Happy birthday, Mom!

Today is my mom's birthday, and I haven't had a chance to tell her happy birthday. It is too late her time to call her now that I have the time, so this is the best way to tell her. I will call her tomorrow, but still, I feel bad, I didn't even send a card :-( I love you, Mom, and I hope you had a great birthday!

I haven't been card sending or calling, so what have I been up to? Chaos. My sewing room looks like a bomb exploded in there! I'm not taking any pics of the worst areas, believe me, it's bad.


There are pieces to about seven different quilts on the sewing cabinets. Some are just scraps that were leftover from some of my last quilt tops that need to be cut up, other pieces are blocks, block parts, or border parts. This actually looks better than it did yesterday.


I babysat for over ten hours today, but while the little guy was napping I got some rows for two different quilts together. The pile on the left is a comfort quilt I started Monday, after finding out a friend of ours has cancer. I'd like to have it finished next week, but we'll have to see how that goes. The pile on the right is the leader/ender project I was working on while doing the log cabin quilt. Yesterday all of the pieces and the border pieces from the next pic were all on the sewing cabinets too.

Here are some piano key borders I am working on for the leader/ender project. The comfort quilt will have a piano key border too, and why I didn't start piecing it first is simple, these pieces were closer to me at the time. None of these borders are done, they all need several more pieces added.

When I laid out the blocks for the comfort quilt, I decided to go ahead and lay out three other quilts as well. I figure out the layout on my design wall, pin a post it note with the number of which row it is on the first block in that row, pile all the blocks in order for that row, then pin them together. I can then keep an entire quilt straight and pile the blocks up so it doesn't take as much room. With two big dogs in the house, keeping a quilt up on the design wall while I assemble it is not going to happen, just trying to keep them from knocking the blocks off with their tails while I am figuring out the layout is hard enough. With eight people living here, I definitely don't have enough space anywhere to leave a quilt laid out, unless it is a one day rush job of assembling and it's laid out on my bed.

The magazine I've been waiting for is finally on the news stand here in the USA. Australian Patchwork and Quilting Vol. 20 No. 4. I bought two copies of it. One for me, one for my best friend of 25 years, Rebecca, but I call her Becky ;-) She prefers Rebecca, but I am an old friend and get nickname rights.



This is why I wanted this magazine so badly. Before Christmas last year, I finally got around to quilting Becky's quilt tops, that had been handed down through her husband's family for 80 years, but no one ever finished them. There are no quilters in their family at all now, so I finally finished them. These quilt tops were not in the best shape, and one I had to completely disassemble and use new sashing and cornerstones on. The double wedding ring was too tattered on the edges to be able to keep the scallops.

I know the quilt police will be all upset, but I crosshatched all the quilts, over the applique and everything, for the simple reason I was trying to hold everything together. Eighty year old quilt tops that had been passed around from non-quilter to non-quilter have rough lives. No one knew they couldn't just throw them in the washer when they smelled musty, they didn't know the edges would unravel. At any rate, the quilts are now finished and usable, which was all Becky wanted. The applique quilts are made with feedsacks from the 30's, the wedding ring quilt from yardage of the same period. Made with 30's fabrics because it WAS the 30's when they were made.

I have another friend, Stephanie, who is my online buddy. She needed some photos of vintage fabrics for her article, and she knew I had finished these quilts. She asked my permission to use some of my photos, and I checked with Becky and we were both fine with it.


So that is the story of how my name, and my best friend's name made it into an Australian quilting magazine, through another friend.