Sunday, October 29, 2006

1 Little, 2 Little, 3 Little Quilts

Well, yesterday I pretty much finished my 3 little wall hangings for the church bazaar! I only have to put the sleeves & labels on the backs. The center squares are hand-embroidered from this book called "Love Covers" by Tricia Cribbs. She used her mother's embroidery designs and put them together into a large quilt. I knew that I would never get a large quilt done for the bazaar, so I made some small wall hangings instead. This way the joy can be spread around! All of the fabrics I chose to use around the squares are reproduction 1930s fabrics that I had been collecting in my stash. They are machine-pieced and machine-quilted.

The first one I did was "Jesus loves me this much." It is 13" square. used the regular embroidery outline stitch on this one. I wasn't sure how I liked that, so I didn't use it on the next one. I also did all of the straight walking foot quilting before the stippling and I had gone and quilted that line down the border and I sure wish I hadn't done that! I should have stippled it instead. Oh, well. Live and learn.



The second one I stitched was "Love is ..." This one is 18.5" x 12". I used a backstitch for the letters and liked the folksy look better. I think it complemented the letter style more. It is similar to what she used in the book.



The third one is " Joy" and is 15.5" x 19.5". It seems to be everyone's favorite! Both of my daughters really like it. My oldest one has brown curly hair so she says that's her singing!



I may try to get a 4th one finished before the bazaar BUT it is Nov 11th! And I do have to work fulltime and take care of everything else besides. So we'll see. That's why I totally finished up these three first. I'll put their sleeves and labels on before I start a fourth. Hope you enjoyed the photos!

Happy Stitching!
Wasie

Monday, October 23, 2006

From Paris, France to Hatch, NM

Now that I think I have finally figured out this photo thing, I am going to start posting some photos of the quilts I have finished lately!

Here is a "Turning Twenty in Paris" quilt that I made this summer--July to be exact--for my 16 year-old-daughter Jessica. She was gone to camp for a month and we sort of redid her room for a surprise. My family was so proud of the fact that I had this quilt completely finished in 2 weeks! Mary at Mary's Quilt Shop did the quilting on her longarm machine so I can't take credit for that. Oh, one of the reasons that we did this for my daughter was because she was not just attending camp; she was volunteering at the Juliette Low Camp for disabled girls near Kansas City. She really worked hard for these girls! They had all sorts of disabilities from quadraplegics to autism to deafness. All of the volunteers were girl scouts. I was so impressed with everything Jess and all of the girls did. Way to go gals!




You may notice a lot of eiffel tower fabric. She is into Paris these days as she is taking French III this year in high school. I made some window drapes for her room out of the pink eiffel tower fabric also. Oh and she loved it and was very excited when she came home and found all of the Paris paraphernalia.

Green Chiles are one of the favorite foods at our house especially since we lived in Las Cruces, NM for so many years before moving to Texas. We consider Hatch chiles to be THE BEST! I even did a postdoc isolating capsaicinoids from chile peppers at New Mexico State. So when I saw all of these chile pepper fabrics I knew I had to do something with them!





Here is "Yellow Brick Road New Mexico Style."




I just put the binding on it last week. And boy am I glad it is finally finished. It has just been lacking the binding for awhile. I am afraid I have a few like that. I just don't seem to like bindings for some reason. So I am trying to force myself to get them done. I tried a new method where you do the entire thing on the sewing machine. (Thanks, Susan.) It certainly went faster-so maybe I'll get some more of them done. sigh...

Well, I am nearly finished with some miniature wall quilts for the church bazaar. They have embroidery in the middle. I will post the photos when they are finished.

Happy Stitching,
Wasie

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

MINI Mania Strikes

Well, MINI Mania has definitely struck our household! In June we purchased our first MINI—a 2006 hyper blue checkmate cooper.with a silver roof and silver swoop. It is a standard, has premium, & cold weather packages besides the checkmate pkg. We all 4 are in love... Everyone wants to ride in it all the time. We ordered it in April and watched and waited for her to be born, cross the ocean, pass through the distribution center and finally arrive at our dealer at the end of June! Heres some photos. Her name is Lil' Lucy.





I started driving her to work when I went back in August, and so she went with me to Oklahoma every day. She pretty much is my car anyhow... But I guess my hubby just missed her sooo much he couldn't stand it. So he found one for himself! So now we have two! His is a used one. It's a 2003 electric blue cooper S with a white roof and white bonnet stripes. (He really liked electric blue when he found it; wouldn't have any other color!) It's a standard also much to our teenage daughters' chagrin! But hubby loves it. His also came with navigation and it's a hoot! It's a "she" as she has a British accent and uses all of these British terms. It is so fun. You want to program the nav even if you know where you're going just to hear her say, "200 yards straight on" in her lil accent. We were going to name his car "Ricky"—that was the original plan—but couldn't do that with that female voice! So he's named her "Sparky". Here's some pics of "Sparky".




If that all wasn't bad enough. We just had to take a couple of days off work—not easy for a college prof—and go play in the MINI Takes the States tour when it came to Dallas! We drove Lucy in the group for a couple of days. Unfortunately, that was all we could spare. I sure did want to go to St Louis and Indy!

MINIs in Memphis


MINI USA Tour Bus


Electric Blue Lineup in Memphis


Now that we have a cooper and a cooper S our daughters think we need to add the two convertibles to the family to "complete the set!" They'd be happy to each drive one! Only one is driving age and she is working on getting her license. She has even attempted the dreaded standard transmission! A friend at work said that he could just see us now...all following each other in our MINIs! sigh

Wasie