Moose Bay Muses

Sunday, June 15, 2014

Weekend Report

Well, another week with almost no sewing! I spent most of my time (when it wasn't raining) puttering in the garden and cleaning. I also had a lot of other things going on like meeting with the Realtor selling my mother's house,a quilt guild meeting, a temporary crown installed, and I even worked a half day at Colorz for Quilts.

Amanda Jean Nyberg from Crazy Mom Quilts was our guest speaker at this month's guild meeting. Sadly, I forgot to bring my camera, but you can visit her blog to see some of her fun and colorful quilts. She has coauthored a great book, Sunday Morning Quilts filled with scrappy, happy designs. She was an excellent speaker and lots of fun!

I wasn't sure if I would get to the Minnesota Quilt Show after having dental work on Thursday, but on Friday, my tooth was feeling great and I decided to make a quick run to the show in St. Cloud.

I took lots of pictures, mostly of quilting designs that I won't share, but these were a few of my favorites. This one had tons of thread-work.

A close-up of the quilting--sorry it's a bit blurred.

This was amazing and life sized!

I had to take a photo of my friend Carolina's sea turtle!

This was so charming--three dimensional too.

I'm so sad that this was such a bad photo.
Anyway, it's my very favorite quilt in the show.
I've been looking at this quilt in my old books, thinking I should try to reproduce it some day and someone else beat me to it!

It was done with wool applique--love the spiderweb quilting too.

Another 3-D quilt--so cute.

Yes, the blue bonnets are made from zippers!

And so were the sunflowers--fun!

Can you tell from the size of the ribbon how amazingly tiny this one is?

The applique quilts are my favorites--I was really drawn to the colors in this one.

Oh my gosh--a mini Dear Jane--adorable!!

This was a beautiful version of the Civil War Bride quilt.

This entire aisle (both sides) was filled with red and white quilts made by two sisters.
They were inspired by the red and white show in NYC a few years ago.

Just a few of the amazing red and white quilts.

I've shown Val's quilt before it was quilted--here it is in the show!

If you squint, you can probably figure out who this is!
(pixilated Lincoln)

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

Stitching Along

Whoohoo! One of my favorite online quilt shops is back! The Old Country Store has reopened with new owners.

Thursday was the June meeting of Stitch Society, so now I have a pile of new hexie patterns and a new project. These are a few more of last months designs that I managed to finish before the class.

The Butterfly

The Easter Egg
Most of the patterns for last month were Easter/Spring themed.

Baby Chicks

Baby Ducky

Baby Bluebird

Bunny

Church

Teresa (our fearless leader), had a trunk load of wooly projects to show us and I couldn't resist picking up some fun patterns, wool (for pumpkins), and a couple fat quarters of Kim Diehl fabric too.

New booty!

Autumn Reflection by Lily Anna Stitches

Garden Walk by Lily Anna Stitches

I bought the patterns for these two table mats--so gorgeous in person with beautiful stitching--I couldn't stop myself!

Saturday, June 7, 2014

Summer Sewing

Remember this photo of my lilacs from 10 weeks ago?

This is how they look today.
Pretty awful! Only the largest two shrubs have flowers. Our horrendous winter certainly did not agree with them--there is a lot of winter damage. I'm thinking it would be best to cut them back at least half way and hope for the best. No armloads of lilac bouquets this year--wahhhh!

On a happier note, my first block of the Primitive Gatherings Summer Block of the Week arrived and I couldn't resist for a second to dive in and start stitching. I know I am going to love this quilt!

The background blocks are pieced. There are also instructions to cut more pieces from the provided light fabrics and to make a total of 28 four patches from the darker fabrics for future blocks. I even managed to squeak out some 2" squares for the scrap box!

Of course, I still have last years Summer Block of the Week blocks waiting to be made into a quilt.
Oh, the guilt!!!

Sunday, June 1, 2014

Sunday Confessional

Here it is, the beginning of a new week (and month!) and I have nothing new to report in the quilting department from last week.

My sisters Cathy and Mary, my sister-in-law Lisa and I worked all week at my Mom's house sorting things and getting ready for a garage sale. It made me realize that I need to start burning through my stash ASAP--I hate to have someone else try to figure out what to do with all that fabric!