Hello and Goodbye and a Little Sewing

During the last weeks of summer, Dave and I met my sister and brother-in-law on Block Island to spend a few days on their catamaran, Escape Velocity.  We were at a mooring in the Great Salt Pond where each morning and evening we heard "Andiamo on your boat, " the signal that the Aldo's Bakery folks were selling their wares from a little outboard motorboat.  We became steady customers and bought bread, cookies and morning buns most days.  Unfortunately, I did not get a picture of the motor which had printed on it, "I gotta no change!"

Jack and Dave enjoyed sitting on the "back porch," solving the world's problems, no doubt.

Marce treated us to cucumbers with lime and sea salt, something she had in a local bar in Honduras while she was there with a film crew.

We biked to the Monhegan Bluffs and went down to the beach (140 steps, they say, plus some climbing on rocks.)

When you get down to the beach you are greeted with hundreds of cairns.

Marce collected rocks to build a cairn of her own.

Back on the boat, Dave got in some swimming time and used snorkle gear to go down and scrape barnacles off the propellers.

All too soon, it was time to leave.  Cap'n Jack and First Mate Marce took Dave and me back to New London where we had left our car.

Dave enjoyed being aboard!

After dropping us off, the sailors set out in the dinghy to return home.

We had more time together in early September when Marce and Jack anchored in Nyack, NY for 2 weeks.  We shopped, did errands, met almost daily at the Runcible Spoon, one of our favorite cafes.
One day, Izzy can to play in our yard!

And when my nephew, Drew came for a quick visit, we managed to get almost all of our family together for a group picture.  Missing? Our niece, Ericka

 

 Marce and Jack headed south on Monday.  We really miss them!

Despite all this busyness, I did manage to get some sewing in.  I made this quilt for a little girl who is expected to make her appearance in November.   It's a Chinese Coins quilt made with repro prints.

I machine quilted it with loops and hearts in the borders and sashings.

And backed it with polka dots.  I'll add a label when the baby is born and I know her name.

Tomorrow is the baby shower, so I finished it in time!

June: Celebrations and (of course) THE CHALLENGE!

The month of June is a busy one for our family. Emily's birthday is on the 16th, Dave's is on the 20th, Father's Day always falls around then, and Dave's and my wedding anniversary is on the 22nd.  Whew!  We buy a lot of cards and eat out much more often than usual.  All of these dates remind us of how quickly our lives spin past and how important it is to appreciate each and every day. 
 This year was one of those significant birthdays for Dave.  Here's one of my favorite pictures of him, taken when he taught at the Edinburgh Academy.  Except for gray hair and beard, he still looks the same (minus the kilt!)

Thirty-eight years ago, this was the scene......

 And twenty-five years ago, our sweet girl arrived.....

 

 Here she is being greeted by her grandmother, her Aunt Marce, and her cousin Drew.

 

Despite all this celebrating, I did manage to complete my Free Motion Challenge for June. The teacher for this month was Cindy Needham who does exquisite machine quilting on whole cloth quilts.  Her tutorial included several parts in which she explained her choices of tools, her method of beginning and ending and burying threads, and her method of dividing the quilting space and quilting differently in each section, much like the Zentagle doodle method.

For some of my practice pieces I used quilt sandwiches I had used to try some decorative threads for bobbin quilting.  Since those threads were white, I used YLI Rainbows thread so I could see the difference between the two.

After several practice sessions, my final attempt is here.   I have a Bernina  and I have done some of the challenges using the BSR, but I did all of this month's quilting without it, and I am happy with the result.  My stitches are more even than I had expected them to be, and I think Cindy's suggestion about letting the rhythm of your machine help you to keep your foot and hands in sync really worked for me.  This is one lesson I think I shall be trying again and again.

 

 

I quilted the name of the month and a heart in hand, too, and I think I will do this on all the challenges for the rest of the year.

 

 I hope that those of you who are celebrating this month and quilting this month have as much fun as I did!

Escape Velocity Achieved (Almost)

  My trip to Florida was short and sweet and busy!   It was thrilling to see Marce and my brother-in-law, Jack so happy and excited to have begun to fulfill their long held dream of sailing around the world.  They have named the boat Escape Velocity and are blogging about their experiences here.

The boat is beautiful and much more comfortable and roomy than I (the landlubber in the family) had expected.  The berths and heads are in the two hulls, and the living space is in the bridge deck that connects the two hulls.

Before my trip, I did a little crafty business and made t-shirts with the boat name and picture for each of us.  I think they were a hit.

When they sold their house, Marce and Jack pared down their possessions to things they thought they would want or need on the boat.  The moving truck arrived on Tuesday.  We sorted through the boxes to decide what could wait in the rented storage locker and what should go right onto the boat.   Things for the boat included pantry and kitchen and bath items, along with the all-important cases of wine.  We packed the rest into the storage locker without an inch of space to spare.  Marce is the all-time champion packer!

Back on board, we had lots of "stuff" to put away into not very much space.

The previous owners left lots of food that they had acquired during their cruising trip of almost 4 years.  We had fun "reading" labels from different countries.

During all this commotion, Izzy, the "Adventure Kitty," always found a spot for watching or napping.

 We did take time out for some fun.  We even took a ride up to Archie's Seabreeze in Ft. Pierce for dinner one night.

 When I left there was still lots of work to do to prepare for sailing away, but I came home knowing that Marce and Jack are beginning a wonderful new chapter of their life together, and that there's a berth with my name on it so that Dave, Emily and I can achieve Escape Velocity, too.

Retreat: Sew. Eat. Sleep. Repeat.

Last weekend, my quilt guild held its annual retreat in Stroudsburg, PA, at the Shawnee Inn.  This was my first retreat, and I had a wonderful time and am ready to go again!  It was bliss to be able to sew and talk quilting and share quilting tips and get to know other members without having to worry about meals, laundry, cleaning and all the other daily responsibilities that impinge on sewing time.
The Shawnee is an old, venerable, classic hotel; when you walk down the halls, you see photographs of visitors like President Eisenhower, Mickey Mantle, Dizzy Gillespie and even the Lone Ranger!  (I don't know whether Tonto was there or not; I didn't see a picture.)  The Inn sits right on the Delaware River north of the Delaware River Gap; we were lucky to have unseasonably warm weather on Friday and Saturday, so two friends and I had a lovely walk on Saturday morning before we began our sewing marathon.

We also took some time out to visit Pocono Sew and Vac in Stroudsburg, too.  What a wonderful store!  It is family owned, and they sell just about every make of sewing machine as well as fabric and thread and notions.  I scored a Bendable Bright Light, and pair of Machingers Quilting Gloves and a few yards of fabric on sale.  (I did not even go to the part of the store where they sell vacuum cleaners!  This was a quilting retreat, after all.  If I ever go on a housecleaning retreat, I'll look at vacuums.)

The Inn provided us with a big meeting room where we could set up our machines and irons.  The room was available to us from Friday morning until Sunday afternoon.  Throughout the weekend, there was the hum of sewing machines punctuated with the voices of quilters complimenting, questioning, advising, reassuring, exclaiming about each others' projects.

I spent a lot of time before the retreat prepping for the projects I took with me.  Like some travelers, I over-packed projects because I wanted to be sure that I could choose what to work on depending on my mood.  One of the projects I worked on was my interpretation of a house block inspired by Jeanneke"s Building Houses from Scraps.

If you have seen the Building Houses from Scraps blog, you know that Jeanneke started a project to make 366 3" house blocks in 2012, one for each day of the year.  I decided that 3" blocks were way too small for me, and although I enjoy hand-piecing, finding the time and motivation to make one block a day for a year is not a commitment I could fulfill, so I drafted my own 6" house block and cut up lots of scraps to take on the retreat.
 
Here's the first house block that I used as a guide:

I cut up some charm squares and lots of scraps and a few jelly roll strips.  Except for choosing appropriate fabrics for the sky pieces, matching the pieces on either side of the door and window, I cut all the other fabrics into pieces without regard to color or scale.  After making a few blocks, I also decided to fussy cut some of the windows.

Here's a tip for organizing pieces for blocks that require lots of little pieces: use a cutlery tray!
Here's what my tray looked like before I started piecing:

And here are the blocks I made during the retreat.

Now that I am home and doing some other sewing, I'm using the house project as leaders and enders, much less pressure than making a house every day! (Oops!  I just realized that two of the blocks are not pieced correctly....too many distractions, I guess.)

Next up, another project that was in my retreat baggage, one of my favorite patterns and one of my bucket list quilts.

March FMQ: Doodling with Ann Fahl

Ann Fahl is the featured teacher for  this month's Free Motion Quilting Challenge organized by Sew Cal Gal.  I really enjoyed the "assignment!"  Ms. Fahl contributed a very comprehensive lesson with lots of information and advice about threads, needles, blocking and basting.  When I was at the AQS show in Lancaster I treated myself to some colorful threads at the Superior and Aurifil booths, and this month I had fun trying some of them out. 
So here's my final product for March.  I tried some of Ms. Fahl's suggested designs and added some doodles of my own.  The threads I used for this sample were Superior's Rainbows and The Bottom Line in the bobbin.  I was a little skeptical when I saw how fine these threads are, but I am really happy with the results!  I started in the upper right doing loops, moved down the right side adding stars and hearts.  Then in the lower right I tried some spirals and morphed them into daisies on the left, a few flower doodles, two heart-in-hands that look like clown hands, and finally loops again at the top left.

I took this photo with my iPhone using a camera app that I read about in the NY Times on Thursday.  It's called Camera Awesome and it has lots of cool features that help you take better pictures and edit them on the spot!  You can read about it here.
In my next post, I'll tell you about my guild's recent retreat and show you my secret to staying organized when piecing quilt blocks.

February Free Motion Quilting

With only two hours to go in the month, I have to post less than stellar attempts at Diane Gaudynski's echoed plumes.  February has whizzed by, even though there is an extra day this year.  So here are my feeble plumes.  I made a promise to myself that I'll do a lot more practicing on the March lesson. (And of course, there are two more days in March, so that will help.)

 

But that's not the only sewing I did in February.  I made this whirligig quilt for a friend's new grandson, using the tutorial from Turtle Hill Quilter.  I had to take the photos in less than optimum conditions, so you'll have to excuse the shadows.  The fabrics are all children's and novelty fabrics, so the wee one can play a little I Spy.

Here's the front:

and the back:

 

 

And finally, I made this quilt top to for my daughter.  I used a charm pack of Kaffe Fassett fabrics for the background and some hand-dyed fabrics for the hearts and hands.  I traced my husband's and my hands and we each drew our own hearts;  I appliqued them by machine using decorative stitches on my Bernina.  The feature that allows you to make one stitch at a time came in handy on all those tight corners and curves.  I'm planning to hand quilt this and have it ready when DD finishes redecorating her room.  

 

We did a little shopping recently at the mall, and stopped for lunch where I snapped DD and her dad.