Another Long Weekend! :0)

Happy Sunday!! I am having another great 3-day weekend! Yesterday Clarinda and I went to Mason Jar quilt shop, Fabric Shack, Sew-a-lot, Little Shop of Stitches, JoAnn's, and Hancock. I got some a nice panel and pattern at Mason Jar. I picked up all my material for my next large quilt which is called Spa, I will be making it in the new line from Moda called Seascape. I will post a picture of the pattern and material later. I didn't get anything at Sew-a-lot. I got some Moda plain charm packs from Little Shop. From JoAnn's I got some pillow forms and a couple other things. From Hancock I got a non-slip mat for the presser foot on my long arm. It was a quite a bit of shopping, I don't think we planned to go to that many stores but we just kept adding them on as the day went by. Next weekend we have a shop hop that we are really looking forward to, we are going to visit a bunch of stores, some that we haven't been to in awhile. Well, the wedding quilt is moving along well now. I've got the tension figured out on the long arm and I have all of the vertical rows sewn. Today, I want to get the horizontal rows done and the borders. Hoping to have all the quilting done today and to put the binding on tomorrow. I really want to get the quilt and pillow to my friend this week. The pillow and quilt still need to be washed and I will put one of the color catchers in the wash with it since it has a lot of dark and light colors, the fabric was not prewashed, I don't prewash like some quilters do, I learned from a very experienced quilter that you don't need to prewash, just spray the material with some water and iron which will help to shrink if their is any shrinkage. But there may still be some color bleeding so I use the color catcher sheets when I wash the quilt for the first time. Below are some pictures of the quilt and the pillow. Here is the final pillow with the pillow form in it. It does still need to be washed and will go in with the quilt. Here are a couple of pictures of the quilt on the long arm as you can see it is quite a lot of material to get through a machine. Hard to believe I used to push this through my normal sewing machine. This is so much better! This is a picture of the quilt top with the vertical lines sewn. Horizontal lines will be next and then you will be able to see the blocks stand out more. This is the back of the quilt showing the sew lines. They are fairly straight, I had a few spots where I had to jog over a bit because the lines on front were not perfectly straight. A couple of pictures of our babies, they love laying on daddy or laying on my couch, they just want to be near people. This is where I work, I took this picture as I left work Friday, it was snowing. Dave took me to Panera for lunch on Friday and they had .99 baked goods, I got two carrot cakes. I haven't been eating that much sugar lately and the sugar in these made me zoom! Well that is the update for now. I will take pictures once the quilt is complete and will post them then.

February Already?

Gosh, where does go? I think my last post was MLK weekend. That was the weekend Dave and I swapped rooms and I am still trying to find things and put things away! It is really nice having the extra room to move around. I just need to take the time to go through and organize things but that will have to wait until after I finish this wedding quilt. I have the top done for the wedding quilt and I also have the pillow cover top made and quilted. I plan to finish up the pillow tomorrow and piece together the back for the quilt. I've got the long arm up and running and so far it is stitching pretty good. I am not doing an all over design on this quilt I am just stitching in the seams, it is called "stitch in the ditch." If you do it right the stitching shouldn't be visible, you will just get the puffy quilted look. I've yet to master the art of the stitches not showing, for the most part I get them in the ditch but every once in a while it looks like I swerved to avoid running over something, LOL. Here are some pictures of the quilt top and pillow top.

Here are a couple of pictures of the quilt top laid out on the table. I took measurements so I can know how big to make the backing piece, I am going to try to get that done tomorrow and hopefully be able to sandwich all the layers together.

This is the pillow top. I used my embroidery machine to put the bride and grooms name in the right and left block, their names are Anne and Scott. The middle block is a heart with the initial of the last name which is V.

Here is a close up of the pillow top after it has been quilted. It is kind of hard to see in the picture. I have a few places I am going to pick out and requilt. I had to go to JoAnn's and get some invisible thread to quilt it. When I started I was using a varigated thread but I didn't like how it look so the invisible thread looks better. It will also look better once I wash it and the threads tighten up some. I also bought a king size pillow when I went to Walmart earlier, can't wait to see it done! Here are some other random pictures...

These are pictures of the table in my new room. I have a lot more space to walk around the table now. Marley is sitting in the window in the second picture. She and Puppy like to sit there and see whats going on in the neighborhood.

These are the awesome old cabinets that Dave got me when the dry cleaner he worked for cleaned out one of their old wherehouses. The drawers are full of buttons and other old goodies. I really like how they look all stacked up.

This is a bottle of water that froze in Dave's car...brrrr

This is me driving to work one day when the weather was bad and we didn't get a snow delay for work :( We've had really strange weather again this winter, we will be in the 50s one day and the 20s the next, everyone has been sick and it just goes around the office. Well, I am going to go get ready for work tomorrow. I'll post some more later this week on my quilt progress.