Summer time and the living is busy!

Hello again, it's been awhile, please forgive me but my daughter is getting married this fall and we just had the bridal shower here at the house this weekend. What fun it was to plan it with her matron of honor and bridesmaids! I am truly enjoying this adventure and the adventure of my first grandchild arriving this fall as well! Life is good!

Quilting has been on the back burner in July, I did a lot of quilts in June and will post some pictures of them here. I did crochet 2 baby afghans and have a knitted one started. I need a cute but easy sweater pattern to knit! Any suggestions????

I have almost completed the wedding quilt that I've written about before. I used a jelly roll from Moda to make the quilt but added a couple of other fabrics, they were a bit richer in color and I thought that they'd make a nice accent, but NO! As I joined the blocks the 2 'read as a solid' prints just jumped out at me, overshadowing the soft florals and stripes in the rest of the blocks! Now some people could maybe live with that, I couldn't so it was time to FROG the blocks, rip it, rip it! I un-sewed the offending squares and now have to put my puzzle back together, soon, because I have so much more that I need to get done!

Can you spot the square that doesn't belong???

My friend, Donna Lynn Thomas writes quilt books, Stripples, Portable Patchwork are just t 2 that's she's written. She's written a new book that will be out this fall and asked her quilting friends to help with testing the concept and designs & for me to quilt 3 of her projects for the book....that was in January. I took the 3 quilts and had them done by May, but never got to finish choosing the fabrics for my sample. Time was running out so when I had my friends over for a stitch & bitch day I asked for some help with color choices. I'd decided to make the entire quilt using only my stash and my colors had to all be different from Donna's for the book.
When I asked Sally, Gina & Joyce for help they jumped right in, now who wouldn't love to play in someone else's stash???? They were terrific, each one added to my choices to make the colors shine as the sunflower design that I'd planned. Part of the quilt is pictured below. I pieced the top, leaving the borders until the end and that's where I got stuck again. Nothing in my stash was right for the quilt, it needed a frame, nothing to detract from the body of the quilt. My browns were all wrong, I fussed and asked my family but it just wasn't working for me so I called Gina.
Gina has a pretty large stash too and she lives 30 minutes away. My SOS got her moving, she gathered up a bunch of fabrics that looked like they might work with my quilt, (I'd sent photos).
Yes she had the ONE, THE fabric that this quilt needed, so it got finished using only stash fabrics, but just one wasn't from my stash! :) Who could understand this predicament more than another quilter? I love my quilting buddies!

I mounted the quilt to the frame, quilted it with leaves and sunflowers and then bound it. The hardest part was shipping it off to Martingale to be photographed. I tracked it and it actually arrived early, whew...now to wait for it to come back! The quilt is called "Brianne's Sunflowers" and I'll post when Donna's book is out!

I joined a group on the internet this summer, a challenge to make a 9 Patch block every day for June, July and half of August. I haven't been making them daily but in batches, here are the ones I've done so far-Many of these fabrics are from quilt made long ago and recently...sew many memories! This is a great way to use up your scraps and fat quarters that you don't know what you were thinking when you bought them years ago! My friend Susan S. is making the 9 patches and is planning on using them all in one quilt sashed in black. Sounds like a good idea to get all of these different fabric combinations into one quilt!

This is the first quilt that I've made for our grandbaby, I used a panel by Deb Strain for MODA called Love U. My DIL Andrea loved her snail fabric from this line so we are going to use it in the nursery and I wanted her to have the colors so that she can match them to other items for the baby's room. I just added charm squares from the same fabric line to make the panel wider. I used 2 layers of batting, Dream Wool and Dream Cotton to make it thick and puffy. I wanted a quilt that the baby can lie on and not be on the hard floor.

This is Barbara D's Fig tree strip quilt, very soft muted colors. Cross hatch quilting in the borders, which she wanted scalloped and Sally did a wonderful job on! The body of the quilt is free motion leaves and loops. It's a very pretty quilt!

Time for me to get to work on Joyce's tan, beige & black quilt which I loaded on the frame last night! Enjoy the day!