Wednesday, September 30, 2015

Queue Them Up!

It's fall again.  The summer was frantically busy with quilting, road trips, a cruise and sewing! 

I didn't intend for it to get carried away - but it did: Row by Row.  I thought I'd pick up a few to support our local stores.  In the end I think I have between 30 and 40 row kits and/or patterns!  What will I do with them all???  More to the point - when???  Anyway - it was a lot of fun.  We planned a couple of little road trips and picked up many of the Alberta rows and a couple from Saskatchewan.  Then we did the Alaska cruise and picked up rows in Juneau, Skagway (which has the distinction of being THE MOST EXPENSIVE at close to US$40 - it has precut applique pieces, which the store felt obligated to charge for - other stores either did precuts for "free" or gave a choice of precut or cut your own, which of course would be less - but I'm not being judgemental here - just observing that the store was taking advantage of it's "captive market" of cruise ship quilters), and Ketchikan.  THEN, a friend and I did a road trip to BC to take a Judy Neimeyer class with "certified instructor" Maureen Wood.  We stopped at 8 stores on the way on the last day of the Row by Row.  So that's how you end up with ~ 30 - 40 kits/patterns. 

I had an avalanche of customer quilts come in over the summer months so have been trying to quilt my way out of that pile.  Making progress and it will go faster now that I don't have any travel plans for the next while. 

And I've made a couple of quilt tops to add to the ones already queued up waiting for quilting. 

 
I got this one section finished of a Glacier Star (Judy Neimeyer) at the Abbotsford retreat with Maureen Wood.  I have all the subcomponents made except for the rest of the curved flying geese in yellow.  Need to find some time to get those finished then I can assemble the rest of the quilt and quilt it.

 
One of my daughters-in-law is a Minions fan so I picked up the Minions panel and some Minions prints and put this together the other day.  A bit bigger than I was thinking, but I like it.  It will get priority in the quilting queue so I can get it in the mail to Hong Kong maybe in time for Christmas.

 
This is the "burst block" that popped up in my Facebook feed one day.  It's a "Man Sewing" video - which I think is related to the Missouri Star Quilt Company.  I liked the block but didn't like the way he did it  - sort of a stack and whack with precut 10" squares.  Since I typically don't get precuts, I wasn't trapped by the need to use them, so I make my own paper pieced pattern that worked MUCH BETTER.  I'm pretty pleased with the top - so just need to quilt it.  Same problem - stuck in the queue. 
 
Our fall weather has been fabulous, as it often is.  We've had a bit of rain, which we really needed in the summer but, oh well, hopefully it will be "banked" for next summer.  Here is a shot of our fall colours taken by my ever talented husband. 
 
 
And speaking of hubby - he made me a fabulous work table with batting and other storage!!!!  It's so awesome.  He took the top off my Ikea gate leg table, and built an entire new underneath for it to sit on.  It's counter height so I don't have to bend over to cut and I can put two rolls of batting on bars underneath, then there are drawers and shelves at the end.  I'm soooooo excited!!!!!