Happy Birthday, Juliette Low!

This post is my entry into the Bloggers Quilt Festival

AND
It honors Juliette Gordon Low's 150th Birthday!


This quilt, Brownie Heartstrings, was a group project organized by my daughter, Julia. She planned several Brownie badge workshops, so more than 50 Brownie Girl Scouts could learn to sew and create a charity quilt at the same time.


With the blocks completed, Julia assembled the top and did the machine quilting. You might be able to see the free-motion butterflies in the blocks.


Juliette (Daisy) Low founded the Girl Scouts in the USA in 1912 in Savannah, Georgia. To celebrate her birthday, 250 local Girl Scouts of all ages gathered at camp last week for a Halloween/Birthday Party.

For the party, Julia wore a vintage uniform from 1940. She presented the quilt to Mary Raymond, our guild charity quilt coordinator, for donation to the Linus Project. I think Daisy would be proud!

I've shown this quilt before when it was on display at the Lowell Quilt Festival, where it won a blue ribbon in the youth category!

Just so you know, a full sheet cake is not big enough for 250 girls, even when the pieces are cut really, really small! (The orange blobs are pumpkins.)

Quilts, camp and cake! It doesn't get any better than that!

Thanks for stopping by!

More Crochet

I'm on a crochet kick this week. I'm enjoying the instant gratification of working with hook and yarn on small projects.


The tutorial for this cute bowl can be found at crochetspot.com.

Next on my to-be-crocheted list: snowflakes in bright, modern colors to hang on my white tree trimmed with ric-rac.

Wool Crochet

I've been crocheting flowers from wool yarn that will be felted and made into brooches for upcoming holiday fairs. I try to keep my bag of yarn in the car so I can crochet a flower whenever I have a few minutes to spare.

My mother and I stopped by the local yarn shop yesterday and I picked up the red, some green for leaves and that beautiful plum was on clearance. Even though it is 100% wool, it won't felt. My clue should have been the word "superwash" on the label! The flower is still cute, so I might make a few more. I'm still trying to get the leaves right.

Most of the flowers in the photo have not been felted yet. You can see the size difference between the two red flowers above my glasses. This morning, I made all the covered buttons for the flower centers using scraps. Yeah! A scrap buster project!

We're having our roof replaced this week. The dark blueish gray is the new roof. I hope it's not too blue, but it's too late now! I'll be looking at it and wondering for another 30 years!

I Won!

Karen Griska recently held a giveaway on her Selvage Blog. (If you haven't visited yet, you must go today! It is chock-full of selvagey goodness!)

Karen painted two of these little wooden cabinets and made quilts to display in them. And I won one of them!

Isn't it the cutest thing ever?! Now to decide where to keep it...

On the a knick-knack shelf?

On my Grandfather's antique radio?

On the ledge of my quilt cabinet?

Yes. I think this will be it's home for a while.
This corner cabinet belonged to my Other Grandma.
It's a little tricky to fold quilts into a triangle and cram them in this cabinet, but I love it.

There are quite a few baby quilts in there, the first quilts Julia and Pete made for themselves, and a couple of antiques. (I need to move that flannel quilt off of the top shelf. It doesn't warrant such a place of distinction.)

Thank you, Karen for sharing your gifts with me!
I promise to pay it forward with a giveaway of my own sometime soon.

Got Scraps?

If you quilt or sew, you've got scraps! Jodi is going to help us use them! Visit Pleasant Home and play along, won't you?!

Jodi asked us to find our scraps, so here you go.

These are just the ones that are not cut into usable pieces. Those are in photo boxes, neatly labeled and lined up on a shelf. These were here, there and everywhere! I just threw the Christmas scraps (see below) into the blue coiled bowl for the photo.


Oh, and then there are baskets with fold-able pieces less than 1/4 yard. Those bits were kind of messy on the stash shelves.

(ok. now that I can see them in a photo, most of them are not pretty. the baskets are not cute, either. giveaway?)

And a basket of selvedges. Do those count as scraps?


Oh, and several years ago, I sorted my scraps by color into paper bags. I've used some of them, but the bags are still crumpled up in a corner somewhere.

OK. I've got scraps!

I finally got all the strips cut for a tree skirt I was commissioned to make in January! She'll get it before Christmas! It is a pattern my mother used in the early 90's. The pattern has since disappeared, so I'm working from photos and long-distance measurements.

Two packages arrived yesterday!
Ten yards of Kona Snow from Jackie at CVQuiltworks
and
My first Spoonflower order!


My Girl Scouts decided to work on the Textile Arts badge, so we ordered a yard of troop number fabric. (My nephew designed our graffiti logo a few years ago.) I can't wait to see what they make from it!

We're all really excited about the badge. There will be some dying, painting, block printing, designing and piecing. Dare I say applique?

Corral your scraps and get ready to sew!

Fall Foliage

Here's a blast from the past! I finished this quilt in 1992, but started it in 1990, shortly after I started quilting. I had seen a photo of a pieced tree in a magazine, but did all the math myself. It was rather exciting at the time!


The placement of the colors represents the changing of the leaves as Fall progresses. I was inspired by memories of watching a particular tree from my bedroom window in the house where I grew up.

The applique leaves were traced from actual leaves I picked up at the Coast Guard Academy after a football game. I used the dryer sheet method to turn under all those little curves.

A few years ago, I decided to tea die the whole thing to tone down the bright white background. Unfortunately, one of the orange prints bled badly. It's not very noticeable from far away.

There is not much Fall color in my yard yet, but I did find a few juicy raspberries. Yum!

I chased this butterfly around, trying to get a few more shots. He was too quick for me, so I only got this one.

This bee is either asleep or dead. I won't be poking him to find out which!

I'm enjoying the sun while it lasts. There is a Nor'easter on its way! Time to batten down the hatches.

Macro Monday

Road Trip!

Look where we went today!

Ryco's Creative Sewing Center in Lincoln, RI.
It's definitely worth the trip.


And look who we met!
Shellie (center) from Shellie Sews works here part-time!
And that's Karen on the right from Sew Many Ways.
Happy Rhode Island bloggers!


So, why didn't I take a picture with my BFF Janet? Sorry, Janet.

We had fun drooling over 6,000 bolts of awesome fabric and aisles of trims to die for. I bought more than I should have, but I'm happy. I started out with the green and orange fabric and ric-rac, moved on to some small-scale Christmas prints, added some stripes to play some more, waffle weave for tea towels, black gross grain ribbon for Julia, and the dresden ruler because they are "in".

There are lots of sample quilts hanging from the rafters of this old mill building on the banks of the Blackstone River. I love the strips in this antique quilt.

I'm ready to jump in and start the big projects on my list and some little projects, too. While I waited in the high school parking lot this afternoon, I crocheted two wool flowers that will be felted and turned into pins. I need to get busy on things I can sell at the holiday craft fairs!

Isn't that bag great?! Janet made it for me because she knits and I don't!

Ready, Set, Sew!