Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Progress on the Doll Quilt and a Mug Rug Sketch...

 I made some progress on the doll quilt, I'm doing a "Wheel of Fortune" mini quilt for my partner.  Hopefully she'll like it, it was a challenge to do with 96 little triangles, each triangle has 4 pieces of fabric in it, that's a lot of seams and this little puppy weighs a lot!  Here you can see the size difference between unsewn triangles at the bottom and 4 sewn ones at the top.  All the seam allowances shrink it by about 25%.


 All sewn together- it measures 10.5" x 13.75".  I'll add a white border and then bind it with a pink, maybe a scrappy binding.


A close of one of the stars.  Getting these little strips to line up correctly was a pain in my butt, some of them I unpicked and resewed 3 times.  Grrr!


It's still not perfect, but it's acceptable, I think.


Gravey seems to approve of it!  :)

And here is my sketch for the Haiku mug rug swap.  It's a bird, bathing in a cup of tea.  Pretty whimsical, but I think it's funny and the poetry possibilities are good.  :)


Family is in town this week!  Too bad it's about 100º here and dry.  Lots of stay-inside time, I predict.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

DQS 11 ideas.... Wheel of Fortune

We're starting a new doll quilt swap, round 11.  We've changed the rules a little for this round.  A more traditional quilt is required this time, one that is more like a miniature of a full sized bed quilt, not an art quilt.  So this means- teeny, tiny piecing!  Good thing I recently learned how to paper-piece!  That's when you sew your fabrics to a paper foundation, using the lines that are on the paper to guide you.  I did my wonky stars using that method and it was great practice, so now  I'm going to attempt to make a Wheel of Fortune miniature quilt.  It's similar to a spiderweb quilt, like I did a couple of rounds ago.  After stalking my partner and learning a bit about her, I think that she'll like this if I do it up in white with scrappy bits of pink and orange and red.  If she doesn't, maybe I'll have to keep it!  I think I'm going to like it a lot.  :)




 
On the personal front, it's been hotter than heck here, over 100º every day for the last few weeks and no rain, just scorching hot and still humid, go figure.  Finally, today, we're getting a few drops of rain, I hope it's enough to revive the drooping bushes and thirsty trees and parched grass.  NW Arkansas is a beautiful place but we typically have dry summers and when we get rain in July, it's such a treat!

All the cats are fine, they lay around most of the day and night, because it's just too hot to do anything.  The hummingbirds are eating like crazy, but have slacked off the last couple of days so I suspect they're sitting on their second nest of eggs right now.  We have 4 big feeders out and I was filling them every day, but now I can actually go 2 days!  So that little break for me is nice. 

I hope you're all having a nice summer!

Monday, July 4, 2011

Happy Fourth of July to the USA!



Happy Fourth of July!

I finished up my set of red birds- spring, summer, autumn and winter... Autumn looks very patriotic, doesn't he?


I had made 2 of these little birds a while back when the bitty theme was birds- I offered a choice of the spring or winter birds.  Then I decided a set of 4 was in order so I made a couple more, summer and autumn.  I had some time to work on them on Friday and so I pulled some fabrics and got them done.  Each little mini measures 7" square. I think I need to add a falling leaf on the autumn one as his leafy bits aren't really showing up too well, it's overpowered by the red and the dark blue.  Other than that, though, I'm pretty pleased with these.  :)

It's nice to actually be getting things done for a change, I need to do this more often.  Seems like I start a lot of things, but don't finish them in a timely fashion.  

None of you guys would ever do that, right?  lol  Yeah, that's what I thought!  I'm in good company!