Seriously, I'm still here.

Remember me? I'm still living in my black hole of hand quilting, people. Blerg.

I have one and three quarter rows left to go. The goal of finishing this one by the end of January...maybe not gonna happen. Unless I don't do any borders and don't sleep or go to work the next two days. 

I now totally understand old fashioned quilting bees.

One slight distraction was Park Ranger Boyfriend being in town to take me to see Miranda Lambert and Dierks Bentley in concert and going to Valley Forge this weekend. No sewing, but an amazing time was had by all. Here I am at the Valley Forge visitor center:

Hope you're doing better with your goals than me!

UPDATE: Guess what! I won a copy of Modern Quilts From The Blogging Universe from Twin Fibers!

That makes my day so awesome! Now, to hand quilt!

Doing Cartwheels

When Lee of Freshly Pieced debuted her Cartwheels pattern, I was lucky enough to win one of the patterns!

I decided to use this pattern for one of the baby quilts I am planning to make this spring and I found out that one of the babies is going to be a girl so I went to work picking colors.

I've been hoarding these fabrics for along time, so I figured a cute baby deserves some REALLY CUTE fabrics. I picked different 12 fabrics for the 12 blocks and then there should be enough of the green diagonal stripe for the binding.

I printed off a pile of the paper pieced templates and finished four of the blocks today:

Using the directional stripe prints made some really cute blocks, in my opinion! It did take a little bit of extra thinking to make the individual units have the fabric going in the same direction.

Sharing at:

Hand Quilting Black Hole

I am currently living in what I will call "the hand quilting black hole."

I picked hand quilting and finishing Park Ranger Boyfriend's Civil War quilt as my January goal for the Lovely Year of Finishes and that might have been a wee bit over ambitious. Blerg.

So that's basically all that I've been working on the last week or so.

Thus far the quilting is done for three and a half rows of the blocks in the center.

The quilting is going well....just very, very slowly.

Check out what everyone else has been working on at WIP Wednesday and the Lovely Year of Finishes mid-month check in!

Lucky Square

I was lucky enough to be chosen to be one of the pattern testers for SewCraftyJess' new pattern, Lucky Square and she's debuting the pattern and sharing the test quilts from myself and the other testers!

I decided to do mine with all scraps in greens, teals, blues, and purples -- something a little bit out of my normal comfort zone! The solid background is Kona Ash and I made the throw sized quilt top. This pattern is great for a confident beginner (provided you're very accurate with your 1/4" seam!)

It is a very fun versatile pattern because it has VERY clear directions on how to make 4 sizes (baby, throw, twin, and queen) and you could adapt to scraps (like I did), yardage (as described in the pattern), charms, or jelly rolls.

Check out Jess's blog to get your own copy of the pattern and see all of the other versions of this pattern!

(Other quilt testers: Gemini Stitches, The Windy Side, City House Studio, Pitter Putter Stitch, Sew Hungry)

Quilted Shoe Quilt

Last week I got a really awesome package from home containing my camera cord, some fabric that I left, and my shoe quilt. My mom free motion quilted it for me and it turned out AMAZING!

The title of this post could also be "My mom is the bomb".

The body of the quilt was quilted with meandering stitches everywhere but the shoes themselves...

...and the borders have a figure 8.

Here's the back:

When my dad saw it finished, he had to call me right away to tell me how cool it looked. My parents are the sweetest.

I got the binding sewn onto the quilt on Thursday and hopefully I'll be able to to hand stitch the binding this week!

Progress has been made on the Civil War quilt hand work...I'll be sharing that soon, I hope!

January Stash Bee Block

This month, our Hive #4 mama Cecelia asked for these fast and easy tile blocks in yellow, grey, and white.

I got mine done right away when I got back to Pennsylvania from my Christmas trip home, but just got my camera cord back this week! I made three just because they were super easy and fun (and used up a bunch of scrap!)

Have a wonderful Wednesday!

Lovely Year of Finishes: January Goal

Shanna of Fiber of All Sorts and Melissa of Sew Bittersweet Designs are hosting "A Lovely Year of Finishes" as a way to take those WIPs to finished projects in bite sized chunks -- one project per month! I'm at the WIP stage for too many projects for a girl in grad school. Find out more about this event here!

My January finish goal is to finish Park Ranger Boyfriend's Civil War Quilt.

This one is currently in the "hand quilting" stage. I'm just hand quilting the sashings and borders (or that's the current plan...) and I have 1.5 of 8 rows finished. I had really wanted to get this one done for Christmas but that did NOT happen. (I'll update the pictures once I get my camera cord back!)

This is kind of an ambitious goal, but I really want to get this one done! I also have to figure out how I want to do the borders, but that's a concern for another day!

Linking up for January and check out what everyone else is up to!