Windy Sunday

 I think the storms have all passed and luckily we never had bad ones after Tuesday. Just thunderstorms and rain, which we needed. 

I have made a little progress on hubby's quilt. I now have 12.5 blocks hand quilted, 9 left to unpick and that leaves 14 to quilt. Lots of progress from last week as the unpicking takes a while on each block. I have been fixing as I go as well for a few tears and seam pulls. 

A non-reply blogger asked about the pattern. This quilt is called Labor Day Madness in the Nickel Quilts book below. I collected green, brown and cream fabrics to make this quilt.

It was a year ago today that this guy was added to the family! Boy does time fly. From the very strong and willful boy he was on a leash, training and patience has worked and I have been walking him by myself for the last few months. No chasing after squirrels, turkeys or bunnies we see on our walks. He does try to go quickly to get past the dogs in their yards, but is a lot better than he was and I am comfortable walking him by myself. He is 72 pounds of muscle!

Bear 4/30/2022.

Earlier this week - not spoiled at all. Squeaky ball, lambie and a bone with a quilt to lay on. I'll also be doing dog stuffed animal surgery today to patch up moose, tiger and the dragon so they can be added back into his toy box for play time.

Linking up with Kathy and the Slow Sunday Stitchers.

Purple Scrap Challenge

 I posted a couple of these photo's in my last post, sorry!

The table scrap challenge this month was purple, and/or the letters Y and N. I managed to hit all three!

I made a little wall hanging - A Nosegay of Yo-Yo's!

I did a little reading up on how to make Yo-Yo's. I had never done them before! 

I cut out a few different size circles and hand stitched the 1/4 inch seam with some hand quilting thread and pulled them together to get little flowers and buds.

This is where I left it on Thursday. This afternoon, I got back into the sewing room and hand stitched the vase and flowers down.... then decided I needed more flowers and another stem. Wish I would have decided that before I stitched the vase down, but oh well. I made it work! A few more circles were cut out and stitched onto the top. Some walking foot quilting (which looks terrible in the photo but not as much while hanging on the wall above my sewing machine), and then I added the purple binding. My challenge quilt from the scraps on the cutting matt. 

I was a little worried we would get a day of rain, but it held off until just a few minutes ago. Emily got her riding lesson in this morning and had a treat of walking the horses around the property a bit at the end of their lesson. I actually got her to smile for a photo while sitting on Lance before they headed out to wander around for a bit on the horses.

Lance is a very tall horse, but he is a beauty.

Linking up with the RSC and the ABC Table Scrap Challenge 2023. 

A busy day....

 Well, we had quite the storm blow through last night! I think we had an hour of heavy rain, constant lightning and wind. That big blob of red was nearly through when I snapped this photo of my weather app.

My 'castle' with a moat! the water was in the gully there covering the dip in the driveway and nearly up to the tree which is a way's in on the lawn. We had a good amount of rain - I'd guess 4-5 inches at least but that is just a guess. It was all soaked in by morning. Looks like we are under the same watch for storms again tonight. Lets hope they wait until we are home from Emily's spring concert at school. 

I had plans to work on my ABC table scraps challenge today. Alas.... I have spent many hours waiting in various waiting rooms today. I did get a walk with the dog this morning after dropping the boy to school early for his Cambridge testing this morning. Then a quick shower before heading to the eye doctor to pick up my new prescription sunglasses. They just have a slight script for distance and boy, I did not realize how bad the bubbling was on my old pair (maybe 4 or 5 years old!). Across town and through the car wash after adding air to the tire again. A vacuum and clean up of the inside and home... where the tire air light was on again. Sigh. After a quick check on chickens and playing with the dog and petting the cats.... I headed to Meineke to have them check the tire. A nail! Arrgghh. Iffy on patching and since they were new last fall, they recommended going back to where I got them to see about warranty. They were for a patch, but the placement of the nail did not recommend that route so a new tire it was. They got me right in and got it put on. At that point it was well after 1PM, so I got a quick lunch at Panera Bread to go, and headed home to play a little with the animals. I had about an hour at that point, so I started with my idea for the challenge. Y and N are the letters. I did a search last night for quilt blocks starting with those letters. I came up with a Nosegay of Yo-Yo's! I have never made a yo-yo before, so this is my first attempt. I found some fabrics and cut different size circles.

I got them all scrunched up and they looked like this. I pulled a little scrap of green for a stem and pressed each edge in and hand stitched it down. The next thought was a vase of some kind. I pulled a pink scrap and cut this shape out. I need to applique turn it and attach it still. The flowers are just sitting there, not attached yet. I pulled a yellowish 10x10 inch square to place this on. That's as far as I got, before I had to go pick up the boy from school. Progress.

Slow Sunday stitching.

 This was Emily yesterday riding Lance. They decided to change things up since she has been riding Marshmallow for a while. She used to ride Lance a couple of years ago so they got along great! He is a very tall horse.

I have been trying to make progress on hubby's quilt in the evenings, but this usually happens.....

Notice the quilting hoop with the dog on top of me and it? Yes, he does not want me to work on 'his' quilt! Hubby mentioned I might need to make a new one for him, since the dog seems to have claimed this one! Nope. He will have to work it out with the dog when it is done! There are 35 blocks that I had machine quilted about 15 years ago. The thread is looking horrible, so I am slowly pulling it out, one block at a time. I did decide to hand quilt them, so I am doing a little unpicking, and then a little stitching..... when the dog allows!

I have 8 of the blocks hand quilted - and I can tell I have not quilted regularly in a while since I am building that callus up on my push middle finger on my right hand. I don't use a thimble, never could get used to it, so I'm taking it slow to build it up again. I have 3-4 quilts in the hand quilting progress (bear paw, cat and mice, Frosty) so once that finger is back to 'production mode' I'll try and keep it that way with a little quilting each day. 

11 blocks have been unpicked and are ready for hand quilting. Which leaves 16 blocks left to unpick. I think I'll work on hand quilting a couple of blocks today. First, will be a quick trip to Lowes to get new seeds (we did not have luck with the old seeds we planted so will try again. The good news is the shade blocker is working great and Emily's pumpkin is starting to turn orange!). Then a quick stop at Aldi's since baby bella mushrooms are 99 cents this week! I see beef stroganoff in our future this week along with some santa fe rolls and we will try a Nigerian Jollof rice recipe Aidan found as well. 

Linking up with the Sunday Slow Stitchers.

Saturday in purple

 Starting off with the dog curled up on the quilt I am unpicking the machine quilting in the middle and replacing with hand quilting of each block. Curled up with Lambie his stuffed animal from Easter.

I did get the second kite block completed and there were some 1.5 inch left on the backing so I cut it to size and made a couple of these little blocks as leaders and enders.

Then I found the basket of purple and started with some random sewing for some crumb blocks.

The finish this week was of the Garden Path quilt. I made the majority of the blocks last year with this challenge. It finished at 48x60.

Linking up with the RSC.

The dog got a walk with Em and Greg and I. Greg and I checked out the floor plan of a house being built near us - with an in-law suite. Time for a shower before taking Emily to horses. I think I am taking a break from riding until fall when it gets cooler.

Frosty progress....

 I got a little sewing time in Monday night and got the sashing and cornerstones machine quilted. It was a start! I think I am going to mark some cross hatching on the diagional for each of the frosty's and hand quilt them. 

I missed the post indicating there was no scouts tonight, so we headed there (17 minutes from home). Emily wants a new dress for graduation, and did not find anything with Grandma so we tried Bells and Bells Outlet. Nothing. I'll have to ask around for good places to get nice dresses for teens from a few of my girl scout friends. We got home early and it was still light, so Bear got a walk and then for a treat, I did a little car ride with him and Emily. We just went 7 minutes up the road and took the back roads back. He was a happy dog sniffing with his nose and head out the window! 

Garden Path is finished!

 

First one completed on my Spring 2023 UFO list. 

This finishes at 48x60 and will be a donation to the H2H project this year.