Middle of August already?

Summer is racing by! Looking forward to my family coming to visit in September!!  Their trip has been postponed due to illness of one of the children, but it is back on the schedule for next month. 🙂

Since my last post, I have finished up some sewing for the granddaughter’s 2nd birthday and worked on a couple of other projects.  Our guild does “pillowcases for hope”, and I stitched up two right before our last guild meeting to drop off, and came home with two more kits.  I had some silly fun fabric purchased last spring to make something fun for my big sister. I decided it would be PERFECT fabric for her travel pillows!!  She is usually out on the road, “PILOTING” for big rig trucks with over sized loads.  I think she will like these cowboys!!

Cowboy pillowcases

Aren’t they FUN ??  I’m sure when she rests her weary head after a long day on the road, she will have sweet dreams with her head on these pillow cases.  Shhhhh….don’t tell, I want to surprise her when I go visit this weekend. (I have about 1 1/2 yards left, and am thinking she will get a nice apron out of the same fabric for her birthday).

Before I got started on pillowcases, I finished up two sundresses for my two year old granddaughters birthday.  I had a great pattern I bought at my local quilt shop, It was called To Tie For, by Olive Anne Designs.  I had some fun tutti-fruitti fabric put away for sundresses, and this is what I came up with in the end.

Sundresses – “to Tie for” design by Olive Ann. size 3.

Fun happy little duck

 

I love that they are reversible.  Took longer to stitch out the cute little duck on the embroidery machine then it did to stitch the dresses together. I made a ‘dolly’ size one out of the dark pink fabric. Poor dolly only got one new dress.

Last Tuesday we had our Quilt Guild class, and I signed up to attend.  The project was a mosaic piece, done with 1 inch squares.  I had found some great hand dyed fabrics at the Hershey Quilt Show in July ($5 for a bag of scraps) that were PERFECT for this project. So, after using up a yard & 1/2 of “wonder under” and cutting up some nice little squares; this is the result:

It was a lot of fun to make.  nothing like a class where you don’t sew a stitch!  After it was all fused on to the background fabric, I quilted it.  I broke the instructors rules however, and did it “my way” …

getting the water in place

playing in the blue water

Fun stitches to catch every block

the back of the crab

finished mosaic crab

This project was lots of fun.  It ended up at 24×24″; and needs to be “finished” on the edges. Thinking about that for a bit, border or just bind it. And what color to use….I am leaning towards a batik in the blue green range….A friend of mine suggested something bright.  It will be a wall hanging, so I have to think about that a bit. Maybe I will just skip the border and face it. .. Something to consider for a bit.

Did a little charity baby quilt work this past week and a half too.  Our quilt bee, the Material Girls, has been working for several months on a project that will be delivered to a local doctor and then taken to Honduras.  I machine quilted and bound 2 tops that someone else put together, and built made 2 more tops and finished them off as well. I seem to be the collection point so I got busy yesterday and got all 6 washed and ready to go. I have a couple more kits ready to put together, and may get them done in early September.

six flannel baby quilts ready to go.

Charity baby quilt. I had fun machine quilting this one

back side of the blue & tan; scrappy binding.

Now, I must get back to business, finishing up my booking contracts with quilting lecturers and workshop instructors for the guild!  I feel better now that I got to play with fabric for a bit.     (I am hand delivering those cowboy’s to my big sister in California….so this post wont publish until she gets them in her hand, and the granddaughter’s sundresses hopefully arrive in the mail!  I wrapped her gifts up in a pillow case, and have forgotten to take a picture of it before I sent it all out in the mail. 😦 oh well…..) Happy Stitching.