Redwork Revival March Block 1

My good friend Star and I are doing a block of the month at our local quilt shop, Parkland Parish. Star's idea of a red and white quilt was brilliant she has a lot of good ideas!!!

If you want to quilt along we are making 2 of the same blocks every month for a year. We are using Marti Michell's Encyclopedia volume 4 Blocks are made with Template Sets L and M. We are how ever writing the instructions to put the block together, but if you want to join in please be sure to buy Marti's Encyclopedia Volume 4. You could always use your stash, use black and white, blue and white, what ever colors you chose, make it your own. The ladies at the Parish are all using red and white. See you the 3rd Monday of every month.

Ellis Island - March page 16,


Cutting instructions are for 2 blocks.

In Love

First up is a quilt I made out of leftovers from my sisters quilt... this one is lap size and it goes to my friend Erica... she will love it.

notice how i only quilted on the black the blocks of color pop out...

it is a really cute quilt.

next up is a quilt I made for my sister in law Megan... she loves it ... i just finished quilting it.

it is larger then a twin but not a full....

Checkerboard white and greens.... it is really a nice quilt...
Now you may be asking how is she doing all this quilting... she does not have a long arm.... she hand quilts most of her projects... well long arms are great... but there is this little thing called a wonderful husband who can built a frame... and you can buy a mid arm to put on it.... and then take over the garage....Here it is my dream.

OH and the next day i went and cleaned the garage with a fine tooth comb... it is much better now....

well bye for now I already have another quilt on the frame that goes to Brandi... have a great sunday....

Things I made today

WOW am I getting things Done!!! One Martini apron... I made another apron this morning but can't show that, it is my sister-in-laws Christmas present...

This is a BOM that I am doing at the Parish, I had never done a BOM so I thought heck why not... turns out I love it.

This is my favorite block that we have done.

When I started this BOM I had never done any triangles at all ever in a quilt... I think that this intersection of 6 triangles... proves I might have made progress in the triangle world.
One potato bag... Done
This fabric looks just like potato's

WOW am I getting things done!!!

Link to the 30's

I thought that these white little spaces needed something yesterday so I ran to the Parish Quilt Co. http://www.parklandparishquilts.com/ just a fast as I could... I know they have a wonderful jar of buttons for 3.85 a scoop I got enough buttons for this project and more for another project in the future. I am very lucky to have a very nice Quilt shop about 1 mile from my house.

I quilted this 85"x85' on my sewing machine... and then I decided that the white space between the colors needed to be quilted as well but they were just empty spaces... so I decided that I could add the button... it would fill the space with something lovely and tie down the middle of these areas... so this quilt is both tied and quilted on my machine... not sure how the quilting community feels about mixing those to but I think it turned out really quite nice...

Here is the full quilt... this is the bigger of 2 quilts out of this pattern and fabric, the other was a small baby size I made with the leftovers. I washed and dried the quilt last night before I took pictures. I love the wrinkly soft feeling after a quilt has been washed and dried.

So Sabbatical has started and so far I have cleaned the garage, had my husband make me a rolling sewing cabinet, and finished one huge quilt, celebrated the 4th of July with family.

Sewing Cart

Well I hope every one had a Happy and Safe 4th of July. We went to Mom and Dad's had a wonderful BBQ in the yard and then we roasted some marshmallows on the fire. The fire works were provided by the neighborhood.
This item was a spark of an idea in my little head Saturday morning.... and since I am married to the Best Cabinet Maker in the world (lucky girl that I am) he just went to the shop and whipped it up.

O.K. It was not an easy task.... I was on the web and was recovering from Friday night Poker, Sat morning 5am (yes my first day off and I was up on my laptop at 5am) and I thought about my chore of taking every thing back into the dinning room so I could set up sewing again... every time we have to use the dinning room, I go through this little chore of picking every thing up and carting it all over the house to hide it... The machine goes in Jessica's room, the material goes in Kate's room the cutting mat and rulers and all of that goes in my room. So here I was wanting to sew sew sew but in order to do that I would have to go around the house and disturb everyone with recovery mission... Well then I was searching on the web and found a few cabinets that rolled around and I could store all of my precious sewing items in. Well you know how that is by time I found the perfect one... it was 150$... plus tax...Plus shipping and I still had to wait a week for it.

Well for starters 200$ for a rolling cabinet was a little bit more then I wanted to spend...( just think of how much real sewing stuff I could buy with 200$) and they just weren't perfect. I wanted something with a few small drawers and then some big drawers and then I wanted a place that fit my cutting mat perfect, and a place where I could put my machine so I could just roil it out and roll it back easily.

So then I got a few web sites lined up on the old lappy toppy and went bouncing into the bedroom. Yes to wake the wonderful husband up... yea I know that it was about 7:30 am on a Sat morning but I had a idea... and well you can't just sit around and wait for someone to get there sleep when an idea is brewing. So I stuck a deal with the husband (we won't talk about his part of the deal) And he JUMPED out of bed in to the shower and off to the shop he went to slay this Dragon for me.

He came back 10 hours later with my cabinet... it is just perfect in every way.

Oh and there is that very cute table runner I made a few weeks ago.

The other night Kate and Nick had a water fight in the back yard. This is a picture of Kate ready for battle... they had lots of fun.

Table Runner

So the Dresden Plates that I made... (first ones ever) I turned in to this table runner. My dinning room table is pretty large sot the runner is 17"wide and 95" long and it think it turned out very cute... it is perfect for summer.

I put the plates together with my sewing machine (Husky) then I hand stitched them down to the back ground fabric. And here is the crazy part... I hand quilted this... this was allot of quilting in a "small" project diagonal straight lines about 1.25" apart...

But it turned out so cute... the quilting adds so much to the runner.

My sabbatical starts soon... 9 weeks off to spend with Kate and Quilt and go on a trip or 2 this summer.

Have a great Day!!!

Dresden Plate table runner and Quilt Frame

First I have to tell you all that Kate... soon after this picture was taken found a spider in her room. She was Not smiling after that... she did not want to sleep in her room after that so she slept on the couch.... not the family room couch but my Living room couch. I hope this does not last long.
OK now off to my new project... I have always wanted to make a Dresden Plate Quilt... but I have never made a Dresden plate. So I decided to make some and then turned them into a table runner for my Dinning room table.... One I discovered that I Love them... making them was easy as pie. The runner needed to be quilted... but I do not like trying to quilt anything on my sewing machine, it is a Quilter but the arm is not got a lot of space on it so fighting to get things to be lined up and flat is more bother then it seems to be worth... but I am enjoying hand quilting and it is just turning out so nice on this runner.

For this runner the decision was made to do lines... but close together... about 1.25 inches

Oh... I have to show you my Quilt frame I bought this for about 50$ and it was great but a little wobbly I did not like that very much so I asked my dear husband to improve the quilt frame... it did have just a little stick that ran from one side to the other side on the bottom. So my wonderful husband took the little 1x1 stick...out and added this which squared the bottom of the quilt frame and made it really sturdy... it works great I love that the little shelf is perfect for my feet to rest on it.

OH... the table runner is 95" long... 17"wide and I should be done quilting it by the end of the week. I am about 1/2 way done now.

Have a wonderful Day!!!

Lisa