Hand Quilting and Hockey!!!

So the winter olympics wrapped up today with a fabulous game USA against Canada for the Gold. Silver is nothing to sneeze at but the intensity is always so much more when it comes to a team winning the gold. I think that if any team had to beat us, it should have been Canada hockey is a religion to them.

The awesome Sidney Crosby won the day with the sudden death score after America's Ryan Miller who should have won MVP if there was one for the Olympics. USA tied the game after it looked like it was all over. It was a great game and you know I'm a soccer fan, Premier League but this hockey could make me want to add another time in my day to do hand work...smile

A quilter rarely just sits and watching TV is a perfect time to get some applique work done. These petals and leaves are for my pink and brown quilt. This is another zone of quilting in my house hand work is perfect for TV time.

Quilting, ironing and the Dollar Store

Don't you just love to find bargains? Now we quilters won't skimp a lot on our fabrics, but, finding good quality quilting material on sale is always a good thing. Nope, there was no fabric at the Dollar Store, Dollar Tree to be exact, my favorite of the dollar stores, in this area at least. There was, for me a repurposed item. It's original purpose was for scrap booking, that much maligned big competition for the quilters disposable income. Maligned because there's probably only so much in the way of hobby money to choose by each of us to spend on entertainment. All you scrappers know, you can rack up a lot of expense in the paper products/decorative items to be added to your lovely legacies of albums for the family. Like us quilters, you can drop a small country's national budget on your said hobby as well, but, oh what a legacy we both can leave. Maligned might be too strong a word, maybe to our treasured quilt shop owners, because they wish you were buying fabric instead...smile.

Anyway, this is what I found, a Scrapbook Envelope. It's original purpose I suppose was for holding delicately cut pieces of papers, pictures, or any other paper product so it wouldn't be crinkled-wrinkled..eh?...eh? Do you see where I'm going with this? You guessed it,after doing all that piecing and carefully ironing the seams all in the same direction, there's nothing more irritating than having to do all that work over again, because it got wrinkled while awaiting completion of the other blocks! So, I repurposed, a scrapbook envelope, which is a little larger than 12 inches, which is a pretty common size for a lot of patterns. Besides rigid and clear, it also has about a 3/4 inch depth so you can store several. So I bought several to hold my blocks in the various stages of completion. And it fits nicely in my Elenore Burns' project bag!


One last thing I got was the cute little box to hold my one inch hexagons-not a brilliant find like the block holder/scrapbook envelope, but they were cute and I must have been in hyper organizing mode...smile.

AND THEY ALL COST $1.00...double smile....

Hand sewing and bird nests...smile

The nature experience continues with a daily update. Finally the little bird flew away from my front porch fern and I wa s able to hold my camera high and sneak a picture with the flash on. It looks like we are expecting 2 little babies.

I've still not watered the plant, but, will attempt to do so tomorrow. We spend about 16 days a month for 7 months total in the hospital. My DD #1 Jennifer has Ewings Sarcoma in her right jaw. She gets chemo and on those overnight stays in the hospital and I stay with her. So, needless to say there's lots of down time for me. The good news is we are half way through, 7 out of 14 and so far all the scans indicate that the cancer is local and not spread.

I've found the perfect hand sewing project for me. It's the old grandmother's flower garden or also known, in earlier years as the mosaic pattern. There's no room for an olfa cutting board and I don't think it would be an easy pattern to cut, all the five sides of a one and one half inch hexagon. Karen Witt used a stamp for the

Preview

Preview

hex's and I thought that would be perfect, and it was. Stamp, cut sew, that all there is to it. Then after attending Elenore Burns' Show and Tell at Paducah, I got this lovely clear project bag, in which I can put my fabric and supplies. It really goes surprisingly fast. I've made about 15 blocks and depending how large I make the quilt, I have a king size bed, so it could be large. I think I'll work on it until Jeni is out of the treatments and that's how big it is. At this rate, it might be a really large quilt!