September Activities

Welcome back!  Oh man, this last month has been busy busy busy at work.  I am the National Rodeo Secretary for the National Intercollegiate Rodeo Association, (aka college rodeo across the USA) and the beginning of the school year has a lot going on for our office.  I kept thinking I wasn't getting anything done because of how very fast the month went by, but I actually accomplished some sewing!  One thing I practiced was getting into the habit of going to my mom's house every Wednesday to work on the quilt my Grandma Linda asked me to finish, and I'm so happy to report I've nearly half the blocks together already!  Here's an idea of what I started with:

 



And sadly I don't have a progress picture, but I will remember next Wednesday to have my mom take one of me working on it.

 

We had the Walla Walla Valley Quilt Festival mid-September and I volunteered for a few hours Saturday at the front door.  I had a blast hanging out with Lianne (our guild president) and one of the other girls who I just can't remember her name to save me.  John and I walked around Sunday for about 2 hours examining all the amazing works.  Here's my quilt hanging up, and my block challenge on the wall with the others, there were some really creative blocks:

 

I'm on the bottom row with the black background

 



I also participated in the APQ Pillowcase Challenge Sew-a-thon and using some fabric from Grandma Linda's stash made this awesome pillowcase:

 

This is made using the "burrito method" that is a free pattern on APQ's website (link above)

 

My amazing piecer: the 1954 White

 

Ta-da!

The most exciting thing was you could enter at some of the sponsors websites and win fabric to make more pillowcases, and I won!  I received an email from Shannon Fabrics a few days ago, and I plan on donating all the cases to children in Walla Walla, hopefully the children's ward at the hospital.

 

I have been so fortunate, won 4 drawings in 2 months now!  Can't wait to pay it forward in the upcoming blog hops.  By the way, I'm participating in not only the Black Cat Crossing, but also the T'was the Night, yay!

 

Here are photos of the items I won from Carol's drawing at Just Let Me Quilt:

Two yards (!) worth of solid and two fall panels

 

 

 

And then I received the package from Sew Lux Fabrics who I had won a $50 gift card from:

 

Ooo!  What an unexpected surprise!  I love presents within presents.

 

It really struck me how much more special this nice wrapping made my prize seem.  I am going to start prettying up my giveaways, because I can!

 

 

For the most part I ordered things I would not normally buy for myself, such as fabric with no plan or a bag pattern...

 

For some reason I was really drawn to purchasing this pattern after seeing all the amazing ones people have made and hearing how tough it can be.  Sometimes I like a challenge.  I'll probably take this on in a couple years.  I hear you also need ~$100 worth of materials to make it, so I'll start saving up too.

I also bought a spool of white Aurifil thread, because I go through it!  I really enjoy how smoothly it works in all 3 of my machines, I must say.

 

Ok, here's one last thing we did in September, we hosted a rock crawling event for remote control vehicles.  Some are very lifelike, some look like bugs, but everyone has a good time.

Getting in some stitching while at the track.

Our youngest competitor (pretty sure he's only 3 years old) driving a scaled truck through the course and doing really well.

John giving Terry some direction over a tough log section.

One of the competition (aka bug like) crawlers crossing the bridge John built.  I helped paint it.

 

See, John's working hard and I'm supervising.

 The event went really well, and we're hoping to keep building awareness over the next couple months for a good turn-out in Spring.

Thank you for visiting, see you again soon!

~Brandy

 

A Perfect Picnic (with TWO GIVEAWAYS!)

The giveaway is now closed and the winners have been emailed :)

Hello, and happy blog hop day!  John and I had a really nice time on our picnic, I'm going to tell you all about it in a moment and show you some pictures (ok lots, and this was me cutting back, it may take a minute to load).  And after I share our adventure, you will have the opportunity to enter one of TWO giveaways!  One will be for US residents, the other for our international visitors.

Also, be sure to visit our sponsors for this hop:

 

Riley Blake Designs

&

Peterboro Basket Company

Here are the other who share this lovely day with me:

Wednesday June 4

Quilt Taffy

Pampered Pettit

Creatin' in the Sticks

Miss Priss Quilts

Life in the Scrapatch

That's Sew Julie

 

Quilt

So first off, when I caught whiff of a possible picnic hop I was very excited.  I'd been making blocks last summer with the idea of using them for a car quilt, hadn't made any more progress on it since, and here was a golden opportunity!  It would also count as a busted UFO for this year which is so nice.  At the time the hop was announced I had all the outer blocks finished, I just needed to finish the center medallion and had already cut the diamonds for one.  And I'm going to toot my own horn on my point matching, because it took me redoing one of the points 6-7 times before I finally started marking and pinning them, and here's what you get when you do that:

 

Practically perfect!



Here's the center and top all put together:

 

 

In case you're wondering, the majority of the red, white, and blue fabric came from Keepsake Quilting, then I added some of the whites and the gray from my LQS Stash, who some of you may recognize as being a featured store in the latest Quilt Sampler.  The blue came from the quilt shop in Pomeroy, WA called Rather-Be's, who I discovered when we held my Great-Grandma's 90th birthday in their retreat center a month ago.  They carry a lot of fabric especially for Quilts of Valor.

Then I created the back out of jean material donated by my Grandpa Jim, Uncle Jerry, dad, John, and myself.  I actually used up the majority of my collection to make this, but that's ok, mom has like 4 bins of jeans in the basement that I plan on raiding in the future... ha!  Like she'd let me!

 

It was John's idea to mimic the front using the dark and light materials.  To get the light star points I had to turn my jeans inside out though, but it's jeans, you can't really tell it's the insides.  And I love how the checkerboard pattern looks!  Also, really liked how quickly the 6 inch points go together as apposed to the 2.5 inch.

This quilt has a lot of firsts for me in it: fussy cut, applique, flying geese, lone star, inner and outer borders, sashing, and working with jeans.  I also used a 1 inch thick poly batting I got at JoAnn Fabrics (it was on sale, 50% off), and it was way less expensive than buying multiple precut battings ($7 vs $60, totally worth it).  I am going to write another post in a couple days that will chronicle more of the making of this quilt, so be sure to come back and visit me for a more in-depth look, and some good pointers I have for the whole Y-seam and point-matching adventure.

 

Basket

Apparently I needed to explore the Peterboro Baskets website more thoroughly because I sure wish I'd gotten our basket from them!  Especially since they are so generously offering a discount right now (20% off use QUILT as your coupon code thru September 30th) and it's free shipping in the US.  They have a picnic basket for two that I would really love to have, and will probably pick up here in the future.

We found a basket from Hobby Lobby that cost almost the same, but the quality is really lacking, especially in the strength of the handle.  However, we made do!  The post previous to this one shows how I made a reversible picnic basket liner for it.  Here's how it turned out:

 

 

 

Menu

For our menu we decided to take a bunch of snack-type food since a full meal wouldn't be a relaxing for us.  I found a mini watermelon, summer sausage, a party cheese mix that I cut up myself, we had a bunch of Ritz crackers already, some Easy Cheese for me, pretzels, carrots and homemade vege dip (I'll share the recipe in another post) and Coca Cola in glass bottles:

This Pampered Chef cutting board is the perfect size to take on a picnic, and their knives all come with protective cases too.

I may be a Pampered Chef consultant, but I do love my Tupperware as well!

It all looks so festive loaded in the basket!  Oh, that white lid is covering some M&M's I took along and never ate, I'm actually eating them as I write this post!

Picnic

Setting up on the banks of Mill Creek :)  This is the back part of my parent's land, we affectionately refer to their land as Rocky Acres.  You can see how pretty the California Poppies and Bachelor Buttons were that day.

We were concentrating really hard on getting our colas to clink hahaha

A lovely snack plate.

John splashing around, it was ~80 degrees, so this was very cooling he said.

I chose to lay on the quilt and eat some more while he played in the water.  The pillow was a good idea to bring along, next time we'll take two.

Enjoying the breeze.

Wait!  A breeze?  Why, that's why I have kites!  So we busted out this Americana one my grandmother actually MADE, and I promptly broke it.  Now I need to find a new spar, we may be in for a road trip :)

Fortunately I brought more than one kite, so we still got to fly for a while.

This was John's second time flying, he's a quick learner.

It was nice to take some time for ourselves with no plan, just to go out to the property and do what we please.  We had also brought along the cribbage board to play but it was too breezy for cards to be laying about this time.  We'll try again this weekend.

GIVEAWAYS!!

 



Giveaway #1 - United States only (see stipulations below)

OH YES!  You're seeing this right, I have for my United States viewers this very lovely, local, bottle of Riesling!  I live in Walla Walla, WA, and we are becoming very well know for our wines.

I do have some stipulations however, as shipping is pretty strict for wine.  As I said before, this is limited to United States readers.  And I am unable to ship to anyone in Massachusetts, North Dakota, New Hampshire, and Utah.  And it's very important that an adult be there to sign for it's arrival, because if it gets returned to me I'm not trying again, I will keep it and will use it to cook with.  (I understand some people view this as sinful... lol)
 

Giveaway #2-International and MA, ND, NH, UT residents

One of the most summer-rific charm packs I could find!  Bartholo-meow's Reef by tim&beck for Moda.  I think this is just too much fun, and it's both boy and girl friendly if you use the right filler colors with this charm pack.  I can't get over that walrus's smirk heeheehee!

 

OK!  Here's how you enter:

Leave me a comment with your city and state/country.  You may also feel free to leave kind words, I always love that of course.  And I shall do my best to respond to you all!  This giveaway will be open until June 10th, and I will use the random number generator to do my drawings, then contact the winners on the 11th.

 

Thank you for visiting, I hope you'll stop by in a few days for my post on making my quilt, and remember the post below shows how I made my picnic basket liner.  Have a fabulous summer, I bet I'll see you in July for some Christmas happenings!

 

~Brandy

Actual progress, amazing what 10 minutes will do!

 

 

So Pat Sloan challenged us to get at least 10 minutes a day of sewing in for the rest of this month, well of course that turned into 60 minutes last night and 15 this morning, but hey!  Progress happens at that point!

This is my mom's car quilt, the one with the jean backing talked about in the previous post.  I tried drawing it out and coloring with the colored pencils but it just wasn't clicking, didn't seem like it would work no matter what I did (limited on my pieces of fabric).  So I finally just grabbed the piles of rectangles and tossed them on the floor and this is what I came up with!

 
 

This is the top piece, I actually have to sew the top and bottom separately from the sides since I decided to have that center twisty piece.  I'll think that one thru a little better next time, borders work way smoother than the way I'm going about things!

 

A close up for a better idea of the true colors.

 

And for once I have an afternoon off, so I am going to try and get this top finished before dinner, being the first day Spring I think it's a fitting accomplishment!

 

UPDATE:

Looking great.  Just have to sew it to the back and batting and tie it together, then on to my FLAG!

 

Thanks for stopping by!

~Brandy

March UFO Progress and Goals

Well first of all, let me share how happy I am that I got myself outside and working in my garden today!  It's in kinda sad shape, but I have hope :)  I am thinking of putting in grape tomatoes, jalepenos, and bell peppers this year, keeping it fairly simple.  I've had good luck with peppers, and the grape tomatoes do well taking care of themselves.  Here's pictures from my previous gardening endeavors:

A pepper, we like to start our seeds inside to give them a head start.

 

John helping me plant.

 

This crop included beans, which was a first for me and very exciting to watch grow!  And now I know not to worry about spacing them out, they need to be next to each other for support!

 

And we had some butternut squash that never did turn yellow/white like it was supposed too... but it was a prolific plant!

 

Our little plot.

 

Bell peppers

 

And a trio of tomatoes.  These pictures are from two years ago, we missed planting anything last year.  But like I said, we'll try and take it slow this time around and see if we can't get ourselves some fresh produce.

 

 

And now!  I have had the opportunity to finish only one project this month, and it was a long overdue one.  When I made my first quilt a year and a half ago I had scraps that I started turning into a pillow case to match the quilt, and I finished it on Saturday the 15th, National Quilting Day!

 

It has an invisible zipper on the bottom, which turned out pretty well I thought.  And you can see the quilting in this picture.

 

Isn't it funny how you puff something up and suddenly it looks rounded?

 

Now I just need to purchase a pillow form that actually fills it haha, it's an 18 inch size, all I had on hand was a 16 inch.

 

As for my piece I plan on completing next or at least moving to the stage of a "top":

 

This is the backing from my mom's car quilt.

 

I did not know the "white" squares were actually striped!

 

And so I'm working on finishing the top, and reassembling it for her.  To be quite honest, I took it from her possession about 8 months ago and got the center of the top done then, then promptly forgot about it until recently when John reminded me.  Yay for my husband!

 

Good luck to you all in your endeavors for the rest of this month, I'm looking forward to some relaxing sewing from here on out!

 

~Brandy