I Am So.... Busted

A friend asked me why I haven't blogged lately (like in two years?) and I have to admit that I'm lazy....  BUSTED!  Oops.

I've been quilting like crazy lately, mostly small things.  They are somehow so very satisfying, simply because they get done!

I found a delightful little piece of hand embroidery at a rummage and snapped it up for only a quarter.  Do you remember those "learn to embroider" kits that came from the Sears catalog or the dime store?  It really reminded me of those, but whoever embroidered it was a master at stitching.  Her stitches are so incredibly tiny!  Anyhow, I added some 30's reproduction scraps for borders and quilted away.  There's stitch in the ditch, clamshells, petals/wedges, and outline stitching around the cat and dog, the rocks, the clouds, the horizon.  Somewhere in one of those mysterious hiding places that we all have, I think I still have the four very-poorly-embroidered squares from my childhood.  They'd be cute put in a little quilt for my sewing room.  (....but only if I re-stitch the mess I made when I was ten or so!)

Next item up for show is a quickie quilt top, 30's reproductions.  It was easy, just plopping a solid charm on the center of a layer cake block, stitching around the edge, cutting it in half, and then doing the mix & match thing.  I used black thread and am having it machine quilted by a friend.  Trickiest part of this one was remembering to start sewing in the middle of each charm so that the thread break is hidden in the seam!  If the fabrics look familiar it's because the scraps for the little quilt above were cut from behind the solids in this one.  I love the black 30's fabric--it just makes the others pop.

That's two of the grandbabies who were drafted into holding it up.  The pic is six weeks old, back when my willow trees were still golden.  The next pic is TODAY, right after our third blizzard of the year.  I've shoveled more snow this year than in the last two or three years combined.  That's Katelin's furbaby Daisy--who refused to go potty outside until the snow was cleared away!  It is as deep my knees in my whole yard and up to my waist in many places.  It looks like the Farmer's Almanac got it right again since they predicted a hard winter.