 

Fall & Winter

Last year, I participated in a Pay It Forward wildfire on Facebook where I'm one of five people my friend Jane will Pay it Forward to with a homemade goody, and then I, in turn, will continue to Pay it Forward to five people. And the paying and forwarding and smiling and loving continues on and on forever. And ever. Amen. 

Just in time for Thanksgiving, my homemade goody arrived in a big box from Jane. I was overwhelmed by her generosity. She made me a whole lap quilt! Out of sumptuous fall-colored batiks. My favorite of all the batiks. It's warm and welcoming and just plain gorgeous. I washed it, keeping my fingers and toes crossed for any bleeding batiks, and now it's all crinkly from the dryer. I love it! It is a perfect addition to my fall decor, folded up on the loveseat. That's my re-purposed/up-cycled (those two words are so prevalent these days. Everywhere.) garage sale chair that I painted black. It's not as dinged up as it looks in the picture. It has bits of ice and frozen leaves on it. I suppose I should bring that in so they can thaw out and the chair can go away until some other holiday where I feel like sitting something on an old black chair on my front porch. That pumpkin, which is also frozen to the chair, says BOO on the other side in haunting script letters. I kept waiting for a nice day to go take a picture of it on my front porch amidst all the bright yellow fall leaves, but it was always so gray and gloomy. And then it snowed. And then it wasn't Halloween anymore and I turned it around to hide the BOO. But before the whole lot goes away for Christmas, I did go out and take a picture with my new fall throw. In the snow. 

Winter has thrust herself upon us with much disdain this year. And early too! We've had more snow this November than we usually get all winter. It's absolutely thrilling. Every time it snows, I get all excited and think this will be the time, that once in a lifetime experience, when you wake up in the morning and go to the window and see a sea of white three feet deep. I have always wanted to be snowed in. To lounge around in my comfiest sweats and pink fuzzy moose socks and watch chick flicks and sew, intermittently napping, maybe making homemade chocolate chip cookies - and all guilt free! Everyone knows you can't feel guilty for luxuriously spending an entire day baking and sewing when you have no other choice but to stay nestled inside the house. 

So far, no three feet of snow except up on the Summit. Plenty of snow there. We took a drive the other night just as the sun was setting on the peaks. And by night, I mean 3:00 in the afternoon. It was gorgeous and pink and my pictures never quite show what it really looked like. For starters, I have been unable to capture the sheer vastness of the valley laying below you when you're looking out from the Summit. It has amazed me, and eluded me, for years. 

My friend and I (ad)ventured North on a day trip to Whitehorse last week. I was in need of cat food, and my friend was up for an adventure, so we took off for the 110 mile drive into the Yukon. We saw a moose, which is always exciting, and enjoyed some fabulous Mexican food for lunch. We shopped and marked everything off our lists and stopped to buy a dozen donuts to bring home on our way out of town. Donuts are quite a commodity here in Skagway. And there, in line, while we were perusing the donut case, staking out our twelve favorites, we heard the bad news. The highway had been closed. We had just become honorary Canadians for the evening. With nothing to do. After all, everything on the list was checked. And here it was, 3:30 in the afternoon and we were stuck. In a foreign country. And it was -22 outside and blowing hard crusty snow in an angry blizzard. What to do?

We hit up the quilt shop. Hah!

Whitehorse has a fantastic quilt shop called Bear's Paw Quilts. Stuffed to the gills with bright batiks, and fuzzy flannels (flannels are a big deal up here), and an absolutely mesmerizing array of quilt models lining the walls. The gals who work there are friendly, and a fun time is had by all. We stocked up on ideas and fabric and enjoyed the company. Then we lingered through pasta for as long as two people can possibly stretch out one single meal in an effort to kill time, bought pajamas and toothbrushes at Walmart, and settled in for the evening at our hotel with a pile of quilt magazines. The only downside of being snowbound in Whitehorse was that neither of their movie theaters was showing Footloose. And I am chomping at the bit to see the new Footloose. It remains at the top of my list for when I go down South. That and the Fiesta Ware display at Dillards.

And as I type, it has just now started snowing. Again! Maybe tomorrow will be the lucky day...

 

 

Boo!

Happy Halloween! 

Round Robin and so on...

Remember the Round Robins we were working on last winter? I got mine back. And I love it! It's perfect for fall. 

I started with this as my center...

I asked the other gals to keep it fall-esque and to please only use batiks. 

And this is what I got back...

I am thrilled with the outcome and can't wait to get her quilted and binded and ready to snuggle under. I think I'm going to add a 4" border of the gold leaf batik that was the background for the row before the flying geese. It will float the flying geese border and really make it stand out. Plus, it will make it big enough to cover the bed. I just love those scrappy little flying geese. They are always so fun to look at.

I was able to snap a photo of Linda's round robin during Show & Tell last weekend. She started with the snazzy paper pieced iris center, and after we all worked on it, here was her final quilt...

I love the appliqued wavy vine border. Fun and different. I still need to get pictures of the other three in our group. Every single one of them was a winner. And they were all so different and fun to work on. 

This weekend I was a busy little bee and got so many projects done around the house. This includes the dreaded errands. How is it that you can spend the entire day running errands, and then at the end of the day, feel like you've accomplished nothing? I don't get it. After the errands, I unplanted all my flower pots (some of which are still alive today! Unbelievable! My black thumb is losing a bit of it's blackness and edging dangerously over to the grayish-green side) and put them up for the winter. I had to make room for my unshiny new black upcycled (funny how that word is everywhere right now) chair on my front porch. I've got it all painted and looking very...ominous. I used a flat matte finish spray-paint, and it looks so much more gloomy than a shiny black. Perfect for the impending doom of Halloween. Rather than three pumpkins spelling out B-O-O as I had originally intended, I got one medium pumpkin and put the entire BOO on it. I loved the look of three, but it needs a longer surface to be appealing. The seat of a rickety old chair didn't cut it. I set chair and pumpkin out on my de-flowered (hah) front porch, amongst a throng of bright gold Cottonwood leaves and was thinking it would make the prettiest picture for fall. Then I went inside and got distracted by something shiny and by the time I made it back outside, Keith had swept off the entire front porch. He's helpful like that.

So I'll wait for more leaves to fall. 

I also got my new sewing room all vacated of yet-to-be-unpacked boxes and ready to paint this week. I'm hoping to paint a coat Monday night and the second coat on Tuesday. Then I'll get my storage units all moved into place and can begin the fun part - unpacking my fabric. I am beside myself with giddiness over the prospect of unpacking, folding, and petting my fabric. The Type-A in me really comes out when I'm organizing my stash on the shelves - every pile of fabric not only color-coordinated, but all folded to the same size. It's tedious and completely extraneous, but it would cause enormous amounts of undo stress otherwise. And admittedly, it looks fantastic when it's all said and done. So fantastic, actually, that I never want to dig in and use any of it. Lest I mess up one of the piles. 

Weekend Warriors

This weekend we sewed. And sewed. And sewed. And ate. And ate. And ate.

When our local quilt group gets together for a mini-retreat, there's one thing to be said. We eat like queens. If any of us were to miss our mark as quilters, we could all surely fall back on cooking, cause let me tell you, we got it going on. It's a wonder we get any sewing done in between the pulled pork, pumpkin bread and spinach dip. And then there were the scones...

Saturday and Sunday, we put the {sewing} pedal to the metal and zipped right along, whipping out UFO's and starting new projects. It rained outside like nobody's business, but we were tucked inside warm and dry, having a fantastic time. None of us could have asked for anything more.

I fished out my Fandango quilt I started last Spring. I had all the blocks assembled and just needed to row them up. I've been dragging my heels on this project, because (cover your eyes, Alicia) I really don't like the fabric. But I do like the person who picked it out, so I put on my big girl panties and plowed onward. 

I really like the latticework in the finished design. You can't tell very well in this photo, but the sashing lines are a dark eggplant, which will match the walls in the room it's going in. Below is a picture of the original pattern, which featured large appliqued flowers. They're cute in the fabric lines shown in the model, but Fandango is so busy with mostly larger prints and I was worried it would be too much. Plus, we voted. And the flowers lost. By a long shot. 

I've ordered backing and some cute striped fabric for the binding. As soon as it gets here, it's ready to be quilted and bound and off to live in Utah. 

With the leftover scraps, I made a not-so-little baby blanket to go with it. And then with the scraps leftover from that, I pieced a scrappy binding for the baby blanket. I really made good use of that fat quarter tower. 

Here's a peek at some projects the other girls worked on this weekend ~

This was from a class we had a while back, where you sew raw-edge squares on squares, cut them into quarters, and then re-sew them up. After you wash it, it frays along the edges like those raw-edge flannel quilts. I can't remember what they're called. 



And again in different fabrics...

As you can see, we like bright colors around here. Maybe it's the lack of sun. 

A Little Bit of Everything All Rolled Into One

Doh! I just had an entire blog post all composed and Internet Explorer stopped working and restarted. All on it's own, without even asking me! How rude. Curse you, Internet Explorer, curse you!

So I left Internet Explorer and joined the Google Chrome Team. They play well with others.

Monday Tuesday morning blog post...take two. 

I haven't done anything quilty this week. I want to, trust me, but I have a list of two dozen other things I should be doing first, and sewing keeps getting bumped further and further down the list. But next weekend, our little quilt group is having a two-day sew-in and I am totally stoked about it. Do people even use that word anymore? Stoked? I can't wait to load up my car with machine, cutting mats, rulers, iron, all the requisite quilting snacks (Think chocolate. Lots and lots of chocolate) and a basket full of projects to work on. All weekend long. First up: Fandango. Remember that quilt? Yea, me neither. It's been so long. It's so close to being done. I think I can get the top all put together by afternoon on our first day there. Woot! Then quilt it, bind it, wash it and in the mail it goes. Then I'm thinking of working on some little fall or Halloween project. Something cute and fast. I'm in the mood for Halloween.

Speaking of Halloween, I ran across this great tutorial for stack-and-sew stars over on American Quilting's blog.

*picture from American Quilting's tutorial. I haven't made any yet to have my OWN picture.       

They're adorable and super easy and you can go HERE to see for yourself. I LOVE them! I want some. I can't wait to make some! American Quilting is one of my all-time favorite quilt shops. They're in Orem, Utah, and if I could, I would climb the highest mountain and sing them praises all weekend long. I love them that much. They always have a storeful of the best models (quilts, not hunky men) and piles and piles of all my favorite fabrics. Seriously, it's like they have a little bug inside my brain that keeps track of all the latest fabrics that I covet, and then they STOCK them in their store. Like magic. Or....voodoo?

Last fall when I was on my annual pilgrimage to Utah, I got together with some friends for craft night. Chamaine was making some Wiggles name tags for her family's Halloween costumes (they were adorable) and Alicia and I made some banners.

Alicia made a gorgeous one in teals and oranges that said Autumn and I just might have to steal her idea and make my own someday. I worked on a traditional Halloween one that was going to say SPOOKY on it. But I couldn't find a font I liked and never finished it. And since I know where this project is, unlike all my UFO's which are boxed up in the guest room still, maybe I'll dig it out this weekend and finish it up. I'll make up a scary font if I have to. I loved how the flags turned out. I scratched them all up with sandpaper and I love how they look. Even without any letters.

Won't those look cute with some scrolly, ghoulish letters that say SPOOKY and all strung up on a black ribbon? Yes, I definitely need to finish these up. 

Haven't got any pumpkins yet for my BOO that's going on my repainted chair, but I did get my black paint. Our little supermarket, and I use that term loosely, won't stock pumpkins, if at all, until a few days before Halloween. I may have to flee the country and go to Whitehorse to get some. I'm hoping the rain holds off for a few days and I'll get my chair painted out on the back deck. I don't want to paint it inside, because I think the cats will sit on it. And while little paw prints might look perfectly charming on the seat of the chair, it's not quite the look I'm going for. 

More later....Typepad seems to be liking Google Chrome. It might be a keeper.

Check back soon!

When Typepad is done having their temper tantrum, maybe they'll let me make a blog post.

Anyone else having problems with Typepad?

Falling for Fall

 
I love this time of year. Everything about it. The crisp, clear mornings. The crackly leaves. The bright colors everywhere - in the trees, the last of the summer flowers, apples and pumpkins and gourds. Oh my. I love the onset of the Holiday season. The calm before the storm so to speak. The first few weeks of October are stress-free, blissfully so, and the future lies open and wide in front of me. Well, for the next seven months anyway. But for those seven months, I can do pretty much anything I want. And believe me, I want. My list is long and I can't wait to dive in.

 
September 23 was the last say of our 2011 tourist season and this is what greeted me as I drove up the pass to our Fraser depot:Can you believe this? I think it's so exciting! Granted, it was gone in a few hours, but for that brief morning, the summit was white. The tourists eat this stuff up. They love it when it snows. I mean, come on, who doesn't come to Alaska and expect to see snow and igloos? Well, contrary to popular belief, we don't live in igloos, but we can definitely do snow.

And while we're on the subject of tourists....I know I often refer to the tourist season as hectic and chaotic. It is. But please know that I'm not saying that with disdain. Any time four cruise ships unload 12,000 people in an area as small as Skagway, it's bound to get hectic. And chaotic. But it's the good kind. Like the crowds at Disneyland. Well, I think the crowds at Disneyland are fun; most probably don't. But I just wanted to clarify to anyone who's been here or to anyone who is coming here, that I love the visitors we get all summer. Sure, it's a wild ride, but I enjoy every minute of it. I am very fortunate to experience this every summer, to meet people from all over the globe. I have no complaints.

This afternoon I was perusing some quilty sites and decorating blogs and found this little pumpkin trio on Crafty Vegas Mom's blog.

 
I love this! How cute is that? Now, we don't have house numbers here in Skagway, but for this, I'll make some up. Hah. I have this old wooden chair that I bought at a garage sale this summer for a buck. Keith's eyes popped out of his head at the thought of me paying ANY amount of money for it, and he stared at me in disbelief (or was it disgust?) as I struggled to shove it in the backseat of the car. (Note to self: Acuras were never meant to HAUL things. Well, for that matter, I'm pretty sure they were never meant to live in Alaska either.) Back to my abandoned old chair. I was thinking of painting it red and sitting it out on my back porch with a summer quilt folded over the back. But now, I'm totally painting it black and sitting some fat pumpkins on it with my made-up house numbers. Or maybe I'll skip the numbers and spell out B-O-O. Oh yes, let's.

Back in the Saddle Again

   Well, well, look what the cat dragged in. As in “Look! It’s ME!” and not literally what my cats have been dragging in, which lately, has been mice. Thankfully not dead ones. We’ve been re-stacking firewood and weed-eating and generally disrupting the entire yard and the little creatures that have been habitating there. The mice, in terror, have been fleeing the tall grass and setting up camp…indoors. Never a good decision. And my two high-maintenance, never-been-outside, “oh look, something to play with!” cats have been thoroughly entertained with the little toys running around for their enjoyment. I’m pretty sure they think we put them there on purpose and bless their little hearts, neither one of them have a clue what to do with them. Butters bats it around like one of the battery-operated animals we set out for her, waiting for it to get stuck in a corner and unable to turn around like her toy chicken does. It’s short-lived fun for her, but minutes of hilarity for us. Tigger just very succinctly lifts a giant paw and holds the nuisance in place with a great sigh and an elaborate eye roll. Then very gently picks it up in his mouth by the scruff of it’s neck and brings it to us, without so much as tweaking a small little mouse whisker. He’s pretty sure he’s done a great and noble deed by saving the life of some unknown abandoned baby and fully expects to be rewarded for it. Imagine his disgust when he’s greeted with shrieks and assorted four-letter oaths. Although, I’d never tell him this, but he does look pretty adorable sitting there with a teeny tiny (albeit flailing) mouse grasped in his teeth, thinking he’s the hero for the day. I wish I had pictures to share, but as I am usually the one standing on a chair or huddling in a heap on the kitchen counter, this circus goes unphotographed. 

But I digress… 

 
If you’re still reading my blog, I thank you. From the bottom of my tourist-stricken heart. I knew going into this blogging endeavor that I would be an absent blogger for the better part of the summer, and yet I chose to do it anyway. I won’t even lie and tell you I had good intentions of trying to blog mid-summer, amidst the chaos of chugging trains and thousands of visitors from all over the world. Straight up, I dismiss all ideas of quilting and blogging during the busy tourist season. And now, as September comes to a close, I find myself not only itching to dig out my sewing machine, but also to dust off the blog header and dig in. I love this time of year, when the changing of the guard brings all the excitement of fondling fabric, ripping out errant seams and flipping lazily through quilt magazines. 

But before I let loose in the sewing room, let me recap my summer and catch you up on what’s kept me from the computer for the past few months. Trust me, it's fun and exciting!

 
June brought us the usual chaos that comes with a big move. We signed on our house and got the keys June 1st...one month into the tourist season. Moving was quick and practical. Load it in a box, move said boxes to new house, pile boxes in corner of living room. Repeat. We had about fifteen people helping us that morning and it went fast. Two moving van loads later, we now reside about sixteen blocks further North than we did before. Skagway is twenty-two blocks long and four blocks wide, so we basically relocated to the other end of town. It's nice up here. We're closer to the train shops, which means we wake bright and early to the mournful tune of vintage locomotives starting up for the day. We're closer to the base of the mountains, which means we also see a lot more bear action. Immediately after moving in, a big black bear helped himself to my bird feeder on the back deck, standing up on his hind legs to tip it over and dump seed all over the deck, and then settling in to lick it up. At least he cleaned up after himself. Since then, almost nightly, we have bears sniffing about, helping themselves to our pesky neighbors' unprotected garbage cans, snacking on my nasturtiums, or riling up the trio of weenie dogs who live in the house behind us. Life is noisy.

 

I was curious how the cats would react to a new place. I thought for sure Butters would be prowling about, in and out of every nook and cranny, while Tigger cowered in the corner with his food bowl. No sirree. Butters wanted nothing to do with the new place. She hid out in her litter box for the first week we were here. Seriously, she burrowed herself in there and wouldn't budge. Not even when Tigger needed to...do his thing. He would dance around the entrance with this frantic look on his face. "Mom! She's in there and won't come out and I need to go!" Until he just plowed on in there, shoving Butters in the corner and did his deed beside her. I'm not gonna lie. This whole process was hilarious and I stood there watching and laughing, not offering up any condolances to either one of them.

 
We knew when we bought the house that we had a lot of remodeling in mind. Pulling up carpets, installing wood flooring, painting, refinishing cabinets. The list was long and varied. The problem occurred when I thought I could actually start on these projects mid-season. Hah! It took a meltdown rivaling a two-year old’s temper tantrum to force me into defeat. I called uncle, threw in the towel and stacked the cabinet doors in the corner of the dining room until this fall. So what I’m really getting to is that we haven’t unpacked the majority of our belongings. I can’t see unpacking and settling in, only to repack it all up and move it to the other room while we remodel in October. At first, this really stressed me out. I’m totally Type-A and this is the kind of thing that sends us Reds into panic. But once I accepted the fact that my house was going to be a mess for the summer, I got over my bad self and started breathing again. It’s a new beginning. Temporarily.

To be continued...

 

 

Quilted Sochi

 
Have you seen the logos and branding for the Sochi 2014 Olympics? They were released to the public months ago, but since I'm off in my own little tourist world these days, I'm just now getting around to seeing them.

 
It's a patchwork quilt theme with 16 different designs representing folkart throughout Russia. I love it! I love all the bright colors and the fun diamond motifs. Read more about it here.