Lori Smith Needs to STOP!

LOL, at least that's what my great friend Linda and I always say. Lori Smith (CLICK HERE) is a quilt designer/genius and she needs to be stopped, because her patterns are SO ADDICTIVE. That's a picture of her spectacular Pieces of Time quilt. We won't talk about the fact that I've completed all 31 blocks and it has STILL become a UFO, waiting quietly for me to jump in and tackle those borders. We also won't talk about the fact that I have her Heritage pattern, still untouched. But that's not really what this post is about.

So if you remember my Be Mindfuls, you may recall that I promised you a peek at a project that's near and dear to my heart. It all started with Lori again, and her wonderful Folk Art Pleasures pattern. I LOVE the pattern, but I also love Jeanne's idea (CLICK HERE to visit her Spiral blog) of redesigning some of the blocks to better fit my own life.

With apologies to Lori for muddling up her borders with letters and numbers, here is a pic of her Folk Art Pleasures (FAP) quilt.
Many of the blocks are perfect for me, just as they are. However, some will "fit" better if I change them. For example, see C4, the chicken one? I have no particular 'truck' with chickens. I never had one as a pet and I certainly don't eat them, so that's one block that I'm going to change. And there are definitely not enough (or ANY) cats in her blocks. And see B2? I'd like to be holding the hands of TWO little boys, rather than just one.

Thus far, I've only completed 7 of the 16 blocks: A2, A3, A4, B1, D1, D2 and D4. I'm working on A1, and that's my current Be Mindful project. I'll post pictures of my blocks tomorrow, even in their current, wrinkly/un-ironed state. But if you've made it this far in today's post, you deserve a reward. Here's a closeup of my version of A3 - it's FOSTER! Here he is in real life:
And here he is in a fabric tree. Check out his Mad Eye, LOL.
In real life, he doesn't go outside and he doesn't have red moons. But his eyes really do look like that when he looks at our dogs.

If you click on the Mad Eye pic, you can see some applique "warts". In particular, you can see the pencil line where his tail connects to his body. (I've since learned not to draw the bottom of that U-shape, because it's hard to turn it all under.) I guess I'm still Celebrating Imperfection. CLICK HERE to read the Warts and All post.

Check back tomorrow to see the rest of the blocks and thanks for stopping by!

Nicer Than Me

It occurred to me that my husband is. Nicer than me, that is. In brief: I asked him to make a display thingie for the craft show. My vision was that he would get a sheet of pegboard, cut it in half longways (to make 2 pieces each 2' x 8'), run skinny boards around each section to sturdy them up, hinge them together and WA-LA, a display thingie that I could paint and hang stuff on at the craft show.

So he did that. He did EXACTLY that for me. He even had to add extra boards to sandwich the pegboard to make it more stable. When I finally went into the garage to see it...IT WAS HUMONGOUS. It was so big it scared me. It was SO big it would touch the ceiling in a normal room. (The garage ceiling is higher, but turns out regular ceilings are 8' tall.) I took one look at it and said, "OMG, that is a MONSTROSITY. It's WAY too big and it's unusable like that. Can you cut it down????"

This is when I knew for a fact he is nicer than me. Know what he said? "Sure, that's no problem." SURE, THAT'S NO PROBLEM. Now, if the situation were reversed, would I have been so nice or would I maybe at least have said something sarcastic? Yep, sarcasm.

The only other thing he said was, "At what point did you realize that 8' is really tall?" LOL

Thanks for stopping by. Hope to have some pics for you soon!

The Bird is Back!

First things first...no news yet of any changes at school. We all feel like we're waiting for the other shoe to drop. I'll keep you posted.

Now, for the bird:

So I was all excited to make these adorable little Christmas light hair clips as a surprise for Little L and Little C, because their Nana is just such a nice person. It was a brand-new pattern I'd gotten from an embroidery design company that I just love.

Well, the clips are done and they're cute. MAN, were they aggravating, though. They each had a total of TWELVE steps, two of which involved gluing things together before they were embroidered. Ideally, one would wait until the glue dried before trying to embroider them.

Not me! I was a little too impatient to wait for the glue to dry, so things shifted and the ribbon on the back didn't sew in right and I'd love to show you a picture, but apparently Picnik is having issues of its own and the colors are off enough that I'd rather wait till Picnik is over its tantrum. How was that for a run-on sentence?

I'll be back tomorrow, hopefully with a picture to show you and a better attitude to boot. Thanks for visiting!

W.I.P.

Sorry I missed posting yesterday. Last night, I was working on a Taggie Lovie for the little granddaughter of one of our school's secretaries. I'm using a more Pink Princess color palette for this one, per the Nana's request, and I hope to have at least a W.I.P. (work in progress) picture for you later today.

In the meantime, look who's here!

I was celebrating imperfection with my first attempt at Zoey's Taggie Lovie. In the interest of keeping it real, I have a pic for you. Have you ever seen the Fail Blog? This is my version:

Yeah, that was one of those ideas that sounded good on paper.

Now, if I should miss MORE than one day of posting, then probably something like our friend Earl might be involved:

And if I should miss SEVERAL days of posting...well, send a rescue squad, will ya?!

Thanks for stopping by!

We Have A WINNER!!

The random number generator just picked my giveaway winner...can I have a drumroll, please?!?? KAREN at MERRY LITTLE QUILTER, come on down and place your order for your handmade, monogrammed handbag!! Wooo hooooo!! Karen, you're set as 'no reply' and I don't see your email on your blog (it's probably there and I just don't see it). Please contact me so you can choose your fabrics and your monogram style!

Now why is it that when I give something away, I'M the one who's excited, just like I won it myself?!

Alrighty, that's all I have for today. I'll leave you with some pics of Zoey's quilt in progress. In true Celebrate Imperfection! style, I did manage to stretch some of the blocks out of shape with my overenthusiastic quilting. However, I told myself that it's a BABY quilt and that the BABY is not going to know or care that Grandma quilts like a gorilla. Right??

Here's the front:

And here's the back:

I'm binding it in dark purple. Thanks so much to ALL who entered my drawing. I wish I could make a purse for every one of you!!

Stylish Laundry

Well, the Celebrate Imperfection! bird had to make his (her??) appearance just to let you know that imperfection is alive and well in my projects. I was monogramming some laundry bags for my friend and had a serious issue at one point. However, all's well that ends well, right? So here they are...this one is back in the package because I didn't think about taking pictures until I'd already bagged it back up:

I think they turned out really well. And now my friend can do her laundry in style! Hope you enjoyed the pics and thanks for stopping by!

Quilt Show, Day Three - College Quilts

Hi and welcome back! I hope you're enjoying your quilt show! Today I have two graduation quilts that I made for the son and daughter of dear friends. This family lives in Ohio and they are ardent Cleveland Browns fans which makes for an interesting rivalry during football season, given the fact that my guys are all all rabid Steelers fans.

When their son Taylor was going off to OSU, I made him this Browns quilt and let me just tell you, working with that neon orange about killed me. Plus, I had severe basting issues and the final product looks wrinkly and baggy. I'm just going to say that I was Celebrating Imperfection!:

Here's the back. I kind of like it better than the front, LOL.

When it was their daughter Alysia's turn to go off to OSU, I made her something a little more feminine. I drew the flower design myself, but our cat, Kong, was also instrumental in the creation of this quilt. (Don't worry, that family loves cats, too.)

Here are a couple of pictures of it on my longarm machine.

And here it is on Alysia's bed at college. All that work on the flowers, and she liked the back! LOL, hey, as long as she's using it, who cares which side is up, right?

I'll be back tomorrow with some more quilt pics. Thanks for stopping by!

Warts and All

Before I explain the title of this post and the somewhat bizarre-looking bird above, let me just show you yesterday's total progress on Zoey's quilt.

Not very impressive. Even if you don't quilt, you can probably tell that I didn't get a lot done, given the fact that I worked on it ALL DAY LONG. Why? Because I spent a LOT of time reverse-sewing, otherwise known as ripping out.

First, Foster alerted me to a piecing error. The plaid is sewn wrong-side-up.

Then there were more piecing errors...blocks that were rotated like those in the picture below. This particular type of error happened a total of three times - I guess because I was too obsessed with focused on color placement. In fact, once I got the errors corrected, I still wound up totally ripping apart and rearranging two rows of blocks before I finally made myself STOP.

Now, about the bird...I had a lot of thinking time as I was ripping out, and it occurred to me that bloggers don't seem to post pictures of the 'warts' in their lives. They seem to be spending their afternoons watching their beautiful children (who are wearing handmade clothes) picking wildflowers in a field.

MY life never has been like that! I was more likely to be spending my afternoon in the E.R. because one of our boys scratched the other one's cornea while they were wrestling over a plastic Halloween mask. Or I might be running all over town to find a replacement globe for the ceiling fan after one of the boys broke it while swinging a boat oar at the other one's head.

So in the interest of honesty, I'm pledging to tell you about the mess-ups and mistakes in my projects. If my disasters are pictures-worthy, I'll even stop to snap a pic of it, warts and all. Not every single wart, mind you...you probably don't have that much time. But just enough to let you know that my life is not about lounging in a field.

I got so excited about the whole Imperfection thing that I created a button for my sidebar. Why Celebrate Imperfection? Because it's reality. Mistakes are going to happen and fixing those mistakes helps us grow.

Thanks for popping in! If you're a blogger and you're into reality, feel free to grab a button! As for me, I'm off to work on Zoey's quilt...and hopefully I won't find toooo many more warts!