Back Home Again--So Much To Share!

Still trying to get back into routine, but thought I could share a few things with you.
The night before we flew out I had an idea and I pulled out the little "Building houses from scraps" kit. I put all of the houses out on a design board and started switching up the pieces, so they took on a scrappy look. This was the result (excuse my very thready design board).

I have not pieced by hand in years (other than hexies--and that is a whole different thing). My goodness, my skills were rusty! I couldn't even seem to stitch a straight line. When the lines are stamped on the fabric, that is pretty silly not to be able to follow them.
By the time we touched down in Manchester, NH I only had 1 house finished and another nearly done (we were up at 2:45 a.m. to catch our flight, so I dozed a lot). We were always on the go while visiting DD#1 and her DH, so I didn't pick it up again until awaiting our flight home. I got three houses finished, total. I need to unpick my first attempt. Those Y-seams stumped me at first, and house #1 is pretty wonky. It is the house in the upper right of the photo below--isn't even the same size as the others. I am really liking these little scrappy houses. Tempting to just work on them, but I am going to try and keep them as my "on the go" project, and let it get finished whenever! Thanks again to my dear friend Annie Miksch for this thoughtful gift!

Since DD#1 lives 10 minutes from Keepsake Quilting, a visit there was inevitable. Blogging friends Grace (acityquilter blog) and Vic (Park Hill Farm blog) had arranged to make the effort to meet up with us there.

Vic, me, and Grace

Tough decisions made at the cutting counter.

I had been saving my pennies for this experience. I had been warned that Keepsake did not have a large selection of CW repro fabrics, but must say I was very surprised at just how small it was. MY LQS, whose selection is not huge, carries more than Keepsake. Luckily, KQ had very different lines of fabric from what I can get at home, so I found plenty to purchase. Now, if it is batiks you are looking for, you will find a room full! That overwhelmed me. I had to walk away and think about it and return with a narrow focus of what I wanted to buy.






After that very hard work of making decisions, carrying bolts of fabric and opening the wallet, it was time for nourishment. Vic and Grace took us to a lovely establishment called The Canoe, where we dined and chatted and laughed.



The day before this grand adventure Angie and I had visited Quilted Threads in Henniker, NH. This shop was a recommendation from Mrs. Goodneedle, and it did not disappoint!

 So here is my haul. To the left is the fabric, Aurifil threads and Valdani flosses I picked up at Keepsake Quilting.

On the right is the fabric I purchased in Quilted Threads.






The Primitive Gatherings pattern was at Quilted Threads, and Patchwork Stars was in the sale bin at Keepsake.

Angie and I have been making pineapple and log cabin ornaments for my other daughter's fundraiser in November. Angie has her share all finished and I was able to provide them transportation back to Utah. Aren't they lovely? Now I need to get my share finished!

When we were at Quilted Threads Angie found some 1/4" hexie papers. Oh, my goodness, they are small. She vacillated as to whether or not to buy them, but they finally found their way home with her. The night before we left she actually started playing with them. Can you believe this? Can you even see it? I left the needle and thread in the photo so you could get the proper perspective. That is a small spool of thread.

We had a wonderful trip. There was so much to do in New Hampshire, Maine and Vermont. I will leave you with this shot as DH and I took a canoe ride in the canal behind our daughter and SIL's apartment. It ends up in Lake Waukewan.

Until next time,
Janet O.

I have a hexie project, too! I just don't often admit it.

Do these fabrics scream the 80s and 90s to you? The one that won't lay
flat from being rolled up in my hand, in the upper left corner,
is the one I just finished.

This project is a running joke with my friends. I will give you a little history (okay, a lot of history). I have mentioned several times that I used to volunteer at a local heritage center. They used to hold an annual festival every year at this very time that ran for 8 days. It featured artisans of heritage crafts, lots of entertainment, food and reenactors, with many different historic groups represented--pioneers, turn of the century farmers, civil war soldiers (including the buffalo soldiers), mountain men, gunfighters, and Native Americans. I participated as a reenactor on the pioneer site and with the gunfighters (very out of character for me).

All of my fabrics were cut
and bagged, ready for
sewing.

I got to know a few of the artisan crafters, including the local woman they brought in to demonstrate quilting. One year, well over ten years ago, she had a Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt on her frame. I had always loved the design and she encouraged me to learn how to English Paper Piece the flowers, pointing out that we spend so much time sitting and doing nothing and this gave our hands a way to be productive. A little bag tucked into your purse could carry all you needed to be working on a block or two wherever you happened to be. She referred to it as her "lady-in-waiting" project. She gave me templates and assigned me to cut papers and fabric that night at home. The following day she taught me the technique. I picked it up quickly and from then on I could rarely be found away from my home without the makings of a flower block in my hands (never worked on this project at home). I stitched while I waited for my kids at the dentist, orthodontist, piano lessons, or even waiting for my turn at parent/teacher conferences. I had cut enough fabrics for over 60 flowers and was cutting papers as I went along. The flowers were starting to pile up. In my enthusiasm for the quilt, I had taught my mother how to make the blocks. Her pile grew faster than mine (she did work on hers at home) and in less than a year she had her entire top hand-pieced, hand-quilted, and entered in the county fair.

My oldest kids were getting their drivers licenses about this time and I soon found I wasn't spending nearly as much time "waiting". It seemed I seldom had a need to pull this project out of my purse. Over time it got buried in the depths of my bag and I didn't worked on it for years. One evening, when DH and I arrived at a high school gym several miles away to watch our youngest son play basketball, we found that the schedule our team had been given had the incorrect time listed and we were very early. What to do? There were other parents there and we started visiting. Suddenly a light went on in my head as I remembered my LIW project. I dug deep and found it, but to my surprise I discovered I could no longer see clearly enough to make those tiny stitches.

Click to see the stitches.

 I was getting old!! One of the other parents loaned me some reading glasses (I didn't even own a pair) and I made a feeble attempt to work on it--still a little stunned that my eyes couldn't do this on their own anymore. Back at home I took it out of my bag and put it away. I wasn't ready to admit that I needed glasses to do handwork.

There are now two or three times a year that I need some handwork to fill long hours. I am an election judge in our area and there are usually some slow times in a day that you need a small project. I also help take entries at the home arts department for our county fair. That is a day and a half that sometimes seems much longer. When I pull out my hexie flowers at either of these places I always get ribbed about how long I have been working on this quilt. Someone asks if it is my second or third quilt, and there is always a bunch of teasing. The kicker was 4 years ago as I sat and sewed on a flower at the quilt entry table of our county fair, a young woman walked in with a finished Grandmother's Flower Garden quilt to enter. She was 18 years old at the time and a friend of my youngest son. She told me that she had seen me working on my quilt several times in years past at the orthodontist's office and had really like it. She had found a pattern, learned how to make it, completed it--right down to the hand-quilting, and was there to enter it in the fair. And there I sat not even halfway through making my flowers. Boy, talk about feeling sheepish.

But I have gathered courage from the many bloggers who have posted about long-term hexie projects and yesterday, as we drove an hour each way to visit some hospital bound relatives, I took along my hexies and finished a flower I haven't worked on since the last election! I tell myself that this will come to pass--someday!!

But there is more (sorry). After initially learning the technique of English Paper Piecing I did some research on it and put together another quilt to work on when there was nothing else to do on the pioneer site. I used repro fabrics and found sewing implements as vintage-looking as I could afford. I chose to do this in the diamond (or as the early English quilters called "lozenge") shape. I collected reproduced newspapers of the 1800s from heritage villages in Utah and Illinois--having found in my research that many such quilts were pieced onto old letters and newspapers. Old letters were harder to come by.

 There was not a lot of idle time on pioneer site, so I didn't get very far with this project, either. We were usually kept busy dipping candles, cooking over the fire, quilting, talking to groups of school children in the schoolhouse tent, or on the handcart trail. But when things were calm, I would pull out my sewing box and try to look as "period correct" as I could with my handwork, because you know what they say about the evil of "idle hands."

Until next time, from the little mountain valley where we are being walloped with rain,
Janet O.