Give me an F!

I'm sewing along with Temecula Quilt Company while they make a cute little letter quilt.

Tomorrow you can find the letter F on their blog.

Are you making them too? 

My letters are made of a collection of coordinating scraps from different quilts I've been saving for just the right project.

They're a little more traditional than I've been sewing with lately, but I like all kinds of fabric, and these traditional scraps worked great here.

The background fabric, showing states and cities, is also from my stash.  Just pretend it was ironed for the photo.

I was saving it in case a school project came up, but with the boys in high school and college, I figured if that hadn't happened by now it just wasn't going to, so I'm using it for my Little Letters Quilt!

It's going to be fun to make a few letters a week and end up with a cute quilt!

Pulling strings

I've been trying to focus on getting some quilting done.

I thought I'd start with the next quilt I thought I'd use, and now I'm happy to say that my Halloween Clover quilt has been quilted!

Woo Hoo!

I'm in the process of pulling the threads through and when I'm finished with that, then I'll show you the whole thing.

There are lots and lots of threads that need to be taken care of on this one, but I'm already about halfway done.

One more good TV evening and I'll be finished! 

Meet my new neighbor!

This guy showed up in our backyard yesterday and we had a good time watching him walk around beside the fence line.

 As you can see, when we found him he was standing on the garden hose.

 My nature loving neighbor had told us that a gopher tortoise had made it's home beside her house and we figured this was who she was talking about. 

After he had throughly scared Copper, who had no idea what this was, and it seemed that the tortoise couldn't figure out how to get out of our fence and go back home, we brought him back to his hole with my neighbor's help.

I wonder if he'll be back again today.

  

Spell It With Fabric quilted edition

I'm back with the pictures of my Alphabet Quilt all quilted, bound and finished!

If you remember from this post, it was a baby gift for two high school English teachers.

It was a difficult one to give away, and I just might have to make another!

I quilted it using the wavy stitch on my Bernina 440.  It's stitch number 4 with a length of 2.5 and a width of 4.9.

It added a nice finishing touch to this sweet baby quilt!

I'm loving the yellow hexagon Riley Blake fabric for the binding and backing.

 I don't get to use yellow very often! 

The pattern is from the Moda Spell It With Fabric Quilt Along, but I halved the size of my blocks.

If you try this, I think you will need to actually halve the sizes in the cutting directions, THEN maybe add a quarter of an inch to that, or else you'll end up with eighth of an inch seam allowances like I did.

Having eighth of an inch seam allowances wasn't really a pretty situation, but I sewed mine a bit bigger and I managed to make it work. 

It was washed and dried without a problem.

I noticed that Temecula Quilt Co. is having a Little Letter Quilt Along that started today, if you're interested.

The finished block size in their quilt is four inches square.

I'm thinking about digging out my scraps and maybe sewing along with them to make myself a little letter quilt to keep!

Not that I'm in need of another project to start!

Right now, I'm working on planning the quilting for a Halloween quilt top that I finished last year. 

 My Bernina 820 that I was planning on using for the quilting is under the weather, and it will probably make a trip to the shop this week.

It's possible that some kind of sensor is broken. 

The bobbin door popped open totally on it's own, while I was away from the machine for a few minutes, and now it refuses to admit that it's been closed.

Ugh!  I'm hoping that it's a quick fix.

In the meantime, I'll be doing the quilting on my smaller machine in an effort to get some things finished. 

Fall certainly seems far away from us here in Florida at this point, but I'm hoping it'll be here soon!

Maybe working on my Halloween quilt will help me feel like fall is on the way.

Tonight, we'll be grilling burgers outside topped with curly fries and melted cheese with a wedge salad to celebrate the weekend before we start another busy school week.