Pets on Quilts Show

The 2011 Pets on Quilts Show is underway and hosted by Sewcalgal. I have not entered the show in the past, but decided to this year since I have plenty of both pets and quilts lol. So here is my entry.


I am currently owned by three fun, feisty felines that love to "assist" with my quilting.  All three were rescued from shelters here in Phoenix.  Echo and Sassy came home with me on the same day in October 2009 from the Arizona Humane Society and Tyrone was adopted in November 2005 from Sun Valley Animal Shelter.

Echo is by far my most reliable helper and can be counted on to be around nearly every time there is some quilting activity going on. 

He has a rather unhealthy obsession with cardboard boxes, so he is generally the first to show up to inspect a new box of fabric that has come in the mail.

He also loves to supervise the cutting and pinning of blocks.
 

He helps squish the fabric down so the lid fits on the container.

 
He rearranges blocks when the layout is not to his liking.
 

He makes sure that the quilting is "just right".

He checks finished tops to make sure they are soft and cuddly.

 
He supervises the basting, although he can't be left unattended with the pins as he has an unhealthy obsession with those too *sigh*.
 

 
And finally, he checks the finished quilts to make sure they are all ready to go.
 

 
Sassy is also a pretty good helper, although she is more selective about the activities in which she participates. 
 
One of her obsessions is the iron and she will get as close as she possibly can without getting burned.  She will often lay on one end of the ironing board while I am pressing on the other.  Goofy cat.
 

 
She also really likes to help me prewash and dry fabric.
 

Then she checks it again once it's dry to make sure it will be acceptable for our quilts.

 
On occasion, she will also supervise the actual sewing.
 

And sometimes she is just too exhausted to be any help at all!



Tyrone is my oldest assistant and now that there are younger workers available, he tends to take it easy and generally doesn't show up for work most days lol.  But here is in his glory days helping me to attach the binding to a king size quilt.
 

He also helped sew on a label one time.

As I said, Tyrone is pretty much retired these days from his quilting helping, at the ripe old age of 6!  What a life!  But no worries, as you can see, I've got two other helpers that are more than willing to pick up his slack lol.

Still Here...

This summer has just flown by!  I have so many things I planned to blog about but got so busy doing them that I didn't get time to write about them. 

I was back in North Dakota for two weeks in July and had a great time with S and his kids.  We got to take a little vacation to dig for fossils in Montana and I also got to see my dad, my sister, his parents and one sister, as well as an old friend while I was up there.  All in all it was a great trip.  There was one big unplanned thing that happened towards the end of the trip, but I will save that story for another post as I'm short on time right now.  Surprise, surprise lol.

After I got back and got caught up a bit with the house stuff, I started working on S's quilt that I am making him for Christmas.  I'm using Carrie Nelson's Radio Flyer pattern.  Lots and lots of cutting and piecing, but I'm having a blast with it and it is going fast.  I have been putting in a lot of sewing time and have a lot to show for it, but again, pictures and details will have to wait for another post.

Oh, and I sold the Texas ranch property and that sale closed this week.  I will miss it, but it is time to move on.  And further north as S's sister said lol.

Until next time, keep on quilting!

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.