And The Storm Rolled In...

Phoenix was hit by a massive dust storm last night.  My side of the Valley didn't get hit as bad as other parts, but I still had some cleanup to do this morning for the pool.  I don't think the sides are supposed to be brown lol.  The solar blanket was also covered in dirt so that needed to be hosed off too.  The good news is that the temperatures dropped quite a bit due to the storm so that is a welcome relief, although it is a humid out - 73% humidity according to accuweather.com.  That's pretty high for us.  Hope we get some of that rain they are predicting for later in the day.  We sure could use it.

In Limbo

For the past couple of months I have felt like I have been living a double life.  I have made two separate ten day trips to North Dakota in the past 60 days and am going to be making another two week trip this month.  That is more traveling than I normally do in a year and it's not done yet.  I have another trip in September and yet another in October.  While I'm there I try to keep up with work via remote access, but stuff related to the house has to wait and I usually come home to nice surprises, like crunchy brown grass because the pet sitter didn't happen to notice that it was changing from green to brown because the irrigation system died while I was gone.

You are probably wondering why I am doing so much traveling right now, other than the fact that it gets me out of the searing Arizona heat, which is great.  Anyway, the answer is that I have become involved with someone that lives in North Dakota, so we are currently enjoying a very long distance relationship.  Your next question is probably how I managed to get involved with someone so far away.  It's actually quite an interesting story, which I am happy to tell if you've got a few spare minutes.  Or twenty lol.

Way back in 1984, at the young age of 15, I met this great guy whom I will refer to as "S".  Mainly because his first name starts with S lol.  We started dating, long distance even then I might add, because he was away at college while I was still in high school.  My parents must have really liked him to allow me to date someone that much older than me.  We dated pretty seriously for over two years until I ended it during my senior year of high school.  It was an amicable split so we stayed friends and kept in touch.  We even kept in touch after I moved to AZ.  That is until he got married and his new wife made him cut off all contact with me.  That was in 1994. 

Fast forward to 2009 when I joined Facebook.  He was on there too so I sent him a friend request.  He accepted and we renewed our friendship and emailed from time to time.  He was divorced by then, but in a relationship.  By the time my divorce was final, the relationship that S had been in had also ended so we were both single for the first time in almost 20 years.  Long story short, we started having actual conversations via internet chat or the phone and realized that it felt like it had been a day since we'd last really talked instead of almost twenty years.  At that point we thought it would be worth it to see each other in person and see how it went.  So S flew down a few months ago and we basically just picked up where we had left off. 

It is nice to be in a real relationship for the first time in many years, but I have to say, it has really cut into my quilting time!  I had boatloads of time to quilt when I was married to someone who didn't want to spend any time with me.  So I'm not sure when I will be able to get back to quilting like I was, between being gone a lot and also looking at the likely prospect of a cross country move some time in the next twelve months.  Oh, and S has three great sons who I have been having a blast getting to know, both in person and chatting via Skype.  Definitely time well spent getting to know them.

So that's where I'm at right now.  Between the relationship, work, and keeping up the house and yard, I don't have time to even think about quilting, let alone do it.  After this next trip I am home for a couple of months and S will be coming my direction instead, so I'm hoping that means a bit more quilting time.  We'll see I guess lol.

Sunday Morning Sewing

I woke up early this morning, as in 3:30 a.m. early.  That is early even for me.  I laid there for about another hour before I finally gave up and got up.  I was in the mood to sew and really wanted to do some piecing.  I wanted something fairly easy as I had a headache and was tired from waking up so darn early. 

I remembered that I had some cute little courthouse steps blocks that were sent to me quite some time ago by a blogging friend, who I think prefers to remain nameless, so I won't share who made these little cuties.  But trust me, the piecing is perfect.  And the pieces finish at 1/2 inch for a finished block size of 6 inches.  And these blocks weren't paper pieced.  Like I said, this friend is a quite a precise piecer. 

I was just hoping that I could at least sew them together adequately so I didn't do the blocks a disservice.  I thought I did ok until I got all of the rows pieced together and stood back to take a look.  Aaack!  I didn't pay attention when I laid everything out and some of my "courthouses" don't line up.  Oh well.  Instead of a humility block, I will have an entire little humility quilt lol.  I refused to unsew the rows so it is what it is at this point. 

I debated about leaving the little quilt border free when it looked like this:

I wasn't sure I was completely happy with that look so I pulled some border candidates from my stash and consulted my trusty quilt advisor (i.e. Dawn).  I texted her a couple of pictures and the border fabric we settled on was this one:

A quick press, a few passes with the rotary cutter and I had the borders cut and ready to attach.  Shortly thereafter I had this:



Not bad for a few hours work.  Thank you to my generous blogging friend that sent me these blocks!  She also sent her leftover blue star fabric and that is what I will use for the backing.  Dawn and I have a quilting day this coming Saturday so I'm hoping to get the basting done and get started on the quilting.  Who knows, maybe I can even have the entire quilt ready for display for the 4th of July, but don't hold your breath on that one lol.



A closeup of the blocks so you can see just how great the piecing is.



I am also happy to report that Echo has performed the quality control test on Chocolate Covered Cherries and has deemed it acceptable lol.

Sassy was enjoying the sunshine the other day, probably while plotting her next way to get in trouble. 



She knocked a picture off the wall below the plant shelf one night last week and I stepped in the shards of plastic on my way to the kitchen the next morning.  Thankfully it was plastic and not glass.  When asked about the incident, her reply was that the evidence against her was circumstantial and therefore she could not be judged guilty of the crime.  Typical.







Quilted, Trimmed and Ready to Bind!

Thanks to a quilting day at Dawn's yesterday, I was able to finish the quilting on Chocolate Covered Cherries today.  This was the first time that I individually quilted blocks and I have to say, between the repetitive pattern and the same fabrics in each block, I got pretty bored.  I have the attention span of a gnat anyway, so the fact that I got all of the blocks quilted this weekend is pretty amazing. 

The quilting is a combination of ditch quilting and my wavy line quilting, all done with my walking foot.  Wrestling the quilt through the machine was a challenge at times, but I chickened out on trying the block quilting with my free motion foot, so I was stuck twisting and turning the quilt quite a lot.  Now I just need to find where I stashed the binding strips to keep them away from curious felines and I will be all set to get the binding sewn on.

The front of the finished quilt:



Closeup of the quilting on the front:



The full back of the quilt:

And the quilting detail of one block on the back of the quilt:





Help for Joplin

Judy at Patchwork Times has come up with a wonderful idea for helping the residents of Joplin.  See this post on her blog if you are interested.

Fruit Cocktail is finished!

After the novel I wrote the other day, this will be a short post.  I finished sewing down the binding on Fruit Cocktail while I was at Dawn's on Saturday and started on the hand sewing for the Friendship Star quilt.  I used King Tut #901 for the top quilting and a green variegated Coats & Clark in the bobbin.

 

We also hit the 25% off anniversary sale at one of our local shops and we picked up a few Kaffe Fasset fabrics at good prices so that was fun too, although I really didn't need any new fabric lol.

And here is the progress on my needlepoint picture.  It is called Sawtooth Sampler by Laura J. Perin and it is from her quilt pattern series.





Where to Begin?

It has been so long since I last posted that I don't even know where to begin.  The good news is that I survived tax season and immediately reopened the quilt studio and have been quite productive!  I had planned to do many posts over the past couple of weeks with progress reports of what I have been working on, but somehow I never got around to actually writing the posts *sigh*.  I did, however, get around to taking pictures of the quilts projects as I worked on them.  That's progress from my last post!

As soon as the tax deadline was over I started my own personal quilting retreat and did basically nothing but quilt for about 5 days.  Oh, and take care of Maya since she decided to blow out her good knee on April 13th.  More about that in a bit.  First I want to talk about the quilting I have been doing.  Echo found the pile of quilts on my sewing table today and decided they were there for him to lay on.  What is it about cats and quilts???

So anyway, as soon as the tax deadline was over, I got busy in my sewing room.  Oh, and I washed the mountain of fabric that I had purchased during the past few months.  But I digress.  The first order of business after April 18th was to get Chocolate Covered Cherries basted and ready for quilting.  I have all of the ditch quilting done and have started the quilting of the blocks. 

Next I basted Fruit Cocktail.  Twice.  I forgot that the backing was just the right size and left the usual margin on the one side only to discover a drastic shortage on the other side when I went to baste that part.  So I undid all of the basting and redid it with the backing properly centered.  This quilt was made during my beginning quilting class in, ahem, 2001.  Yes, it has been sitting here unquilted for nearly 10 years.  But now it is not only basted and quilted, but I have the binding half sewn down.   Speaking of the binding, I have had that made and stored with the quilt for literally years.  As I'm sewing it on by machine, I realize that it is about half as long as it needs to be.  I think I had another quilt with the same binding and probably switched them.  As luck would have it, I found another binding the same width in my drawer of leftover bindings that matched well and was just the length I needed so I added it to the other one and finished up the machine sewing.  For the quilting, I did straight line quilting in the blocks and my wavy line quilting in the border.

The quilted top:

A closeup of the block quilting:


And the back.  It's kind of hard to see the quilting on the back since the fabric is so busy.

Then I quilted this little orphan bargello block.  It had been basted since last fall.  Took all of 15 minutes to quilt so I don't know why I let it sit so long *sigh*.

And finally, I quilted this little Friendship Star quilt.  It is also from my beginning quilting class which hopefully explains some of the whacked off points on the stars.  Thankfully my piecing has improved!  The binding is attached and ready for the hand sewing, which I'm hoping to work on tomorrow at Dawn's.  I ran out of the top thread with about 4 inches left to go on the quilting.  I found a similar purple thread in my stash and finished it with that.  Done is better than perfect!

And the back:

Amidst all of the quilting I also got bit HARD by the needlepoint bug.  I have had some charts forever, as well as threads, but just never got around to trying canvas work.  That has all changed.  I went to a local shop a few days after tax season ended and came home with the canvas and chart for a new project.  I already had the threads in my cross stitching stash.  Shocking I know lol.  For about two days, the quilting sat untouched as I stitched away on my new project.  I have made quite a bit of progress and plan to work on it more tomorrow, so I will save the pictures, etc. for a separate post.

And then there is the real life stuff that has been going on.  As I mentioned above, Miss Maya decided to tear her ACL (her knee) on April 13th.  She had surgery on her other knee in August 2007 when she tore that ACL, but the surgery was hard on her and at her current age, surgery is not an option.  There was quite a bit of drama for a few days as the ex and I came to terms with her situation.  We thought we were going to have to put her down since surgery wasn't an option.  Thankfully the vet said she could heal on her own.  Funny how everyone said differently when she tore out the first knee.  At that time we were told that her knee could only heal with surgery costing in excess of $2000.  So of course we did the surgery.  That was pretty annoying to find out that we wouldn't have had to put her through that, or spend all that money, but at least we didn't have to put her down. 

The other complicating factor was that my ex had arranged for a pet transport service to pick up Maya, Koda and Sammy the cat on April 30th to take them from Phoenix to his new place in Ohio.  He thought for sure that they wouldn't take Maya while her leg was healing, but he was wrong, thankfully, and they all were picked up on the 30th and arrived in Ohio this past Wednesday safe and sound.  So in the last week I have reduced my pet population by half, which has taken a huge load off.  No more barking dogs day and night and no more getting up 50 times a day to let someone out or bring someone in.  Could be why my blood pressure was down to 102/76 at my physical on Wednesday!

So that is what has been happening in my corner of the world for the last month or so!