One Hour a Day

Bonnie Hunter from Quiltville challenged her blog readers to join her in working on hand stitching projects for one hour a day. Since I have several hand projects in the works right now, I'm joining in! If you've come from Bonnie's blog, that means I've figured out how to do her Linkie.

Here's my hand project - I'm calling it my Jubilee+5 Garden Quilt for now. Go to this blog to find out more about our Jubilee quilts. We're a group of quilters making quilts to celebrate our 50th or other significant number birthdays. I'm late working on my quilt because my birthday was back in July.

My quilt is a wallhanging version of a quilt seen on Quiltsalott's blog. I admire her quilts very much. Mine includes fabric about things I might see in my flower garden.
There have been a few bumps along the way. Like stitching the blocks together wrong but all that's been fixed now and below is what my quilt looks like as of last night.

I plan to embroider my initial "M" on the middle block and am trying out a paper "M" to see if its the right size. I'm still thinking its too large.


This week, I hope to finish piecing the square gray polka dot insets in between the blocks. I would also like to begin embroidering my initial because I can't join it all together until that's done.


Its going to be a very hot day here - 105 degrees last I checked. We're grilling tonight and I plan to bake an apple pie for dessert. Its already 76 degrees outside so I better start in on baking now during the "cool" of the day!

Disappearing HSTs

I'm working, as I can, on Quiltville's latest mystery quilt, Roll Roll Cotton Bowl and thought I'd give you an update. Actually the reason I'm posting is I'm probably just procrastinating getting started on it today! You've heard of the Disappearing Nine Patch pattern? This post is about my disappearing Half Square Triangles.

Here's one of the finished blocks from the step released last week. Don't be too impressed because I only have 3 of them done! I've finished parts of several steps but I can't seem to totally catch up on all of them. I have no idea why I'm struggling with the neutral string blocks but I'm way behind on them. Tomorrow, Bonnie Hunter will release the final step which may be a pieced border. What else would you do with 172 parallelograms from Step 6?

Okay, here is what my ironing board looks like today. Well not quite true, I've artistically covered the water stains my iron has left behind but otherwise, this is what's on it. You can see Half Square Triangles sewn into groups of 5 and a few stacks of groups of 4 which should be 5, more red/neutral fabric plus the triangle paper. Guess what that means?

This afternoon, I'm going to solve the mystery of the disappearing HSTs. A few days ago, I determined I was short a few of the red/neutral HSTs. Then the number ballooned up to being short 20 and last night I decided that even though I was really sleepy, I'd recount because that number couldn't be right. I was right it wasn't correct. I now need 37 more red/neutral HSTs! I even got out my trusty old calculator and rechecked. How could it be an odd number? Where have they all gone to? Are my math skills that bad or am I having a senior moment?!? I do know I better make those 37 HSTs and sew them into blocks before I'm short even more.

Part of the problem may be that I didn't get started on the RRCB step to make the red/neutral HSTs until almost Christmas Eve. When I saw that the quilt needed 600 HSTs, I nearly threw in the towel. I'm glad I hung in there but its kind of disappointing to think you have enough made and then have to go back and make more.

I used to think I'd like an entire bed quilt made out of HSTs. I'm rethinking that but you know, I have a short memory so who knows what my quilting future will hold?!?

Selvages, selvages everywhere!

Have you heard about the Process Pledge? Its a blogging idea that encourages bloggers to tell more about their creative process instead of just showing a picture of their final project. I just took the pledge and I thought I'd share a little about the process of making my selvage spiderweb blocks!


At this point in my creative process, my sewing room is a mess! There are several piles of selvages on the floor, on the ironing board and on my sewing machine cabinet. This pile is the largest. These are all the selvages I've used in the inner rings which still have more selvage to use.

I still have about half a tub of selvages to go before I start over on the pile. So far, I've only made 13 square blocks and if I'm really going to make this a bed size quilt, I have quite a few more blocks to make!

I've been following Tallgrass Prairie Studio's tutorial on how she adapted Quiltville's instructions to make a Selvage Spiderweb quilt. The slippery and shiny project I was working on has been put aside so I can concentrate on this quilt for a while. Looks like I'll soon be making a bridesmaid dress for my daughter so I want to get as far along as I can in the next week!