My Spring Day

The past few days have really been spring here,  with azaleas Everywhere! and now the garden centers are bringing out bedding plants.  We had some grass dug up a couple of days ago to turn into a larger area with ground cover instead and so we went out and got some ivy and other stuff to put in there, and picked up some really pretty snapdragons as well-- I don't think I've ever seen this ombre effect before:

 Of course once we were out and about, we had to go for coffee!

 One of my favorite coffee spots here is called Foxy Loxy, and it's in an old house, and I think that they might make the best coffee I've had in Savannah,  (I know, I know, I love Gallery Espresso too!)  I took richard there today, and it has a courtyard in the back.  It was so peaceful and pleasant back there.

Home again, I have finished the double wedding ring quilt!  Yes, it even has the binding finished....

 and it lays flat! and I didn't have to quilt in the colored parts-- that tells you how wonky it was before i quilted it.

 These are some of the quilting designs that I was quite happy with:

4 leaves

flower garden

butterfly like flowers

wavy line cross-hatching

radiating bubbles

snail

like a field

 And this is the piece of furniture we picked up the other day at the garage sale;

 It has faux finishes, and some cute little lace paneled doors,
 and the front drawers opens up and down into a desk surface

 I love furniture that has curvy parts!

 Well that's my report for today.
Except that I have been bitten by the clay bug.
Also, I plan to make popovers now that Deirdre has sent me a link to a mouthwatering looking recipe.

Also... it is Wednesday, so It is ithe link-up to the needle and thread Network page:

click here   

Some Mysteries

There are large mysteries, and small.  One thing that perhaps you can assist with is to identify what this mysterious object is:   (I bought it for 2$ yesterday at a flea market)

 Well, I can sort of see what it "is"-- six little cylindrical pots held together in a framework, made of a thick aluminum, I think.  But I am mystified to what it was created for-- what it's use is/was.

 (here is a bit more of my booty from the sale.....

some nice frames, a desk lamp for 5$, and some pleasant flower paintings,.  We also got a nice used piece of furniture made by MacKenzie Childs, but it is still in the back of the truck, waiting for some stronger people to carry it into the house,  so I will photograph it later this week.

Today, I've been very busy quilting again.  Lots of FMQ (Free Motion Quilting) going on around here. 
I had been doing swatches (largely based on Leah Day's FMQ blog-- button on sidebar!), and was then trying those designs on my bright quilt, until I came to the end of my 1000m of pink/orange variegated thread --- that's the empty green spool pictured here.  Yes, there is lots of stitching on that quilt, but I am using the thread in the bobbin as well as on the top, so, really it has 1/2 of a kilometer stitched on it so far.

I was having a good time with this, and was reluctant to have it come to an end.  So, I decided to quilt the double wedding ring quilt that I had pieced Last Year. 

I really couldn't see doing all the centers with the same design, as that would get a bit boring, so I just carried on with my pattern experiments. 

I did an outline of the curves first with the walking foot-- in the ditch.  That way I could remove all the pins and have it pretty well stabilized.  This was also helpful because this quilt top did not lay flat.  Not by a long shot.  With all those curves and odd shapes meeting, the white spots need to be quilted into submission.

It might be that I need to do something in the colored fabric spots as well, but I'll worry about that later.

 these are some of the patterns that I am trying in the white spaces.   It is fun to fit a pattern into these odd shapes-- the little inside pieces that look like footballs, and the larger squarish shapes with concave sides. 

 I did do some practice ideas in my sketchbook.  With those and my little swatches, it isn't too hard to make something different in the shapes as I go along. 
 And this is the back of the quilt so far:

It's going to be another of my quilts that I think of as "finished is better than perfect".  
 I hope you are having a wonderful weekend too!

Double Wedding Ring

I recently decided that a double wedding ring quilt would be nice to have around. Done in old-fashioned looking fabrics for a real vintage feel.  I did a wall=hanging several years ago that had 9 rings, and it went okay.  Well, it doesn't lay particularly flat, but it didn't cause me too much angst. 

So I started one, thinking to make it 16 rings, in a 4 x 4 arrangement, a nice square lap size. Fortunately i still have the book with the wedding ring pattern templates in it.  I really like this book, "Quilts Galore!", by Diana McClune and Laura Nownes.  I decided to cut down the size of the rings, since I wanted that old-fashioned look, as you know.  So, I just copied the templates at 80% of the full size.  So, instead of a ring being 17" across, I suppose it will be smaller.  Not quite sure of the actual size. 

There was quite a bit of cutting pieces from templates.  Started sewing arcs together, then football shapes.  After a while, I decided to lay out some of the pieces:

 Aaahhh, I thought. This looks a little boring.  So I thought I'd add in some other colors to jazz it up a bit. Right-o. 

 So, because I'd already cut out all the pieces, I now had to make the quilt bigger to add in new colors.  I think I finally settled on a 5 x 6 arrangement.  So I cut out more template pieced fabrics, and sewed more arcs and more football shapes and laid them out on the floor to see how it's going. 

I think it looks pretty much like it did before I jazzed it up.  But now it's bigger. 
Well, whatever.  I am nearly at the hard part, where I have to sew in that squarish center piece and then join them all together.  So I will now take a little break from this project. 
michelle