Another Great Finish!

This is another of my most favorite customers! She is also the President of my Quilt Guild and a very close friend as well! She loves to piece quilts and bring them to me for finishing! I love to quilt for her because she enters a lot of her quilts into shows! And we do win ribbons!

This Carolina Lights Fabric was done by Patti Brown, a North Carolina resident for ALB Decorator Fabrics. It is of the lighthouses up and down the coast of North Carolina.

This quilt is going to my friends "feller" for his Christmas gift. I am sure he is going to love it!

Wheew! It's BIG - It's DONE!

I was so happy to get this off the machine! Sometimes you get one of those quilts that you seem to never be able to get off the machine! I thought this one was going to take me forever!

This customer is one of my favorites! She is a great piecer and her borders are always so flat and square! I have another one to do for her just like this but I think her Grandmothers Fan is going next. I need a break from this pattern.

There's A New Book In Town!

Cathy Wiggins, is an awesome quilt artist! My husband and I had the pleasure of visiting with her in her home on Lake Gaston yesterday. I have commissioned her to create a pictoral quilt of my grandchildren! I am so excited about this! We both were members of a longarmers association and she showed a quilt she had created with a little girl holding a frog. I knew right then I wanted her to do my granddaughter, my oldest daughters little girl. Before I could get the ball rolling I found out that my youngest was expecting her first child so I decided to wait until he was older and have them both on the same quilt.

Well, we are under contract and now I have to exercise lots of patience (which my hubby tells me I have none of). I know the wait will definitely be worth it!

Cathy has shown many of her quilts in some of the prestigious quilt shows and has many ribbons to show for her talents! She has just recently had her first book published! If you have never seen her quilt, "Clowns On Parade" hanging in a show, I hope you will have that pleasure one day.

You can purchase her book, Clowns On Parade, through AQS Publishing!

Everything's BIGGER In Texas!!

Merry Christmas to me!!!

BingoBonnie mentioned having a bumper crop of lemons this year so I asked her if she would consider sending me a dozen. Well, today my husband and I went into town and we just got home about 30 minutes ago! I saw a box on the porch and made a comment as to it was probably my Pride and Prejudice books coming from Amazon. When I bent down to pick up the box it was really heavy so I thought there was no way it was my books. I had not ordered anything else so I wondered what it could be. There was an address on the return but no name. I did know it was Texas but I still didn't put 2 and 2 together.

Well, look here what she sent!! I think this is more like 3 dozen lemons! AND look how big these suckers are! Oh I mean lemons! hehe They REALLY do have BIGGER things in Texas!

Looks like plenty of lemonade for the holidays!!! Thank you so much Bonnie!

Crazy Eights Quilt for Parker

I found this pattern at Wish Upon A Quilt in Raleigh, NC while out shopping with Arlette and Karen a few weeks ago. Sandy Gervais of Pieces From My Heart is the pattern designer. I fell in love with it the moment I saw it hanging on the wall. The quilt shop had a sample made up and quilted and I just had to have the fabrics to make one for each of my grandchildren. I had to do some web surfing to find all of the fabrics but eventually I did.

After standing at the quilting machine the larger part of today I decided to take some time and put the first of these 2 quilts together. This one is for my 2 year old grandson Parker. I think he will really think it is cool. He is so funny these days. Heather told me that he tells everyone that I made his comforter in his bedroom. He uses the quilts I made for him when he was born to lay around in the living room watching television. Heather has told him that I made them for him so now any and all quilts are made by his mawmaw, whether I did or not. He is such a sweetie cakes!

By the way...he now calls me Mawmaw Freesha. :) (We will have to work on that pronunciation)

The Border Is On!

I went from this...



To this...I dyed the white blocks with coffee today. The fabric arrived around 3 this afternoon and upon inspection I saw that the doves were not white, as they showed on my monitor. The coffee dyed the blocks to as perfect a color as I needed.

So, what do you think about this wallhanging now? You really have to see it in person to get the overall effect of how the border and cream blocks play so well together.

This is going to someone for a gift so we will wait and see what their reaction is to it.

Aloha Lettie!

Arlette from the Polka Dot Pineapple has surprised me with an awesome box of goodies straight from Hawaii!! She was here in NC last month with her husband and my friend Karen and I went down and took her for a fun day of shopping. We also enjoyed a nice lunch at the Olive Garden. (see previous posting)

Karen and I both asked Lettie to send us a piece of Hawaiian fabric but I never thought I would receive such a wonderful package! It is chocked full of things Lettie makes! I see these things on her blog and secretly wish I had her talent for coming up with these cute items! (Maybe she can read my mind) I so appreciate everything she has sent to me and will use it all!


Do you remember my previous post about the Australian chocolates called TimTams? Now I have Hawaiian Caramacs and ToffeeMacs!! I haven't opened them yet but you can be sure I will before the day is up!


Oops...the box of CaraMacs are open...Took the photo a while to upload so I had to have something to do! hehehe

This close up is of the doughnut pincushion she made for me, as well as a mug rug, keychain, and a jewelry bag!


I sampled a CaraMac while that photo loaded and I give it an A++! YUM!

This is a close up of the jewelry bag...My mind is trying to envision how to use it for a portable CQ bead bag! :)


Double oops now...The ToffeeMacs are open! I can't help the fact that my camera takes so long to upload a photo! :)

Now for these fabulous fabrics!! I told my hubby that I am going to make us an Hawaiian quilt using all of these fabrics together! Aren't they beautiful!!





You know what happened don't you!! YEP!! I ate 2 ToffeeMacs!! Well, what did you expect?? I uploaded 4 photos at one time and it took forever!! DOUBLE YUM!! I do not believe I told Lettie that chocolate covered toffee and chocolate covered coconut are my 2 most favorite candies!! Now how did she know? :)

Thank you so much Lettie for the wonderful goodies!! It felt like Christmas at our house today!

Getting Things Done!

No quilting today...resting my legs...

It really feels good to be back to my old self! Being productive in my sewing room and the quilting studio makes me so happy! At the end of the day I love being able to say "Look what I did"!

I bought this quilt top off of Ebay last year and it lacked having the outer pieced border sewn on. A few of the small blocks had to be added to the length of the border strips so I got it out of the drawer this evening and commenced to finishing and getting it ready to be quilted. I found out in a hurry why this was never finished and then sold on Ebay for as little as it was sold for. The pieced border is too large for the top on 3 sides. Someone didn't do their math correctly or didn't square up the Gate Latch blocks as they went. One side out of 4 fit correctly. But all is not lost because it doesn't look too terribly bad and it is going to be quilted regardless!

I think it will look great as a tablecloth in our breakfast area! The colors are perfect and the Gate Latch pattern was my Granny Ida's favorite so what could be better than that!

Ohhhh Lisa!!

Your quilt is finished and ready to fly to Iowa! I really hope you like what I quilted on it. I used a panto called Feather Strippy Bar. There are feathers and bar lines alternated down through your quilt. Great texture!





And this is what's on the frame now! Full custom so it will most likely take more than a day. I do have it already started and have some progress photos just for my visitors!

My Watch Monkey "Paduche"

Meet Paduche....This little fellow is my "Watch Monkey". He was mascot to a trip I took with 7 other quilters to the Paducah, KY Quilt Show in April of 2008. We stopped at Subway for lunch on the trip there and I won him out of one of the stuffed animal machines. I named him our mascot and he went happily along with us to the show! Now he hangs on my machine and watches everything I do. He sees every quilt go on the machine, he sees them come off. He hears me when I might use some harsh language on "Sassy", my machine, and he hears me squeal with delight when I quilt a design to suit me! Don't you think he is so cute!


Paduche was about as glad as I was when I finished this quilt tonight. It was due off the machine yesterday but as I said in a previous post, my mother-n-law was hurt, so it had to wait until today. And to give you a quick update, she has a fracture to her right ankle and her left knee is really bummed up but luckily no tendon or tissue damage. She will be hobbling about for a good while but knowing her, she will try to do everything she can get by with. We will have to watch her like a hawk! We all are just glad it was no worse!




And this 30's quilt went on the frame tonight...Let's see if tomorrow will come and go without happenstance so I can show you a "finished" photo sometime tomorrow evening!

Whats On The Machine!

Well this is the 1st day of December and my plans are to show you something new on my machine each day of this month! I really want to be customer quilt free by the time Christmas arrives. My business plans are going to change some January 1st and I want to be ready for the change. They are good changes, for myself as well as my clients. I am taking Prednisone for inflammation in my bronchials right now so it will help with my arthritis pain in my knees too. I laughed and told my sister this morning that I better make good use of my time while the medicine is in my system. lol

This is my Pig quilt made using all the pig fabrics my friends have sent to me over the past few years on the HGTV Quilting and Needlework Forum. I showed the top in a previous post. Now it is quilted. I have just a wee bit of frogging to do and replace that stitching because I changed my plans after I started quilting it. It wont take too long to do but will only take about 10 minutes to put back what I take out thank goodness. I am taking out the wording that you see in the photos and replacing it with just the curvy line along the seam lines. I couldnt get my words even across the quilt...I made up a poem and for some lines, there were too many words to fit. Oh well...I will print my poem off and put it on the label.




This quilt belongs to my good friend Georgia. She is giving this to her granddaughter for Christmas. She requested an ABC panto to be quilted on it and I found the perfect one from Dave Hudson's line. Stay tuned to see if this one makes it off the machine tomorrow!