bad blogger

wow. i am a bad blogger. BAD BLOGGER in capital letters. it has been 1 year since my last post. apparently, i'm also a bad quilt-alonger. BAD QUILT-ALONGER. too busy being a mom, wife and employee to get any quilting done in a timely manner. and people keep having babies. babies need quilts. so with that, maybe, just maybe i could start writing again. would help if i thought that anyone read this ever. or cared. so a post without a pic is boring. BORING. so here's a pic of mickey the cat helping with the bad quilt alonging.

sparkle punched out.

wow. the quilt-along continues. i am not elizabeth hartman. i am wonky-stars challenged. 1 hour of sewing produced two sets of stars. at this rate i might have to quit my job to keep this on time. i will be talking to my husband to see how he feels about that.  i picked  kona champagne for my solid. i thought it was a fitting name for a quilt called sparkle punch. after rippng out 8 seams, and almost ruining the one set of pink polka dots i have, i read the part of the instructions when elizabeth says, "...If you've never done piecing like this before, it may help to practice on some scraps before moving on to your "good" fabric". oh how i wish that i would have read that 30 minutes earlier.   i think i have the hang of the squares now so i hope to be a little more productive the next time i sit down. sorry about the busy background behind my two stars... champagne matches my floor too closely and the next closest surface was my pressing table. (also just noticed that picture 1 has a really odd color tint. things are not going my way tonight.)

happy new year!

yeah, i'm back. i hope. spent most of the morning cutting fabric to finish oh fransson's paintbox quilt-along which, yes, i started in APRIL OF 2010. also, fabric has been found (found, not bought!) to particpate in oh fransson's current quilt-along, sparkle punch. i settled on polka dots. not sure if they are going to actually match or not but since i have cut approximately 490 3 1/2-inch squares of polka dots, polka dots it is!  i'm attempting to actually quilt along in a timely manner this time. i love good intentions. mickey helped me for awhile.

here are the blocks that i have finished sewing for the paintbox quilt along. almost done with the blues. then onto purple, yellow, red, orange and pink! 42 blocks down, 38 to go!

and then i cut squares. and more squares. and still more squares. here is part of the stack waiting to become a sparkle punch quilt!

late to the party...

i decided to participate in oh fransson's paintbox quilt-along. it started in january. i started yesterday. technically i started closer to january because i ordered my robert kaufman kona solids jelly roll in january. i lovingly photographed it when it arrived.



and then i shopped. and shopped for prints to go with the solids. then all of the fabric sat on top of my sewing machine for, well, a couple of months. yesterday i sorted and started! cutting.


i've decided to not use the brown solid or two of the three white solids that came in the jelly roll and instead i'm going to use a black solid and two additional gray solids. i also have one more blue solid to find a print to match, more shopping for me!

today i started sewing! i started with the gray solid because it is my favorite! i love gray! and then sewed the white because it is b-o-r-i-n-g. i continued with the greens because they are my least favorite and thought i'd work from not so exciting for me towards the colors i like better. except that is just today. sometimes greens are my favorites. i guess my real strategy is that i piled them up and i'm just working through the pile. i only sewed for a bit and then i cut some more.

8 blocks down... 72 to go!


i wanted to photograph the stack... it looks pathetically small but i am not discouraged!

a new quilt for the bowerbaby! pattern from Oh Fransson's mod quilt sampler quilt along

first time i have attempted a pieced back on a quilt. it's bit wonky, but that just makes it more charming, right?