Weekend Doings

Saturday was my monthly meeting with my quilty friend, Diane. She brought some embroidery to work on and I was cutting pieces for one of my quilt kits. I got the kit cut,boxed and on the shelf and then moved onto the next project. Well. I needed to finish designing the layout for it; you know things like sashings and borders. Because I wanted to try a (new to me) technique from Sally Schneider's "Designing with Built In Borders", I knew I didn't have enough of the black background to finish the quilt and to even continue. I needed to have that finished design. *Sigh* I pushed it aside and pulled out the next one. As I was trying to decipher my notes about the next quilt, I realized that this, too, needed more design work. *Another big sigh* I finally decided that the 30-year-old UFO that I'm repurposing was a good thing to work on and started to take the blocks apart. About this time, we decided it was time to go out for lunch. By 3:00pm I was home and felt like I had spun my wheels all day. So, deciding that I really wanted to feel like I accomplished something I got onto the computer and worked on both of the designs in EQ. The black one was so darn frustrating! I already had my .bmp files of the blocks but EQ wouldn't let me drop them into the on-point setting. I finally just used a different software package and printed out the blocks at 1" square. I then moved onto the other quilt and got it designed, done! Saturday night I sat on the couch with colored pencils, glue stick and graph paper and finished the design on the black one the old school way and got it done!

Sunday started out calm. I cooked breakfast for myself and CarGuy. And then we went grocery shopping. Ugh. With all the good sales on some standard items because of Thanksgiving I stocked up. After putting the grocery items away at home I informed CarGuy I was going to the LQS to see if I could get more of that black fabric. It was a long shot, at best, because it was a shop BOM about 2 years ago. I just wanted to match the weave of the fabric.

Before I left, a friend of CarGuy's stopped by with a quilt top his Gramma made in the early 1940's. As the youngest of 5 grandchildern he never knew her, but she left 5 quilt tops to her grandchildren, 4 of them yet unborn. He got the last one. I'll blog more about Junkyard Bob's quilt later. I needed to get batting and a backing for it so I added to my LQS shopping list.

I stopped at Hancock Fabrics and just cruised around the store. They did not have the batting I like in the size I needed. But I did find some Kona Cotton in a solid black. I bought the rest of the bolt in the hope that it somewhat blended with what was at home. It was a good thing I did! My LQS was out of black Kona Cotton. I did, however get the backing for Junkyard Bob's quilt and a fan quilt of mine. Note: the black played nicely with what I already had.

Here's a teaser of my fan quilt:


Sunday afternoon my long-arm quilter called and said my quilt "Blue Study" was ready. Woohoo! Back into the car for the half hour trip to her house. Along with Junkyard Bob's quilt and my fan quilt. And yes, both quilt tops were made out original 1930-40's fabric, not reproductions.

By the time I got home I just wanted to sit and watch 'Desperate Housewives'. Can you say tired?

Update note: I forgot to add that Sunday morning in the shower I realized that the "other quilt" I worked on in EQ was not going to happen in the size I did it. I need to resize the blocks. *sigh*