Updating--Part One

Well, Blogger seems to have taken an active dislike to one of my photos, and is refusing to upload it, so this post is going out with just two pictures and I'll try to get the others loaded into Part Two!

The pinwheel quilts are coming along. I made up some extra blocks, to ensure that I made it all the way to 600 of each direction--a total of 1200.

As of today, they are all pressed and trimmed and waiting for the next steps.

As part of another project (which I'll talk about in the next post, since it has pictures to go with it) I had to do some excavating.

Perfect excuse to do a little reorganizing while I was at it, so that's what my Saturday mostly consisted of. Lots of projects in boxes, lots of tubs and bins and boxes reorganized and cleaned out and generally made more pleasant. There's now one big tub that's all scraps and leftovers from old projects, and there are a couple of BOMs that are now have all their parts together in the same box. Should make it much easier to work on them when their turn in the rotation comes up.

And thus endeth Part One, while I go do battle with the uploader elves to see if I can get the rest of the pictures to show up!

Sunday Funnies

 Today is one of those hot steamy kinds of days that are much more typical of the East or South than the desert Southwest--very hot and very humid, oppressively so. Please indulge my little whinge here, and then I promise I'll go ahead and be more cheerful and more positive, okay? I don't like summer. There, I've said it. I have never liked it, but I've learned to endure it. At left are three reasons why, and there's one more you can't see. So yeah, give me some frozen yogurt, some ice water, and a good book, and as long as my a/c keeps working, I'm good. Yes, my a/c unit has a long history of breaking down at the first heat wave, plus I'm signed up on that program that lets the electric company cycle it off if they are nearing capacity. It's worth it to me to do that, especially if it will avoid brownouts. This house really does hold the cool fairly well, at least downstairs, so it's not that much of a hardship. Upstairs is another story, but I'm done with heat related topics for now.

 One of the Photo A Day prompts this week was "in my bag." What could be more appropriate than my knitting bag(s). Of course I have two...and there are lots more, too. These are the ones that came with me to knit group this past week.

The green one also held my Traveling Trillian, which has been finished. Well, except for two short ends left to weave in--I had done such a good job of cleaning out the bags that I didn't have a crochet hook or a yarn needle to use!

 Another piece from the photo-a-day prompts: today's was "handwriting" and naturally my brain made the leap from "handwriting" to "handwriting on quilts."

The writing on this little quilt was done with a sepia Pigma pen, and it seems to be fading quite a bit--although it was meant to look that way originally. This piece is hand appliqued, hand quilted, hand-written-on, and has also been tea-dyed to give it a faded, old look. It's supposed to look like an old handkerchief, maybe one that was wrapped around a bundle of old love letters, and stashed in a drawer. There are bits of poetry written all over it. This particular one is a quote from Milton's Paradise Lost:
"A heavenly paradise is that place/ Wherein all pleasant spirits do flow."

Then there is this other quilt that features handwriting on it. Oh my surprise surprise, it's a Double Wedding Ring!

I made this one for my parents' fiftieth wedding anniversary. We flew back to help them celebrate--first time most of my kids had been around really cold weather. February in Mass. is not exactly balmy! But they had a good time, and the weather even cooperated with a light dusting of snow flurries so they could run around in it and catch snowflakes on their tongues and all that good stuff.

Oh, and maybe get a little appreciation for my tales of having to walk to school through the snowdrifts. Well, it didn't last...I believe they even questioned whether I had to put snow tires on my dinosaur for the ride!

 The funny part of this story is that I had very carefully hand quilted the whole thing, including my signature and all the writing on it--names and dates, etc.It was very fine hand quilting, too. You can tell from the picture at left how tiny and even my stitches were!

So the next time I saw this, my dad very proudly showed me that my mother had embroidered over all my quilting stitches. "She finished it for you!"

Oh wow.

Anyway, I have it now, and it still has kind of a mixed message for me.

Maybe other hand quilters will understand and appreciate my feelings. It's that mixture of love and head-shaking that accompanies an experience like this.

I have mentioned that I'm the first quilter in the family, haven't I? So no one really has/had that tradition or understanding of quilting.

Oh well. Families are complicated!


So, onward with keeping cool! A big glass of iced coffee, my little DVD player, and it's back to trimming pinwheels.

I'm finding that there are some blocks that got into the wrong stack, so my count is off a bit. Once these are done, I'll do another count, and I came to a decision.

I'm so close to having 1200 blocks, that I may as well just make up the 10 or so that it will take to get there. Then I can make 6 full quilts, gasp.

So much for making myself a pinwheel quilt! I had no idea it would turn into this kind of a marathon project.

But, in the long run, I might as well have all 6 quilts be the same size. I can just take the numbers for one quilt and multiply by 6. Hopefully not too much room for error there.

Said in that tone of voice which admits that, where I'm concerned, with math, there's ALWAYS room for error. Mrs. Murphy is a quilter, and she lives in my quilting room!