Another website

freerice.com

I found this website on another blog I read. I think it's a good one for when you are bored and want to make a difference at the same time. I'm not sure how real it is... like are they really giving rice away? But I'll just give them the befit of the doubt.

Book Crossing

http://www.bookcrossing.com/

I came across this on my other blog and thought it was an interesting idea and thought I would share it here. ^_^

*loves books*

Opps didn't look at the comments till now. Lynn - I have looked at the site you showed me, bookcrossing is different. Your website is to keep track of books you own. ^_^

Bookcrossing is a fun way to register books and share them. You register a book on bookcrossing and then leave it somewhere, anywhere - in the park, in a locker at the gym or just anywhere you think it will find a home - hopefully someone that will be as touched by the book as you were. Leave a note in the book that it was registered in bookcrossing and they can go on bookcrossing and say where they found the book and where they are going to put it. That way you can track where your book is going and hopefully they will put that book someplace where it could reach someone else when they are done reading it.

I thought that was an interesting idea. I am trying to figure out what book I want to put on a journey.

The Raffle Team

http://www.scvqa.org/RafflesTest.php

Hey this is the test website of the Raffle team. ^_^

I'm part of the raffle team for SCVQA's 2008 calendar year.

If you have anything you want to donate to the raffle team you can contact me! I'm super excited about volunteering for SCVQA, they are a nice bunch of quilters!

My one block wonder

Here is the fabric I started with



Here is part of my set up quilt



Here is the other side (I couldn't fit in all in one shot)


Here is a closet up shot on one of the corners.


Here is one of the one block wonders where I did rotating rather than straight mirror imagines. It was pretty neat. ^_^

one block wonder Candice's quilt

Did the one block wonder with Holly and the gang.

Here is Candice's once block wonder quilt.

This is here fabric.



Here is pictures of her making her block.




Here is her setting up her quilt on her white felt. ^_^


Doesn't it look totally different from her original fabric?

Mystery quilt kind of going - part 2

Okay now I'm on part 6 and 7... that only took me a week to get to

Here's a picture of all my part 5 have square triangles. At different stages. The second to the left top are just cut but needs to be opened (I'm following the modern quilt books suggestion about opening up seams rather than having them to one side). The left top are opened up seams that need to be ironed. Bottom left are ironed, middle bottom is the other side of the ironed half square triangles so you can see I'm splitting the seam.

The bottom right is part 6, I have to make 48 of those and another 48 with the accent color going the other way.

The top right is part 7, I have make 48 of those and another 48 with the colors going the other way.



I have never felt less accomplished with the amount of work I have put into this quilt so far. I think because these parts are so tiny. We are working with 2" squares here and we have to make 96 of almost everything!

I hope to get passed this and on to part 8 by the end of the week. I don't know though...

Cutting Tip

During the Mystery Quilt day two Sundays ago. We had a new quilter join us - Patti.

She was super new. Holly and her Husband, Mike were teaching her how to cut fabric correctly.

There was a tip that Holly gave her.

When cutting multiple strips from the same fabric, you want to cut the bigger one first because if you mess up you can probably easily convert them to the small strip sizes.

I never did that! But it's sooo logical. Why have I never thought of it? Anyways totally doing that from now on and I feel that it will be quite helpful in the future.

I know this seems random but I was thinking about starting a new quilt in my mind while staring at a test and that tip totally came in my mind when I was thinking about cutting dimensions.

grid paper and how to calucate half square triangles

I personally like doing half square triangles but making the squares and drawing a line in the middle and sewing two lines 1/4th from each side. That's just me. I tried triangles on the roll, it's nice, but having the tear out all that paper was never really that fun to me and it seems like one more step till getting to ironing.

Well here's the website that shows you why adding 7/8ths to any finished half square triangle using my favoriate method of doing it works.
http://www.robertkaufman.com/quilting/ask_margrit_fall_2006/
I love how neatly he laid it out and the pictures help lots! ^_^

If you like the grid paper method (triangles on a roll) and you don't have triangles on a roll or can't get them for some reason or need to do what you need to do now. I found a website that has 1", 2", 3" and 4" printable grids.

Here it is
http://www.bellaonline.com/articles/art10208.asp
It's on the bottom of this website.

To let you know though. A long time ago I tried photo copying some triangle on a roll that Holly gave me because I needed a few extra squares for a side project and The Granery didn't have the size I needed so they suggest just photo copying the ones I haven't used yet (since I was showing them the sample I got from Holly to buy it). Trying to just use regular printer paper to do the triangles on the roll method = bad idea. I would just have been better of waiting for the triangles on the roll to get in rather than dealing with printer paper version of it. But like I said if you're in a bind you can use this.

One block wonder Fabric

I picked a fab fabric for my one block wonder! Here it is.



Well okay I don't love it, but I have time to stubble onto other fabrics since Holly can't have her lesson till probably next year. Haha I wonder how many fabrics I'm going to collect by then... I'm so bad sometimes. I would like this fabric more if the red wasn't so all over the place, it's almost like they were running out of red when they printed this fabric.

Oh well Holly and Cheri said that some of the best one block wonders come from kind of ugly fabric... we will see how that turns out. Hehe.

Wow this is a lot of blogging for one night! I hope this will keep blog readers busy! Haha, I will try to keep this more up to date, no promises though! Someday I hope to write a review of all the quilting books I have collected in the past few months... It's a lot to let you know... like 10 of them! I'm a crazy quilting book collector... I really need to stop...

Goodies from the quilt show!

I got a few things at the quilt show. One I'm not going to show off now because I am saving that for a later post.



I got a moffet templet and the super 60 ruler for when Holly has time to do the one block wonder.



I got the dice em and slice em book. Holly and Cheri showed it to me when I did the mystery quilt and thought I really wanted it. I also got two neat patterns, one for a cute purse and one for 3 glasses case that are shaped like butterflies, frogs and turtles. I thought they were super cute, the lady said it should take a few hours to figure out the first one, but after that they are pretty quick to make, about an hour she says.

Love them!

There were a lot of things I was tempted to buy. Like the professional cutting board that Holly has, but that was like 200 dollars or so, but it would have been pretty nice for all this cutting I'm doing for this step 5 of the mystery quilt. Yeah. Hehe. Oh well maybe next year I'll buy it. All I need to do is save 20 dollars a month and I'll have more than enough to buy it next year.

I know what you're all thinking no fabric!!! I know. Maybe next year. ^_^ There were some Japanese fabric I thought looked neat but I couldn't choose... actually that was my whole problem, I couldn't choose... I think by next year I will have a better sense of color, maybe have quilts in mind to do so I can choose fabric for them. ^_^

The quilt show 2007 highlights

I walked around and took pictures of the quilts I liked best. I choose a couple to show off. I think I got some ideas from them. Very cool quilts!

Here we go.



The golden stitch from Harry Potter, very neat.



Bald Eagles I like the use of color and technique here. Not sure what they did but it's neat



Oh this one was cool. This lady has been with her husband for a really long time, and took all their old clothes to make this memory quilt. It's very lovely.



I like the swirly quilt parts. It's what I noticed about this quilt I think it was very well done.



I just thought that this had a neat old black and white picture feeling to it. Okay maybe I just thought the flames on the car were cool. ^_^



Got to show a Halloween quilt of course. I like this one the most. It reminds me of when I was in grade school.



I like pigs what can I say? I also it reminds me of the pillow quilt top that Lynn made about a year ago. ^_^



River with bridges thought that was a neat idea for a quilt.



I thought this was pretty cool. The bicycles are appliqué and are really black ribbon! I wouldn't have thought of doing that, but now I'm totally going to use that if I do something like that.



Here's the best for last. It's only quilted. It's black fabric with colored quilting tread. I thought it was pretty good, no wonder it won a prize. ^_^

Okay I'll admit it. There are probably a lot of other wonderful quilts that I missed out on. I didn't take pictures of everything, just what kind of struck me, and these are the highlights. Some of you will have different views about what you thought was neat or cool this was just what I thought.

Mystery quilt kind of going

Last last Sunday. Sorry I haven't blogged in a while ^_^ Been busy.

Anyways last last Sunday Holly had a Mystery quilt day. Me and Cadence worked on it for about 6 hours and we are only on step 2! There are 14 steps... It's sad I know.

Here are pictures of what I have done so far.



I have been working on it for about an hour each night or so. Not much farther. I'm on step 5 but it involves a lot of cutting. Like 192 squares 2" and 96 half square triangles of light (purple for me) and accent (orange for me) fabric and 96 2" x 31/2 rectangles of main print (the black fabric). I only have the light cut out right now.

I have no idea how it's going to turn out. I'm sure some of you out there do... but I'll just leave it as a surprise ^_^

Oh by the way if you don't have triangles on a roll for 1.5" finished square, you can cut 2 and 3/8th squares and just draw a line in the middle and sew 1/4th from that on both sides and it's just as good. I had to calculated that! It seems for any finished square you add 7/8ths to get what you want from this method of doing half square triangles.

Binding Class

Yesterday I went to a binding class at the Granary.

There were only two people in the class. Lucky me.

I had one extra square from my bento box quilt so I used that to practice binding.

I really liked the class, even though it was only a beginner class I got taught bais binding and so here it is.

From the back



From the front.



In the class it was great because she showed us some binding clips. I really like them because I usually use pins or bobby pins and I got poked a lot and so with binding clips I think will be better. I will only get stabbed by the needle now. ^_^

Oh next to my binding sample is the rest of my binding that I'm going to use for the real quilt. I'm one step closer to finishing the bento box quilt. yay!

Tonight I went to the SCVQA meeting. The speaker was pretty great. I liked her a lot. I get the feeling that I have only been exposed to the best speakers so far. I wonder what will be next.

Also I volunteered to help with the raffle group for next year. That I think will be fun. The ladies I'm paired up with are very nice and so I think it will be great.

Pin wheels for the SCVQA

I followed the instruction for the block of the month. They are suppose 11 inch blocks and for some reason I got 8 inch blocks. I don't know how they could have came out to be 11 inches at all, I looked at the measurements and redid the calculations and there is no way I could get 11 inches. Could the measurements they gave us be wrong?

Oh well here are my blocks. I just used what ever colorful scraps I had around.




Sorry I have blogged for almost a month. Jeez that's a long time. I just haven't really been quilting. Though I did buy a lot of quilting books during this time. I will try to post about them soon.

Tomorrow I'm taking the binding class at the Granary and of course Thursday night is the SCVQA meeting. So this week is a lot of quilting activities.

EDIT - I totally know what I did wrong. See the color parts in the middle? You're suppose to cut 4 3/4 squares in half to get them, but I cut them into 1/4ths because you cut the white part into 1/4ths and I sort of just did the same thing.

No wonder they are so small! Melody = needs to read instructions better.

garden quilt top - 42" x 58"

I'm done with my garden quilt top and let me just say I think it looks super nice! Please excuse all the blue tape I used to hang it on my wall.

Okay here it.



The middle part is London Stairs and then I just put a border around it.

Thanks Holly for giving the perfect fabric for the border! I love it!

It looks a lot better in person too. If only you can see it!

Here is my hand picture, I think I will do this for all my quilts since I have done it with most of them. ^_^ This does give you a closer look at the awesome border fabric!

quilt as you go

I found this website on the internet today. Holly has been trying a quilt as you go method and was going to show us but has not time right now. So I thought I would look it up on the internet.

Now I don't think this is what Holly is going to show us but I thought it was interesting. Now that I'm quilting my benton box quilt I sort of wished I did something like this. it's such a pain to move the quilt around on my tiny tiny sewing mechine.

http://www.secretsof.com/content/624

So now I have to make a quilt to do this with. ^_^ Might be fun. Definitly going to work on my quilting skills.

Though this involves a lot of hand stitching which I'm not a fan of at all. But I know it's better that way.

-----

edit : oh look I think I found they way Holly's doing it too.

http://www.quilterscache.com/H/howtoquiltoneatatime.html

basting and quilting the bento box top

So last night, even though I went with my friends to get the harry potter book, oh my gosh borders was such a mad house. I am never doing that again!

I came home around 1am and decided I wanted to finally bast my bento box quilt

Here's some pictures of it.



This is me setting up the backing for it. It was kind of hard to find space in my living room for it. But I some how managed.


I was half way done pinning it around 3am. It was going pretty well. I learned a lot from doing it the wrong way the first time. I think this will go a lot better. *nods*



Finally I finished pinning it this morning. I was about 70% last night before I thought hm.. it's 4:30 am maybe I should get some sleep. This morning I got up and started pinning again.




And now I'm here quilting it. It's going to be pretty simple. I'm just going to follow the pattern lines. So if you flip the quilt to the back you can see the bento box in the quilt lines. Well that's my plan. I think I'll be at the binding by tonight. And then it will take me a month to finish hand blind stitching it!

christmas blocks!

I got a new block tool, so exciting! I started quilting blocks from it with my Christmas fabric. My Christmas quilt will be crazy when I put all the blocks for it together.

Well here are the blocks I made from my block tool.





I like the top block more. I think the second block is too busy. Hey look I can tell when something is too busy! ^_^

thread ran out!

My thread finally gave out. Good thing I sort of knew this would happen and got new thread. Comparing the two, I thought wow I went through a lot of thread!!

Finally! Some quilting for me!

So I finished my blocks tonight

Here is the 12 inch number one. It turned out pretty good. ^_^



Here is the 12 inch number two. For some reason I didn't have enough blue for the triangles but lucky I had a blue in my stash that was pretty close to the color. I wonder if you can tell which blue I added. ^_^



Oh I also fixed the block I missed up on. Now it's all pretty and ready to be sewn up with the rest of the quilt.



I will probably sew it up tomorrow which should take me like two seconds.

I also worked on my stair case quilt but all I did was sew really long strips together because it's basically two pieces of fabric sewn together and than position to make it look like stairs. I cut up all my purple fabric so what I get out of it is all I have. I'll probably finish that quilt top tomorrow.

Right now I sort of feel that quilting is kind of addicting. For the short time that my friend stayed with me I really felt kind of grumpy and almost upset that I couldn't quilt because he taking up quilting space in the living room. I would be so much farther right now! I might have more work done on my Christmas quilt (well probably not the Christmas quilt) and be done with the stairs, I would totally have been done with these squares like 2 days ago if he wasn't here. Oh well back to my hermit life of quilting madness. ^_^

My thread is almost gone! Good thing I got another spool this week. Wow going through a spool of thread makes me feel like I quilted a lot.

I'm also feeling like I'm getting better at this following patterns and stuff. These squares didn't take me nearly as long as the 8 inch squares. See I finished both in one night where as the 8 inch ones were a night each.

Good times though! ^_^

Blah

A guest has been staying with me for last couple of days and basically took over the spot where I usually have my sewing machine and iron set up!

I feel so quilting deprived. It's really sad, I want to quilt! Oh well tomorrow. I can quilt tomorrow. ^_^

working on christmas quilt

I have a lot of Christmas themed fabric. So I have been doing random things with it. I think with all the pieces I have will somehow make a quilt from that.

Here's what I worked on tonight

Roll by Roll Quilt - finished the sailboat roll

Just finished the sail boat roll!

I don't know why I dislike triangles so much. They are just a hassle to work with. Though the last two rolls are paper piecing and applica which probably aren't much nicer. ^_^

And here's the picture.



Yup you can really tell it's my first quilt because of the horrible color picking on my part. Well it's kind of funky. Hehe crazy sky and dark water. I should have thought this out more but I really didn't know better. I would totally do the colors differently if I worked on it now.

Roll by Roll Quilt Update

It's funny. This was the quilt that got me started quilting and I'm not even close to being done with it at all. It's really crazy. Here's what I have it so far.



I decided to put off the small group quilt for the day and work on this one.

Here's all my triangles, I still need to cut them out. ^_^



Here's a link to the book I'm using for it - http://softexpressions.com/software/books/LearnQltRow.php (stolen from Lynn's blog ^_^)

fabric!

Okay I finally folded up my fabric stash. It's not even organized and it took me forever to do today.

Here's the picture of the stash.



Seriously what am I going to do with all this fabric? ^_^

PikMin

I started playing PikMin last night. I know hecka old game, but it was on sale and I never played it before. I started playing it around 1:30 and kind of got caught up with it till 4am! It is pretty fun. I usually have trouble with these types of games because of my poor hand/eye coordination. Let's see how long it takes me to finish it. I'm on day 6 out of 30.



http://www.gamestop.com/product.asp?product%5Fid=916067

Color quilting book

So I have some issues choosing the right colors for my quilt. Guess what I got! It's way great. It's called "Color Magic for Quilters" I love it!

Here are some snap shots of it








And you can get it here - http://www.amazon.com/Color-Magic-Quilters-Absolutely-Successful/dp/0875969852/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/102-6009768-5717742?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184483003&sr=8-1

small group quilt day 3

Okay done with another middle size block so right now only 2 more sets left! Yay Melody.



If you have the quilters eye you can see that I messed up. The top right and bottom left are suppose to be rotated so the blue looks like it makes an X in the block. Argh. I guess I'll redo it tomorrow. Night peeps.