Grandmother's Garden

I got a wonderful package in the mail on Monday—my vintage redone quilt had returned from the fabulous Chris, who worked magic with her quilting!

The first thing I did was spread it out on the living room floor to marvel at the quilting.  It was so beautiful!

My grandmother pieced the top in the late 1960s or early 1970s.  She'd sent it to my mother to finish, but that didn't happen.  Instead, it got tucked away, and I found it many years later in a big plastic tote that ended up at my house after mom passed away.

Grandma and me, picking cherries c. 1963

You can read below about me discovering the quilt top and ultimately deciding—thanks to inspiration and encouragement from Quilt Diva Julie—to take it apart and remake each block.  

Back Story and Inspiration

Blocks Before and After: 

Part One 

Part Two
Part Three
Part Four  
Top Redone

 

My goal was to preserve the wild and wonderful vintage prints in the tulip/lily-shapes and replace some of the fabrics that had condition issues.

 

Chris truly captured the eclectic spirit of the quilt with her free-form quilting.  I love, love, love it!  She matched the thread to the many colors in the blocks so that it blended in and didn't detract.  That's a lot of thread changes!  

I really appreciate the TLC she put into the quilting.  You can see more on Chris's blog and public photo album.

Slow Mojo

How is it I can ignore two whole boxes of paperwork "to be filed" for years on end, and then all of a sudden decide that it needs to be addressed this very week?  

Hm, could it be that I am procrastinating on something else?  I think we can all guess the answer to that one.

This month marks my four-year blog anniversary, and that's about exactly how long it's been since I did any serious filing or otherwise dealing with paperwork.  The good thing about waiting so long is that 80 percent of it can be tossed.  Well, not tossed, exactly, as a lot of it is personal and financial type things.  I'll probably have a little party around the burn barrel soon.  Hear that, Dad?  I'm coming over to your place to set my stuff on fire. 

A friend and former coworker, who was a young lawyer at the time and now is a financial advisor, told me he threw away all his bills right after he paid them.  Like, immediately.  On hearing this, I remember being shocked for a few seconds.  This was before the days of going paperless and online access.  I was taught one needed to save such things, although I was never really sure for how long.  His response was, "What for?" and he went on to justify the rationale for his personal statute of limitations.  I've become better at adopting this attitude in the years since, but apparently I'm not quite there yet. 

I did find my mortgage paperwork in one of the boxes, along with an original car title and my sister-in-law's Health Care Power of Attorney.  You know, things one might need to put one's hands on quickly without first having to sift through a few hundred pages of financial statements, receipts, and a couple colonoscopy reports (with color photos!).

Not much has been happening in the sewing room this week except for one sample block.  I bought a Quick Curve Ruler so I could make the Mod Olives block following the tutorial at Sew Kind of Wonderful.

But I am apparently a big fumble-futz when it comes to curved rulers.  I made a mess of the first few cuts and finally gave up on the rotary cutter altogether and used a marking pen with the ruler and then scissor-cut the pieces.  I'm not sure what my problem was there.  I'll take another whack at it (probably literally) another time.

Finally, I am taking baby steps to try to sneak around my procrastination problem. So even though it's been slow, the flow (my word for 2014) hasn't stopped completely.

A few days ago, I doodled a quilting idea for the Hubcap Diamond Star Halo quilt, and today I finally got it basted.

What are you working on this weekend?

I love everything about this song, a song about flow of another kind, as in a river (and life, in general).  Darrell Scott can sure tell a story in his songwriting, and he is a master on the guitar.

Sunday Sundry 2-16-14

Valentine's Day began with a surprise while I was lying in bed (not what you're thinking) doing my shoulder exercises.  See there?  I know how to party.

Norm had been up making coffee.  He came back upstairs with a brown paper bag garnished with a red bow.

"Happy Valentine's Day!  It's not breakfast in bed."  We had just been talking about the whole breakfast in bed thing a few days before.  I said I kind of liked the idea.  He said he didn't really care for it.  Obviously, after 30 years, this is not a deal breaker.  Just one of those things you shrug off and go, "Hunh."

I sat up and took the package.  It felt like...a bowl??  But it was even better.

A cake stand!  Not just any one, but the Georges Briard cake stand I had seen at the antique mall a couple weeks ago.  He had gone back and bought it for me a few days later.

Isn't that sweet?  I love it!

I made him some brownies yesterday in return, which, no, I did not put on the cake stand (are you kidding? I just washed it).  I totally could have though.  I will definitely will use it in the future, just you wait and see.

We went shopping yesterday and I blew my Jo-Ann gift card from Christmas on a smaller rotary cutter, some blades, and these blazing lovelies, which I hope will help melt the polar icecap that seems to have dipped into our neck of the woods this winter.

What will I make with them?  Who knows!  Maybe I'll work some of them into the Tea Towel Challenge project.  I need to get going on that again.

I also need to baste the next UFO to be quilted, which is this one, Hubcap Diamond Star Halo.  Egads, I finished the flimsy two years ago.  Surely it has aged enough by now.

Frankly, I've been a little intimidated by it.  There, I said it.  But "feel the fear and quilt it anyway," right?  Right-o.

Come to Light

It's been quiet here on the blog for a week, but I have not been sitting on my hands.  Still working my way down the UFO list. 

I wanted to relay my second experience with the Coats thread I mentioned in previous post, because I don't want to give anyone a bum steer.  I've been using it as the top thread in the current project, with Aurifil in the bobbin.  Remember how I said it didn't shred?  Well, in the words of The Dude in The Big Lebowski (still one of my favorite movies):

I'm not sure if it's because I was quilting with a walking foot last time and now I'm free-motion quilting, or maybe it's as simple as one being polyester and the other cotton; but this same Coats thread unwinds itself at the ends (frays, shreds, whatever you want to call it).  By contrast, the Aurifil bobbin thread stays nice and tight.  You can see the difference in the two threads in the photo below.

I am burying my thread ends, and I don't think it'll be a problem in this wall hanging, which won't get a lot of manipulation like a bed quilt would.  But there's that, just so you know.

Karen gave me a tip on a great sale on Aurifil thread at Sue's Sew EZ Designs.  She's closing her shop soon.  I'm going to stock up on a few spools in different colors so I have some on hand.

We had workmen here two days this week installing a new whole-house humidifier which attaches to the furnace.  Our old April-Aire gave up the ghost during the depths of the recent deep freeze with high-pitched squealing and banging noises.  The new unit, a Honeywell, went in on Monday but got unplugged by Tuesday when it was determined it was defective.  We wouldn't have known anything was wrong except our neighbors called to advise us that our air conditioning unit outside was running underneath its winter covering!  That side of the house faces theirs, and we would've had no clue this was happening had they not called.  Apparently, the problem was more than a wiring issue, so a new unit has been ordered and should go in next week, hopefully uneventfully.

While the workers were here, I was happily holed up in the sewing room quilting "pearls on a string" while listening to Led Zeppelin.  I've never been a big fan of Robert Plant's voice, but I love Jimmy's guitar.  Here's one of my favorite Zep tunes, sans vocals, by a guy who seems to be channeling Page.  Sing along if you like!  There's even cowbell at 1:20.

Let me take you to the movie

Let me take you to the show

Let me be yours ever truly

Can I make your garden grow?

Yours ever truly ~ Happy Valentine's Day!

Hemispheres Quilted

The Hemispheres Quilt-Along wall hanging is now completely done.  Another one checked off the to-be-finished list!

I used a walking foot to quilt it, following the arc of the curves and using a chaco liner to mark the curves where I didn't have the ditch to follow.

I wanted the top thread color to match the azure fabric but was limited by what was locally available on short notice.  The big box store had a turquoise Coats and Clark 40-wt. trilobal polyester embroidery thread, so I thought I'd give it a shot, with Aurifil in the bobbin.  I am happy with the result.  The CC didn't shred or lint and had a nice sheen.

The fabrics in the top are Robert Kaufman Quilter's Linen in azure, charcoal, and snow.  I love the bit of dimension you can see up close, yet it still reads as a solid from a couple feet away.

While I was at the store, I spied what looked to be an interesting fabric for the backing, so I grabbed a couple yards of that as well.
 

Some of you may recall that this JCP skirt was my inspiration. I found it while online shopping and pinned it on Pinterest, commenting that it'd make a cool quilt.

Not long afterwards, I heard about the Hemispheres Quilt-Along and saw the quilt pattern.  It was serendipity!

So there you have it for this week's finish.  Linking to: