A little crewel

Sometime last year I was over at some quilter friend's hanging out and she was working on this beautiful crewel pillow.  When I questioned her about it, she told me she got it off of Ebay and that it was from the 70's.  Guess what I did the minute I got home?  Yep, did an Ebay search and bought myself a couple of crewel pillow kits!  I love these older kits from the 60's & 70's.   And I really am amazed at the quality of materials in them.  Unfortunately, that is not the case with most kits you find today.  The linen on this pillow kit is thick and soft and a nice weave.  The yarn is pure wool and the zipper has a heavy cotton twill tape and metal teeth!  It came with some lovely velvet piping for the edge of the pillow.  I gave you all a brief glimpse of this kit in this post.  I had only done a few of the flowers on the pillow top.  Here is what it looks like now

I love how it came out!  I can't wait to see this pillow on my sofa.  I hope to be able to get it finished this week. The colors make me feel all happy inside.  

And considering that we are supposed to drop to 25 degrees over the next 24 hours and have ice on the roads tomorrow, I think this pillow will really brighten up the winter days.  Now, on to the next project......

Workshop In Progress - 1/26

I signed up for the Workshop in Progress over at Naptime Quilter's blog.  I did this a couple of weeks ago in an effort to spur myself back into blogging.  And then, I didn't post anything the past two weeks!  Typical me....what can I say?  I have put this on my list of things to work on for 2011.  Follow through, doing what you say you will do.  So, I am throwing it out there to you all.  Now, you know a deep dark secret about me.  I start a lot of things and don't finish them.  I sign up for stuff and then don't do it.  Eck, I don't like that about myself.  So, I'm going to think long and hard before I sign up for stuff or say yes to a request for my time.  And when I do sign up or say yes, I'm going to do it.

So even though I missed the first couple of weeks, I'm jumping in now to Workshop in Progress Wednesdays.  This is a project I started almost two years ago.  It was a kit I bought at the Houston International Quilt Show in 2005!  It's on my list of quilts to complete this year.  G. absolutely loves this quilt and I am going to finish it this year and put it on our bed.

It's a medallion quilt that starts with a center block and then borders are added around and around.  It will be an extremely large quilt when it's done.  And it is extremely detailed!  That last border took hours and hours.  First, cutting all of those pieces and then they are sewn together using y-seams.  Very tedious....
The center was paper pieced.

There are three more borders and then I have to decide how I'm going to quilt it.  And if I will attempt to quilt it myself or send it off to a long arm quilter.  I have always thought that if I bothered to piece a top, I needed to quilt it myself or else it wasn't truly my quilt.  But, queen sized quilts are quite challenging to quilt on a domestic sewing machine.  What do you guys think?

M.

Unplanned Break

Without really meaning to, I seem to have taken an almost 6 week break from blogging.  Not sure what happened, life I guess.....I sort of lost my creative vibe for several weeks and with it went any desire to blog.  Go figure.  Tonight, I was hand quilting the Nicey Jane quilt and watching Julie & Julia and G asked me what my challenge was going to be for this year.  And a few of you have written asking what happened to me.  So, here I am, back in the saddle again.  I've actually been thinking quite a bit about what I wanted to set as goals for this year.  Still haven't come to a concrete decision yet, but I'm working on it.  I'll be posting about that soon.

For now, I thought I'd tell you a little more about my New York trip.  It truly was such a magical trip.  G & I had an absolute blast the entire trip.  So, where did I leave off?  Oh yeah, the World Trade Center site.  From there, we headed back into Soho.  We found ourselves at Purl Soho (okay, I planned to whole thing, no WAY was I going to be in NY and not go to Purl Soho.)  Can you tell how excited I was?

I bought a cool little coin purse frame and G bought me that gorgeous stack of Liberty of London that Purl put together for the Color Wheel Quilt.  I swear, I think that has to be my next project.  After I soaked up all of PS, it was off to Shoegasm.  (Best name for a shoe store I ever hear of!!!!)

Those adorable little boots on my feet?  Got them at Shoegasm! We another fantastic meal, this time at Asia De Cuba.  The food was amazing and it was such a cool space.  If you are in New York, I highly recommend this place.  We started off with a crispy duck appetiser and for the entree we had a seared ahi tuna with wasabi mashed potatoes.  YUM!  I was so excited about the food, I forgot to get a pic of our plate, but it was gorgeous.

And that was the end of day two of my Christmas in New York trip.  I'll wrap up the trip next post.

Can I just say, it's really good to be back in blogland.  I missed you guys!

M.