Killer purse?

Apologies for the bad pic, which isn't really so bad for a cell phone in a closed restroom stall. I would have tried for a better shot, but there's something kind of creepy about flash photography in a public washroom.

The signs appeared recently inside the stall doors in the ladies room at Ogilvie Transportation Center in Chicago. The first time I saw them, I laughed. They make me smile every time. I've wanted to write a similar comment to this one, but being a good girl and not having the proper marking pen on me I didn't. Friday morning when I saw this comment I decided I had to take a picture.

The signs are only in the restrooms on the Madison Street side of the station. Apparently the stolen purses on the other side of the station aren't as feral.

Speaking of purses, I bought a new one recently that I just love! Isn't it great?

And the other day while reading all the posts from Quilt Market, I spotted my purse in Valori Wells' booth. The girl has taste.

I'm tired and possibly Canadian

Exhausting week of way too much work, and the clock radio and carbon monoxide detector conspired against uninterrupted sleep three nights this week. Woke up at midnight, having barely just gone to bed, by incessant beeping that I'd never heard before. Turned out to be the clock radio in my sewing room. Figured hubby had turned the alarm on by mistake when he was listening to the radio while ironing his shirts. He wisely irons his own knowing that I can press a quilt seam, but don't manage sleeves, etc. too well. Next night same thing. Apparently in my half asleep state I didn't completely turn the alarm off.

This morning about 5, the unmistakable beeps of a smoke detector whose batteries are winding down woke me up. I couldn't reach the thing, so hubby got up and took the battery out, got back into bed and another beep. It wasn't the smoke detector, it was the carbon monoxide detector nearby. At least I got almost an hour's sleep before my Wake Up Yoga class. Like the class, wish I didn't have to wake up so early for it though.

Later this morning I was reading an article in the Wall Street Journal about Canada's new citizenship law and looks like I might be Canadian. The government is promoting the change in the law with a You Tube video called "Waking Up Canadian."
Apparently in 2007 when the United States started requiring passports for travel between the U.S. and Canada a lot of people who applied for Canadian passports found out they weren't Canadian any more. The new law attempts to help those folks by granting retroactive citizenship to people who "lost" it between 1947 and 1977, and giving it to their children who were born outside Canada.

My mom was Canadian, but lost that citizenship when she became a U.S. citizen after marrying my dad. After dad retired, they planned to move to Canada and live on some property they had bought years earlier. It had been in my mom's family at one point and is near where many of her cousins still live. Mom and Dad applied for Canadian citizenship, but after two years nothing had happened with their applications and my dad had died from cancer. He was buried in the churchyard in Canada near where they planned to live.

Anyway, Mom decided to go back to Canada after Dad died, and she's been living there for more than 10 years as a landed immigrant, which is what she ended up doing so she could live there again because nothing was happening with the citizenship application.

As of Friday, she might not be a landed immigrant any more. She could be a Canadian again. And, having been born to a Canadian parent, I might be Canadian too!

Always felt like I belonged to two countries with most of my "known" relatives living in Canada and going there all the time to visit. Maybe now when folks say, "You have an accent. Where are you from?" (just because I pronounce words like "about" and "borrow" differently) I could say, "I'm Canadian."

I won't start saying "eh," but I wouldn't mind a butter tart.

A little of this ...

... and a little of that. Haven't had time for much sewing these days. Work has crept into my weekends lately, and yesterday was spent with hubby.

We flew up to Sheboygan, WI, and had lunch at the Final Approach restaurant at the Memorial Airport. Really yummy! I don't mind flying in little airplanes, but I get a bit bored. There needs to be a destination and I need a book and/or some Sudukos to keep me occupied. I've tried applique, but it can be too bumpy. Conversation is difficult with headsets so there's not much of that, and he doesn't seem to mind. He just loves flying and having someone with him.

The restaurant was nice. Service was good and food was excellent. The waitress told us about their Monday night special: Martinis and manicures. Sounds like fun. He can fly and I can drink and get my nails done. We'll have to wait until later in the summer when it stays light long enough for us to go, enjoy ourselves and get back to our airport before dark.

Today he went back out to the airport, and I managed to get these off the design wall:

They've been up there for awhile taunting me. You can make so many different blocks with half-square triangles.

Awhile back I'd dug out my UFOs and listed them all. Quite a lot hasn't been finished around here. Including putting that list on the blog. Does your unfinished project list include fabric combinations you love, but havent' found the right pattern for yet?

I did get the half-square triangle quilt done, but then I got distracted by all the other half-square triangles I'd found (and the ones I didn't need once I cut back on the size of that project). At one time I collected triangular scraps from projects (mine and others) and used them to start and stop my chain piecing. You know, run one through the machine before starting chain piecing so that if the thread bunched up on the underside it wouldn't affect my "real" project. Then when you get to the end of something and need to press it, you feed another set of triangles through so you can take your "real" project off the machine without creating a thread tail.

Just some of my collection of itty-bitty triangles. The ones in the plastic bags will finish at 1-inch. How crazy is that?

Eventually, I had gobs of triangles that then had to be pressed and trimmed. So instead of working on something that was partially done, I started messing with the triangles. Grouping like colors together and making up blocks. Finally this weekend I got the last one off the design wall.

This block is 16-inches by 12-inches.

Not sure what I'll do with them. I've put them in a box with other orphan blocks. I like the idea of making a quilt of all these odd blocks. The one I saw in New York keeps popping into my brain. But that one was unified by similar fabrics (1930s feed sacks) and my blocks are all over the color map. Have to think how I could possibly unite what's in that box.

I did finish the backing for Luke's quilt this weekend. Very scrappy. And am contemplating taking some of these to a long arm quilter because at this rate, I'll never get them finished. Depends on whether I've made the backings big enough for the longarmer. Might not have as I had illusions of doing the quilting myself. Even bought the batting. They're mostly small-sized quilts. Baby quilts, really. Surely I can quilt them myself, even if I do mostly do straight-line machine quilting. But now there are five in the stack, and I still have the twins' quilts to piece. Where's that measuring tape?

Another top waits to be quilted

Zach's Sort of Bargello is really a lot brighter than it appears. 52" x 52"

Zach's quilt is done. Minus the back. I did make binding though. Now I can toss it in the pile with the other four waiting to be quilted and get started on the baby quilts for the twins. I like the top-making process lots more than the machine quilting process. Hand quilting? I think not. I've been hand quilting the same wall hanging for years, and most of these latest tops are baby quilts that I would prefer not to give to these kids' kids.

The twin's nursery has blue walls and is decorated in monkeys. Two hours of surfing the Internet and I found this Michael Miller flannel of monkeys playing in the water. Isn't it cute. Would have prefered it wasn't flannel because the babies will be in Atlanta, but it was the cutest monkey fabric I could find. And in person, it's even cuter. I found a block called Monkey Wrench that is not the traditional version. It's more of a snail's trails block. I'm thinking light and dark blues and browns in that pattern with the flannel for the border.

In reality I am my mother's daughter

Can't remember what post I saw it on, but someone suggested posting pictures of your quilt room on Monday. Of course, here it is Wednesday and I'm just getting around to it ... AND seeing that I haven't posted since the NY trip.

Took these pictures last fall. You can tell it was awhile ago because the windows are open, and the room was fairly clean, and I cleverly cropped the worst of the mess out of the pix. (You can't really see the floor, can you? The room has windows or doors and odd bumped out areas on every wall. (It's the style of the whole house, actually.)

This room seems to have been a former dining room. Off the kitchen and with an L-shaped cupboard of shelves where my stash goes to hide. I have to pull out stacks of fat quarters to get to the stacks behind. I'd prefer to see it all laid out one-stack deep and in open view. I had that in my Orlando quilt room, but it did result in fading of the fabric at the fold over time so I have some fat quarters with stripes down the middle.

Here's the reality:
I've become my mother.


Stacks of crap abound! Something must be done. It's one thing to have her hands, it's another to have her piles of paper everywhere.

So, I moved the recipes-to-be-organized, scrapbook-to-be-put-together, and photos-that-should-be-in-albums into neat stacks on the dining room table where hubby won't let them stay for long, and I'll be more inclined to organize them. I hope.

The applique blocks are from Barbara Brackman's "Prairie Flower" book. I had three done and one prepped before hitting my early 40s. I've got bifocal glasses and bifocal contacts and readers from the drugstore and hope that I might finish the other blocks one day.

A little more than 24 hours in NYC

Last Friday I met my friend Fran in New York -- well, actually Newark airport. After helping reunite a lost little boy with his parents, we took the train to Penn Station and walked 40 blocks in the cold!

The exercise was a good thing because we ended up at Crumbs, splitting cupcakes and having coffee for lunch. We started with chocolate coconut and then devil dog (chocolate with marshmallow filling), and passed on the Elvis (banana with a smear of peanut butter on top, not fried).

Along the way we wandered into the gift shop of the American Folk Art Museum, which happened to have a quilt exhibit going on. The last time I was in New York with Fran, about 6 years ago, we accidentally ended up in another museum having a quilt exhibit. The exhibit last weekend was small, about a dozen quilts, all scrappy and made in the '30s.

Wish I had pictures to show. Of course the museum website shows some, but not my favorites. (Check out this one. That's a lot of really small squares!) One favorite was made of pieces of knitted garmets including an argyle sweater and a man's bathing costume. Not my idea of a quilt, but so much fun to look at, and I'm sure it is warm. My other favorite was made of miscellaneous blocks of various sizes and scales. Wondering if I can do something like that with all my one-off blocks and piles and piles of half-square triangles. What made that quilt work was the color scheme pulled everything together. The fabrics were all pastels from the same time period. I'll have to play around with my leftovers to see if they'll play nice together.

The reason we were in New York? To see Buddy Miller, Patty Griffins, Shawn Colvin and Emmylou Harris at the newly renovated Beacon Theater for their "Three Girls and their Buddy" show. Sadly, Buddy wasn't feeling well and didn't perform, but the three girls more than made up for it. What a great show! And the theatre is incredible. The hotel next door is nice, lots of great restaurants nearby (not to mention Crumbs) and a much better vibe than the touristy areas of New York. I think we'll be back for more shows.

We walked around the next morning before heading to different airports and saw Jack McBrayer of "30 Rock" walk past us. Last time I saw Stanley Tucci. Now I'm not going to feel like a trip to New York is complete if I don't see someone famous.

Two tops finished!

Half-square triangle quilt. 40-inches square.

Woo hoo! I finished the half-square triangle top last weekend. And a spider-web top that I hadn't mentioned before.

The half-square triangle was nine blocks waiting for a border while I debated various ideas. One plan was to turn all the leftover squares from the half-square triangles into applique circles of various sizes and scatter them over a vine on a solid navy border. Circles inside circles would form the flowers on the vine.

I found circle templates from my kaleidoscope and Dresden plate quilts, cut some more in different sizes and even tried Anna Maria Horner's super circles on a couple before I confessed to myself that I was totally going to hate making all those circles no matter what method I used, and I was not going to enjoy sewing them to the border either. (The kaleidescope and Dresden plate experiences still being too fresh to repeat no matter how in love with the border idea I was.) And then, I pulled some of the leftover squares and scattered them over the border fabric and realized that the border idea would be too busy and would compete with the already busy interior.

Feeling guilt free about abandoning the applique circles, I pulled different fabrics for the border (didn't have enough navy and trying to use up stash). I didn't have quite enough of this purple stripe leftover from the backing of another quilt, but by using partial seams to set it, I had just enough. The width of the border was determined by the length of the fabric I did have. There was just enough for binding too!

I like how the stripes move around the quilt. This would have looked good mitred too, and if I'd had enough fabric that's what I would have done.

Last Sunday was very productive. I sewed all day. Besides that top and binding, I also finished a spider-web quilt and the backing for it and -- finally -- the backing for Luke's quilt.

Spider-web quilt in progress.

Year's ago (kind of a theme with my quilting) I saw a spider-web quilt at a quilt show in Lake County, Florida. Always wanted to make one, but never did. Then, I saw Marit's spider-web blocks and her tutorial, which includes a link to Bonnie's tutorial and decided that now was the time to give it a try. (Also, I was still avoiding making the back for Luke's quilt). I used paper like Bonnie and shortened my stitch length to reduce the chances of the stitching coming out when I removed the paper.

I squared up my blocks after stitching them together because they weren't as uniform as this anal-retentive quilter would like. I figured my blocks needed to be squared to 11 inches. I kept the 45-degree line of the ruler along a diagonal seam line, the midpoint of the finished size (5.5 inches) on the ruler at the intersection of the seams, and the 11-inch ruler marks on the seams at the corners.

To reduce bulk in the center, I pulled the seams in opposite directions so that I could fan them out, making a tiny four-patch and letting the seam lie flatter.

I used a bunch of strips that had been given to me years ago (I told you this was a theme in my quilting) by a quilt shop owner who didn't want them because they weren't her colors and she thought I'd be able to figure out something to do with them. I don't know where she got them. This was before jelly rolls, and these strips were not cut to a uniform width, which is just fine for the spider-web blocks.

I had some strips leftover, but had to supplement with two other fabrics from my stash to nearly complete the piano-keys border. There wasn't enough of the black polka-dot for the cornerstones so I used plain black and plan to embroider (or quilt) spider webs in bright pink and orange thread.

This quilt and a copy of Charlotte's Web will make a nice present for a certain little girl. I had bought some fabric for her, but couldn't figure out what pattern to use. Still don't know what to do with that fabric, but I'm sure years from now I'll figure it out.

Completed spider-web quilt top. 44-inches square.