Birthday Block for April

Michele asked for an 8" block using the colors from a Laurel Birch panel. She asked that we use batiks. Although I have a great piece of Laurel Birch cat fabric that would match her panel, I decided to honor her wishes and use batiks. Hope she likes it.

A Quick Makeover & An Orchid

My little design wall is a piece of foam board insulation with a gridded flannel cover. It is not very stiff making it hard to get the fabric taught. Also, I could never get the grid straight. If you look at many of my pictures of blocks, you might think the block is crooked when in fact it's the grid. The gridded flannel is rather thin, so you can see some of the marks on the foam board.

I have purchased some dark tan flannel and attempted to recover it. The fabric is still abit saggy, but at least I'm not

looking at those crooked lines.

I'm also tired of looking at a burnt up ironing board cover. It wasn't that long ago that I made a new cover, but it really looks like crap. My bright idea is to make a cover that is already completely burnt or dark brown.

I wonder how long this will look good?

I have had this orchid for over 9 years and it has never bloomed before. I think there's a lesson in there somewhere.

I'm back in Business

Well sort of. I got my new hard drive. It has been installed along with the programming, but I do not yet have any of my data. I am going to see if Best Buy can restore some of the data off the bad drive, we'll see what happens.

In the meantime, I made three blocks for the Sunshine Quilters. This blocks is Lots of Pops. One is pistachio and the other two are TuttiFruitti.

I've lost my best friend...

...or at least it felt like it. On Saturday morning I checked my email and all was well. I went out to do my weekly grocery shopping. I did a few chores around the house and then went back to the computer (my 6 month old Dell laptop) to do a little this and that and it was dead.. deader than dead. I had a black screen with a white arrow. I rebooted, and rebooted again. I asked my husband to have a try at it to see if he could figure out what was wrong. He got the start up disks and played around for and hour or two with no luck. I was starting to get nervous. There must be a ton of emails waiting for me. And what about all my friends blogs, I've got to know what they are up to.

My husband said he had no idea what was wrong and that I should call Dell. So Sunday I called and spent over an hour with a thick accented fellow. He had me pushing all sorts of buttons doing all sorts of diagnostics. The conclusion of which is that the hard drive is dead and they will send me a new one. What about my data I asked. His suggestion, go to where ever I bought the computer and have them restore my data to a disk (yes for a fee). My first laptop, which was a hand me down with a cracked screen, lasted 4 years. My second laptop also lasted 4 years and still works but gets so hot I am afraid of a fire. This little Vista gem lasted all of 6 months.

So here I am at work, checking all my important emails only to find 87 unread emails. 10 of them are sales pitches the rest are forwarded posts from sites I belong to. There is not one email directly to me. So I guess I didn't miss a thing.

Evil Bunny & Hearts from Hell

Otherwise known as the March Block of the Tisket, Tasket block of the month. I thought this would get easier with practice...NOT!

It's Official..

I am defiantly nuts. I was reading some blog, which led me to a blog, which led me to a blog, which led me to A Rainbow Block Swap. Something came over me and before I could even think about it, I signed up and pick the color light green (good thing AuntAnn had sent me some). I have to make 9 blocks and send them off to the hostess. In return I will get back 9 different blocks in 9 different colors. I am happy that the deadline for mailing is May 1 (only 6 weeks away) unlike the HGTV swap whose deadlines are 4 or 5 months.
So here is my first block. It is a variation on the Paths and Stiles blocks I did last week. I don't know if it has a name.

Where did all the Rhinos go?

There's no such thing as an Ugly Fabric

Do you think this Alexander Henry fabric is ugly? Someone else did because they dropped the price to $1. yard. I bought 5 yards.
I believe there is no such thing as an ugly fabric. I have used this fabric before and I am going to use it again. So stay tuned, in a few days you can see just what an ugly fabric can do.

Fabric Dying

As I have mentioned a few times before, I want to make some more Windmill block quilts and this time something a little more masculine. I never have enough of any one piece of fabric for the background except for bleached muslin (I just bought a bolt).

I got out my very large mason jars and stuffed each with a two yard piece of muslin. I added boiling water and 6 tea bags to one jar and hot tap water and a few drops of blue dye to the other. I let them both sit for awhile before dumping it all out. I rinsed the fabrics several times and then washed them separately in the washer in hot water, making sure that the water ran clear.

I love tea dyed fabric and I love the mottled look when you jam all the fabric in a jar. It is much more interesting than just plain white.

Windmills

This top is done! Super easy and fast.

BQE

Next weekend March 12, 13 and 14 is the biannual Broward Quilt Expo. I have taken Thursday and Friday off work and hope to go to the show on Friday. If there is anyone out there in blogland planning on going, maybe we can meet. In case you were wondering, I did not get anything done to enter in the show, blame it on the x-box.

Sunshine Quilters

It seems like I'm making alot of blocks lately and not too many quilts. I signed up for the Sunshine Quilters. It's another charity group which only asks for one block a month. I'm a big sucker for charity quilts and how can I not make at least one block a month? So I made two. This month's block is a Quilters Cache pattern called Paths and Stiles. I really like this one. It is very easy but doesn't look so simple.




This pattern is for a 9 inch block but I think I'll redraw it and make it into a 6 inch block.

'And the Lord said............."

"Let there be light."

Imagine that, a quilting gizmo that actually works. I can see again!

Zizzy-Dot Swap - A New Beginning

Dotti and I have had our fill of postcards, so we have decided to swap 6 inch blocks. There are no rules other than the block must be finished at 6 inches. They can be any color and pattern and are due to be mailed to each other sometime during the last week of the month. This is going to be fun.

Here are our blocks for February, I'm not even going to tell you who made which one.