Ten Thousand Villages

Ten Thousand Villages, a store that carries hand-made, fair trade arts and crafts, is coming to Lawrence soon!  Volunteers are needed to help get the store open.  Anyone nearby want to help out?  Contact Carolynn at cwinhazel at aol dot com.

This is so exciting!

Thanks for stopping by,
Nan

Wonderful Weekend!

This has been a really fun weekend!  My friend Carolyn, from OK, came up to spend the weekend with us.  This morning we both wore our Pig t-shirts for this self portrait:

Carolyn drove straight to the shop after she got off work on Friday and we had some "Late Night" sewing with the gals at the shop. 

Here is Carolyn with Carol & Pat, showing off the signature quilt  that Carolyn brought with her.  She's been collecting signatures of friends and family for several years.  Isn't that a great pattern?  Her Kansas Dugout blocks are made with white backgrounds that are 5" cut squares and 4" cut snowball squares on two opposite corners.  I love the overall look of the blocks and her setting.  Have you ever made a signature quilt?  I did one with a group of quilters from church as a welcome gift for our pastor and his wife when they came to the church.  Carolyn's quilt has me thinking of making one for myself.

The sewing and fun continued all day Saturday at our house.  Carolyn worked on setting these fun bulls' eye blocks from a block swap.  Do you see the cool circle in a diamond patterns that the blocks are forming?  I think the blocks between the circles look like flowers.  Carolyn chose a really cool setting for these blocks.

This bag took up most of my weekend.  It's a gift for a friend and I'm happy with how it turned out.

Willie is the little friend with the bag.  He belongs to the daughter of one of our pastors.  Willie came to the "Miss Nan hospital" for a minor surgery.  He's good as new now except for a small scar. :)

I also whipped up another twilling project.  Last week I did the twilling over a couple of evenings and then took a break from the bag to get it to this point Saturday afternoon.  This is a monthly twilling kit from the shop and will be a shop sample as soon as I get the binding tacked down.  I've really gotten myself hooked on twilling and maybe Carolyn, too!  I taught her how and she picked out the November (Thanksgiving) monthly twilling kit for her first project.

Now, with church and a long nap under my belt, I'm ready to get back to Minglewood.  I think I'll work on the machine applique for the center medallion - due date for the sample is Sept 1st!

What a wonderful weekend!  I hope yours was great, too.

Thanks for stopping by,
Nan

WIPs (Works in Progress)

Or should that be WsIP? lol  Either way, I thought I'd share my two newest projects with you today.  (Plus, what better excuse to take a break from cleaning house? lol) 

There's a blog I enjoy reading, That Man Quilts, and the author Lane mentioned the other day that he likes to show his projects all along the way instead of waiting and only showing pics of things when they're done.  As a new blogger, I guess I just figured finished projects are all anyone would want to see.  But I thought about it and decided he had a point.  Lots of non-quilters don't really know what goes into making a quilt, and quilters might enjoy seeing things as they progress.  So here goes!

I've recently started doing the embroidery for Vintage Tin by Crabapple Hill.  I finished the first block (the long row of oil cans across the top) last weekend, and this week have started on the second block:

This will be a shop block of the month (BOM) and my blocks (and eventual quilt) will be the shop sample.  This has been really fun so far, and Mark is thrilled that I'm doing it. :)

Yesterday at work I cut kits for a cozy, flannel Christmas throw.  It's in bright, non-traditional colors.  Here is my kit, that will also be for a shop sample.  I've sub-cut the fabrics into the block sizes needed, and it's ready to start sewing together.  You can't see much of the flannels, but it's actually more flannel than minkee (the solid colors in the foreground of the pic, which are sooooo soft!).  The flannels have snowmen, reindeer, etc. and one says "Peace", another "Love" and a third "Joy".  They are really cute.

There's hot pink and orange in the flannel, so along with the purple, turquoise and lime green, all my favorite colors are represented.

Stay tuned for progress!

Thanks for stopping by,
Nan

Time Flies

I woke up to this pic of my nieces in my in-box:

The first day of school and look how grown up they are!  They are beautiful girls inside and out.  And it just seems like a year or two ago that I talked to my sister on the phone the day the older one started kindergarten.  And now it's her senior year of high school.  Wow!  And look at how lil sis is almost as tall as big sis now.

Speaking of time flying, last night at quilt guild we had a wonderful program from Barb Eikmeier.  She was a member of our guild years ago when I first started quilting.  Several moves later (she was an army wife), her DH has retired and they have settled in Kansas.  She works with me at the shop and teaches there, too.  She had lots of wonderful ideas about sashing to share with us and it was a great program.

But I thought back to the guild workshop I took from Barb way back when - maybe 14 or more years ago?  At the beginning of class I apologized to her that I'd need to leave my cell phone on during the workshop because my grandfather was having surgery that day and I was waiting on word of his condition.  I'm sure the cell phone must have been huge so long ago!  (And Papa's surgery went fine that day, though he passed on several years ago now.)  Now it is common place for cell phones to go off at workshops, movies, even sometimes in church.  But I remember feeling bad at the time that I was going to cause an interruption.

The other thing I remember very well from that workshop is that someone asked her if we needed to pin every seam.  She smiled and said, "No, only the ones you want to match." lol  I've pinned every seam since!

I gave the quilt I made at that workshop to my Aunt Nancy.  It was a yellow and blue wallhanging with a star in the center, and a cool technique to piece a zig-zag inner border around the star as part of the star backgrounds and outer border, instead of by itself.  It's from her book Traditional Quilts with Painless Borders.

My nieces would have been toddlers when I made that quilt!

Thanks for stopping by,
Nan

Retreating

This last weekend I went to a quilt retreat with the shop.  It was held at a serene B&B in rural Kansas, Cedar Crest Lodge.  Laura is a fantastic gourmet cook, and we laughed, ate and sewed up a storm.  Here's some of what I got up to:

This is the "real thing", my first twilling project (my practice project doesn't count).  I did this wool twilling as a sample for the shop to show that you can twill on wool.  It's the June monthly twilling pattern and I put on the borders, quilted it and bound it at retreat.  The wool was really nice to twill on.  My practice piece on the other hand, well...as Christina who taught me to twill says, "everyone needs a practice piece".  I'm going to pitch it, as the stitches really don't look that great.

I added the borders and finished the quilt top for Roll, Roll Cotton Boll.  This was a Bonnie K Hunter mystery quilt and is now in her newest book, String Fling.  I'll add a pic once I've quilted it.  I'm really happy with how it looks so far!

We also made these fun placemats for our hostess, Laura.  She uses a different set of dishes and placemats for every meal while we're there.  We did about half of the placemats with orange and the other half with green.  It's a fun stitch & flip method and Laura was delighted and surprised with our gift.

And just so you aren't tempted to think it was all work and no play, here I am sitting by the pool, modeling the beach bag that I recently made (with lots of help from my friend Amber).  This was the bag's first trip to the pool or beach, so I thought Amber needed to see me with it!

Thanks for stopping by!

Nan

AIDA

The weekend before last, my friend Ann and I had a fun day out.  First we went to lunch on the Plaza and did a little shopping.  I couldn't resist grabbing pics of these cute guys!

Then we headed for the main event, AIDA at the Kauffman Center.  Wow, what a beautiful venue!  It has just recently opened, and everything is very sleek and modern from the outside and the lobbies.  Here we are before the show.

The inside is just as beautiful.

It was a great show, too!  What a fun day. :)

Thanks for stopping by,
Nan

Giddy Up

Yesterday at the fair, I was fascinated by this display, and some similar ones, done by several of the 4-H kids on hitch posts.  Have you ever noticed hitch posts around your town, or like me, had you never even thought about them?  These kids divided up the town and mapped out where all the horse hitches are still around.  Turns out - lots of places!  This poster is just one section.  And one of these pics in the poster is at Wheatfield's, where I go all the time!

As it happens, this morning I met some friends for breakfast at Wheatfield's, so here is one of the two that are on either side of one of the doors there.  I've walked past it countless times before and never seen it.

We were talking about it, and most of my friends were like me and had never thought about them or noticed them.  One of the ladies knew about them, though and suggested driving to the oldest neighborhood in town, where she said they were all over.  Boy was she right!  Below are just a few of the ones I found on one block.

Doesn't the cobblestone street add to the period ambiance?  I can almost imagine it when the road was dirt, and people pulled up in their buggies for a visit, and hitched the horse here while they went inside to visit.  Or maybe to have a quilting bee?

Look at this fancy one!  This is the only one I saw (in my very brief scavenger hunt) that wasn't concrete:

And it even has two rings, so instead of a pair of posts, like many houses had, these people got more bang for their buck.  Here's a close-up:

So now that I have reticular activation (fancy term I remember from college for "now that I'm aware of them and they're on the brain") for hitch posts, I'm expecting to see them everywhere when I'm downtown and in the older parts of town.  Does your town still have any hitch posts?

Thanks for stopping by,
Nan

Take me to the Fair!

After I was done running around getting a bunch of things done today, I stopped by the fair.  I love the fair.  No, I didn't take pics of all the cute goats and sheep, but I did enjoy looking at them. And there were lots of great photography, clothing and flower entries to enjoy, among others.

Of course my favorite stop at the fair is the quilt show!  Here's my quilt hanging:

Yippee!  The judge specifically commented on these two blocks, so I snapped a close-up pic:

This is from the pattern "Snow Days...Sew Days" by Amy Bradley.  The only downside was that I was there before the kettle corn stand was open.  But that could be considered an upside, too!

Thanks for stopping by,
Nan

Minglewood

Last night I finished up the samples for this month's Minglewood BOM that I'm doing at the LQS, and dropped them off today.  The August kits include sashing fabrics, so it's exciting to finally see the blocks with their sashing around them!

I've brought home the previous blocks (August is month 10) so that I can get them all sashed and put together.  Next month is the center block, and applique medallion.  Should be fun!

Thanks for stopping by,
Nan