Dragonflies R Us

When I wrote about the butterfly quilt in progress, I mentioned that I was more a dragonfly person than a butterfly person. Herein lies the proof:
My bathroom. Nice prints to be hanging in a steamy bathroom, you say. Well, they would be if they were the real prints. I looked all over for dragonfly prints but could only find really nice ones that were, gulp, $75 each unframed. Not me. So I grabbed some images from the internet and printed them on photo paper. Maybe not as sharp and crisp as real prints, but for a bathroom? Just fine.





I fell in love with this lamp on Ebay and had to have it. I graces my living room now and I think it's my absolute favorite lamp ever.
A. It's dragonflies.
B. It's stained glass.
C. It's enameled.
D. It's blue.
All bases covered.


Pillow from my living room. Starting to see a trend? I found this fabric when we redecorated and even though it was obscenely expensive even for decorating fabric, at $40 a yard, it didn't take much for 6 chair bottoms and two pillows. So I splurged. The dragonflies are embroidered in three colors. It is exquisite.



Ditto for the dining room chair.












No dragonflies in the bedroom or den yet, but I'm working on it!

What a week

I haven't had much to say this week because I haven't had time to sit down and say it. Monday was laundry and house-cleaning, catching up from my house guests. Tuesday was Project Linus group work/lunch meeting, errands and outdoor work. Today was 215 mile round trip to drive my husband to my dentist near our former home to get a second opinion on some work his local dentist said was necessary. (The verdict was that the local dentist was overly cautious and he didn't need the crown -- yeah! -- but he has a couple of small fillings to be done and an older filling to repair, so we'll be going back.) Then I planted some flowers when we got home. Oh, yeah, and ran to the Bruster's Ice Cream Shop for some Double Chocolate Chunk - well, my husband wanted it and he had a rough day! Tomorrow I have to take the gift baby quilt to the longarm quilter, fill a prescription and run to the grocery and bank. Friday is haircut appointment and pick up canned goods to take to the local food bank (which, of course, is almost all the way downtown and not handy at all). Yipes.

Needless to say, I won't be sewing this week. But Saturday ..... Saturday is MINE!

The house is ours again

Our three house guests are gone and it seems very, very quiet around here. I thought I'd lie down for a little while this afternoon because I was worn out. I ended up sleeping for three hours!

My sister-in-law and her husband and my brother-in-law were visiting. It was her birthday Friday so we made her a cake and a pretty fancy dinner. The cake was the Hershey's "Chocolate Town Special Cake" from the recipe that used to be on the cocoa can. It is hands-down the best chocolate cake ever. The texture is more like a lighter brownie than a fluffy cake. It's dense and moist and deeply chocolate. The prefect frosting to complement this, and the one my mother-in-law always used, is boiled like making chocolate fudge. It hardens into a candy-like shell on the cake. Very delicious, very rich - and probably should only be eaten once a year!

Her birthday dinner was roast turkey with mashed potatoes and gravy and rolls and veggies (kind of like a mini Thanksgiving!). Five people are hard to feed with roast chicken. You have to make two of them, so I though, Why not a turkey? Well, I found out that turkeys are difficult to find in the grocery in May. I had to get a Butterball, which is not my favorite brand. We brined it overnight and it was much improved. If you're not brining poultry, look it up and try it. The meat is infused with the moisture and doesn't dry out while roasting, and the seasoning penetrates throughout the bird. It also works well for pork.

We also made stuffed pasta shells, which are delicious, but take a while to put together. And sauteed herbed green beans, another winner. I was basically in the kitchen the whole time, what with breakfast and dinners and washing-up and all. It gave my husband time to visit with his siblings.

When they visit, we don't go gallivanting all over town to the attractions and shopping. We sit in the living room and talk, watch movies, talk some more, walk around the yard, etc. Didn't even leave the property the entire time. When my other sister-in-law visits, we end up taking her and her family around to local places, like the aquarium or the Civil War battlefield parks or the state parks, and it seems like there is never time to just visit and catch up on our lives.

Tonight, I'm eating leftover turkey and gravy and relaxing. Tomorrow will be soon enough to put the house back together.

Cats, both fabric and real

I received a little goody in the mail yesterday, so I wanted to show it and the rest of its coordinating fabrics. This will be a Linus quilt.

I found the large cat and bluebird print first, on the sale rack of my local quilt shop. I loved it, so I picked up 2 yards, figuring it would be a good backing for a child's quilt. A few months later I ran into the panel print of the same cat, also on sale, so that was added to the stack. Then, last week, I found the blue and purple bird footprints fabric on sale at an online store. I pulled out some purple and yellow, and a plaid for the binding, and there's the collection. But I still don't know what pattern to use. Any suggestions?

I was thinking of cutting the panel print into strips and using them for the border, but it would only make four strips, and that's 148 inches. I would need about 200 inches to circle a crib size quilt. Or, I could cut out the panels and use them as the centers for pieced blocks, but they're rectangular, so that's awkward. I'm just stumped.

On to the real cat: Molly saw a tuxedo cat outside on the patio last night. I was at my desk and she was lying in the hall doorway. Suddenly she rushed through the den and charged up to the door, chittering and twitching all over! Her tail was about six inches in diameter and every bit of the fur on her back was up. She kept pacing in front of the sliding door, making those weird chittery noises, so I got up to see what she was so upset about. The cat was standing at the bottom of the stairs, calmly watching Molly go to pieces. It seemed to think that Molly's antics were amusing - certainly not scary.

It was a good-sized tuxedo cat, very cute, that I've seen once before outside. I have no idea where it belongs. When I came up to the glass, it got nervous and left, but not in a scared way, it just sauntered off. Definitely not a basket case like my Molly. She didn't calm down for a while, just kept looking out the door trying to spot the interloper.

I'm not sure when she last saw another cat - it might have been years. I tried to tell her that her three sisters and mom live together in harmony, so other cats are OK, but she seemed to respond, "Harmony, schmarmony, that guy's in MY YARD!"

Latest Linus quilt

Here's the latest Project Linus quilt. The border fabric came from thousandsofbolts.com and is printed with cakes, pies, ice cream and fruit. Since it had so many colors in the print, I could have gone any number of directions with the palette, but I decided to make a girly-girl quilt and used pink, fuchsia and green after I found the stripe for the border. All pinwheel blocks seemed too repetitive so I threw in a few Dutchman's Puzzle and Variable Stars blocks for zing. It was completed two days after I cut it out; it's very quick to make these little quilt tops. The mitered border took longer than anything!

I won't be able to quilt this until next week after my houseguests leave.

Butterfly quilt

Well, I did it again. With all the open projects I have staring me in the face, I up and started a new one! It's hopeless. It seems that I am incapable of saying "well, I'll put this in the drawer and work on it after this, that and the other are complete". Nope. Can't.

I bought the butterfly fabric yesterday and I was so psyched about making the butterfly blocks that I had to try it out. I traced each butterfly design (there were 14 different butterflies) on parchment paper and figured out how much space to add around each one. Then, I added seam allowances. Using the templates, I could map how many of each design I could cut out in an area. I marked the corners of the template on the reverse side and used a ruler to draw the template boundaries. This method allowed me to make the best use of the fabric, since cutting out one of the shapes often would impact using the adjacent butterfly. Maximizing the number of patches I could generate from my yardage, I cut out 50 butterfly patches, ranging in size from 2 1/2" x 3" to 6 1/2" x 7". All are rectangular but vary in size proportionate to the butterfly design. Each will be sashed on all four sides using one of five coordinating fabrics and trimmed to 8 1/2". The completed blocks will be randomly interspersed with solid 8 1/2" square blocks of the coordinating fabrics. The border will consist of a 2" strip of crosswise stripes and a 6" strip of coordinating blue floral print. The binding will be the stripe, cut on the bias. The quilt will be 64" x 72", with a strip of patchwork design on the back as well.

So far, 10 blocks are completed. I will use anywhere from 25 to 30 on the quilt depending on what it looks like when assembled on my "horizontal design wall" --- i.e., the guest bed! The remaining butterfly patches will probably find their way into a Linus quilt.

This is a very vibrant, visually interesting design which is also very easy to do and quick to make. I'm certain I didn't invent it but I can't for the life of me remember where I saw it.

I'm weak.........

and I can't be trusted in the fabric store. I finished the Meadowbrook baby quilt (sorry, no pictures yet) and headed out to the quilt shop to deliver it to the longarmer. What I didn't know was she was out of town for a funeral, so that didn't happen. But, in the meantime, I was in the clutches of temptation.

So, there I was wandering around the shop, swooning over the new fabrics. Arranged artfully on a park bench (did I say that their shop is so yummy and tempting?) were bolts of Robert Kaufman's "Metamorphosis" line. Now, I'm not generally a butterfly person (I lean toward dragonflies, which fascinate me). But these matched the colors in my living room so perfectly I had to take a look. And of course my brain spun off a design suggestion. Remember my Project Linus owl quilt, where I alternated plain blocks with sashed "fussy-cut" owl patches? The butterflies would be perfect for this treatment. So of course I had to get some. See for yourself, isn't it wonderful?

Then, the owner called my attention to the new batiks. Batiks were something I had never used, or even bought. But, standing before that glowing shelf of beautiful batiks, I realized that they were the perfect fabric to use with the Winner's Bouquet templates. So I bought some. I know, I know. I have a problem.