Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Found them!

Phew... I finally found them. :)

I was laying down, trying to ease the tension in my shoulders and my thoughts wandered to where the quilts might be. Then I realized it could be under the 25 yards of flimsy muslin I have. Oh yes indeed!! :)

I also "found" this quilt... eh, not that I realized it was lost. :P But the rows need to be sewn together... might as well add it to the pile?

I'm feeling so much better now... I think I'll sew! Never mind that I still haven't packed any clothing or personal items yet. But I've got the majority of my quilting stuff packed up! :D

Leah

When I should have been packing...

...I might have been sewing. :D

Yup, more progress on the Galaxy Stars quilt. I think I've got the hardest part behind me. It'll just be block sections to piece, and then to put together into a top.

I also need to seriously organize my room... I'm losing quilts! I've lost my snowball and 9-patch blocks. I hunted and hunted for it... but it just wasn't findable. At least it's all together, and not likely a block here, block there. :P On the other hand, I'll forgive myself, as I haven't done anything with it in 1.5 years.

While hunting around, I also realized that I managed to misplace my Snail's Trail quilt top. Ugh. Haven't seen it in about a year. And you'd think I'd be organized enough to hang it up so stuff like this doesn't happen!

Yeah, I'm a little mad at myself, but that's ok... I found a different quilt top to finish piecing at my parents house. Fancy that. :D

Leah

Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Beginnings of Galaxy Quilt

Got the 16-patches done! I can't promise that this is the correct shading... I might have gone a little crazy in Photoshop Elements. ;)

I haven't done too much more progress on the Galaxy quilt at this time. The heat got to me again. And it's pretty bad - I can drink a gallon of water throughout the day and only go to the bathroom once or twice. Normally, my bladder would have exploded several times over. :P

Got several errands accomplished today, including swinging by the hearing aid place. My left hearing aid was constantly creating a vacuum-like suction that was cutting off my ability to hear. I'd wiggle the hearing aid around and it'd return back to normal. I was thinking the tube was too narrow, but turns out there was a pinch in the tube! It was effectively cutting off about half of the tube's workability. No wonder. Glad to have that resolved, as I want to be able to hear when I visit my parents.

Yup, I'll be seeing them later this month! We're driving instead of flying, so I'm taking my sewing machine and a few projects with me. I already bought over 100 yards of fabric, and my mom has bought more dye than I have ever seen in my life! We're gonna have fun. :)

Off to drink some more water!

Leah

Saturday, June 07, 2008

Yup, new project

I decided to go ahead and do galaxy stars, heat or no! :)

Here's a bunch of the strips that I'm about to subcut.

The directions said that I would need (85) 2" strips, I accidentally cut 90... and now I have more that 25 of them leftover! Yikes... that's pretty wonky math. So I double checked the background math, and it's pretty exact, go figure. The good news is that I have no doubt at all that I'll find a use for all those 2" strips. :)


Here's all the hand dyes cut up.

2" squares, 2"x3.5" and 2"x5" pieces. I accidentally cut too many 2" squares too... but again, I'll find a use for them. :) I'm doing the largest size listed (111x99), so that meant extra 2x3.5" pieces to cut.


Now I'm working on the black background fabric, but that doesn't photograph well. ;) What I'm really happy about is that the directions called for (14) 6.5" squares, but I actually got 18 squares out of the three strips I cut.

That adds up to 4 leftover squares, which is EXACTLY what I need to finish this snowball and 9-patch quilt that I frankly have no clue where it is right now. :P



In other exciting news, I got Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 installed! I bought it back in February with the Christmas gift card my brother gave me. Except I ran into a "minor" issue - I couldn't get my DVD Rom drive to open. :P (Don't blame my computer, it's an old geezer at 5 years old now).

So I would pathetically press on the button every few days, feel it whir and click, but nothing opened. Today I decided to give my drive a "lift" by slightly pressing the slot upwards, and it opened!! Finally. :D

And yes, today's pictures are edited (cropped and resize, I haven't figure how to manipulate color yet) and brought to you by Adobe Photoshop. ;)

Leah

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

A new project?

I' ve been thinking of starting a new quilting project. I won the Galaxy pattern from Suzanne (congrats on your new business venture!) and I had no doubt that I would want to do that pattern in black background and hand dyed fabrics. But do I really want to start another quilt, especially in this heat?!

I can see from the picture I need to take out a few pink/purples and replace them with a blue or two. Maybe swap out a yellow for another orange?

What's holding me back is the heat - I really don't want to turn on the iron! It even crossed my mind to see about setting the ironing board out the front door. Well, it's supposed to cool down some on Thursday, so that might be a good day to open up the windows and do some ironing. Yeah... I'll do that. :)

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We finally got my husband's computer finally fixed for real. We were under delusions that it was better, but then it started crashing every 10 minutes or so. Back to the shop! It took the guys a few days to figure it out, but they finally reset the bios on the motherboard and it's been crashed free since. But poor guy, he was fighting with it all week. If I just replace the word "computer" with "sewing machine", suddenly I can relate very well how he feels! ;) But he has a laptop, and I have a back up sewing machine, so it's not like we have to go hobby-less for a bit anymore.

Tomorrow is my quilt guild meeting. Good thing my husband is gonna wake up when I do, cuz I'm planning to steal his quilt for show and tell. :D

Leah