I am so behind on posting!!!

I have been quilting, I promise. (Not like some people do... I'm not cranking out a quilt every week!)

Here are the two quilts I made for my little ones last Christmas. I finished them in March'ish(everything was done except tacking the binding down at Christmastime - and I did wrap them up and give them to the kidlets - but some unexpected situations delayed the completion until a bit later!), but didn't get around to taking pictures and posting them. It's been a busy year... :)

This is for my little boy:




And this one is for my little girl:



I had to piece the back of my son's, because when I bought the backing, I trusted the saleslady to figure out how much I needed. Now I know that I can do the math myself and just might have a better chance at figuring it out correctly. :) There was no way I was going to try to piece and match that diamond design, so I bought the dots to fill in the lack. Luckily, my daughter's could be pieced with the same fabric, which was easier.

These are "I-Spy" quilts, found on the blog diaryofaquilter. She even (from time to time) sells the vintage "I-Spy" squares in her shop!

I also made a quilt for my son and his wife who were married earlier this year...


This was from a pattern from the Modern Basics book by Amy at Amy's Creative Side. I changed the color scheme, obviously, and made it another row wide so there was plenty of snuggling room for the newlyweds. :)

All three quilts were quilted by Stacey G. :)

*Sorry the coloring is so bad in these pictures.*

I have two wallhangings ready to go to the quilter, as well as a baby quilt (which was started when my four year old was a baby and now will NOT be used for him) and a table runner.

AND I'm really excited about two quilts I am making for Christmas gifts. :)

Buggy Barn for my boy

Here is one of the quilts I made for Christmas gifts... this one is for my 11-year-old son.
We have a Scouting tradition in our family, so it was fun to make this quilt out of Scouting fabric. My son has finished Cubs and started Boy Scouts, so he was pretty excited about it. (I do have his name embroidered on the label... but for privacy reasons, I took it out of the picture!)

I love the Buggy Barn method! You don't have to be exact, so that takes a lot of pressure off the process!

What I learned: Sometimes not all the blocks will have great "matches" with the fabrics that end up together. If you're familiar with the Buggy Barn method, you probably know what I mean. I ended up buying more fabric to help with that problem, but I still see that some of the blocks aren't quite as contrasting as I would like. Still, I love the quilt as a whole.

Machine quilted by Stacey G., as always!

LQS Mystery Sampler

I am still participating in my LQS's Mystery Sampler. We receive new assignments each month and I'm happy to say I've kept up with all of them... except one. We had redwork to do in January, and I almost had it all finished (in spite of those same ol' unexpected events), but I just couldn't pull it off. I had to pay the $5.00 for the next month's block fabric and pattern. (Darn!)

Here are all the blocks we've done up 'til now (except the redwork):
Excuse the horrible lighting.

This block (from this month) gave both my friend and me trouble. We both had corners that ended up chopped off, even though we followed the instructions. I'll be interested to see if other women (especially those who are beginners and haven't made this block before) had the same problem. If not, I want to know what we did wrong. We didn't even work on them together (as we often do), so it wasn't like the blind leading the blind.
Btw, I was actually to the point of trimming this block down to the 12.5 inches... all finished, you know? This I looked at it and noticed I had sewn one of the very first strips on upside down. I could not believe that I didn't notice it before that moment, when I was about to trim it all down and pack it into my plastic carry-box. I thought I was going to have to pick the whole thing apart, or buy new fabric and start over... but I put my thinking cap on and figured out that I could just take off a few pieces, pick back a couple of inches on a few more, and fix the upside down strip, then re-press and re-sew everything to put it all back together. It worked! I did do some backstitching to secure it all, and it turned out fine. (Other than the chopped off corners, which I will still need to figure out. But they were there BEFORE I took everything apart!)

And on the redwork: The teacher's pattern was very cute... a chubby little duck pushing a flower cart. Very cute, but not really what either my friend or I wanted. She found a pattern we both liked more - from an old coloring book, no less - and made hers from that. I will be using it, too, even though I did have the duck almost completely done. To me, the duck made the quilt look more like a baby quilt, which doesn't really fit in with my plans for it. So, anyway, I'll be working on the redwork in the next few weeks so that it will be ready when it's time to start sewing the quilt top together.

Um... has it really been that long???

The last post was in September???

I have been working on quilts, but some unexpected issues did slow my progress and kept me from getting on this blog. (Obviously!)

Here are some of the things I've worked on since the last time I posted:
In 2009, we were waiting to bring our sweet baby girl home from her birth country. We received a call in October to let us know that because of emigration issues in her homeland, she would not be coming home until after the new year. We had already waited longer than we expected, but now we would be waiting at least 3 more months. A friend took me to a local quilt shop to cheer me up, and when I saw this fabric, I had to get it. It was the first thing to really make me smile after learning that our girl wouldn't be home for a while. I used a Turning Twenty pattern to piece the top, which I did finish before I left to go bring our daughter home. With two young children (plus some older ones, too), I didn't get it all the way finished until the autumn of 2010! I call it my Comfort Quilt, because working on it helped me get through the months of waiting for our little one to come home. (I also sometimes refer to it as "My PMS Quilt" for obvious reasons. ;)

What I learned from this quilt: Using black binding and black backing make it really hard to stitch the binding down in back. It's hard to see what you're doing!

Okay, I'm not real proud of this next quilt.

First of all, I didn't even "plan" to make this quilt. I went to a local quilt shop with a friend, and saw the cute "road" fabric, decided my little guy would love that for his Hotwheels cars (he was getting a bunch of them for this birthday), and made an impulsive purchase.

Second, I made the mistake of throwing it in the wash with no "color catcher" sheet. The black from the roads bled in several areas.

Third, cutting a panel like this evenly is hard.

Fourth, when I went to put the backing on, I was short on fabric. I had to piece it in, and because it wasn't cut straight (see "Third"), the pieced part wasn't really straight. All of this ended up making the edges a tiny bit ripple-ish.

Because I was already so tired of this quilt by the time it was done, I decided to make the label by using a Micron permanent pen instead of embroidery. I've washed the quilt several times, and...

Fifth: The ink on the label does seem to smear and fade. I decided to label this quilt with the words, "a learning quilt".
Yeah, because I learned a lot:

Don't make impulsive purchases.
Don't make panel type designs unless I figure out how to cut them evenly.
Don't use permanent marker for the label.
ALWAYS use a "color catcher" sheet when I wash quilt fabric or a quilt.

***My little guy still likes to run his cars along the roads... and we use it for a snuggle quilt, too... so it still serves it's purpose!***

I will probably re-do the label at some point... embroidery this time!

Both quilts were machine quilted by Stacey G.

I also have three quilts I made for my three youngest children for Christmas. Because of the unexpected events that occurred last year, I was only able to get them done to the "binding is sewn on but not stitched down" stage before Christmas. I wrapped them as such, hoping to finish them up in January. More unexpected events made that not happen... but I'm now about done with one of them, and should have the next two done in the next couple of weeks. I'll post pictures of each as I finish them up!