Seven...no, not the movie...

Seven blocks to go! 

Apparently I have sewn so much that I have worn my sewing machine out! I had to take it and the 830 back to the sewing machine hospital. I was not at all happy with the sewing machine hospital...we do seem to have a love hate relationship, don't we?  I'll start to think they're OK and then they'll go and do something else. It is absolutely my fault that I didn't bring the 830 back in right away after I had it serviced and it wasn't sewing properly.  When I told the service manager that I had not been able to get the tension to sew correctly, she found the original service slip from January and said they will have to charge me AGAIN to service it. I said if she looked at the stitches she could see that I had not sewn on it since I had it back, but she said they don't keep that record and it doesn't matter anyway. Actually, I think the machine records service record and stitches...I'll have to check. I may or may not make a fuss...I'm excellent about voting with my feet, although Bernina makes it really hard to do that. There's no other dealer in the greater Atlanta Metro area, which is why I keep going back there. We'll see.

I played around with how to lay this out:

Actually - truth, truth - I'm getting bored, and I was trying to play around with different layouts to see if I could stick a fork in this and call it done.

I went to the ECQG night meeting for the first time Thursday night. It was very nice and the people were friendly. The speaker was Margaret Miller.

There ain't no answer, there ain't gonna be any answer...there never has been an answer...there's the answer.

Gertrude Stein

Eight!

Do you remember a song from the 60's by Edwin Starr "Twenty-Five Miles" where he counts down the miles to go to get to his girlfriend's house?  THAT song has been playing in my mind...I actually do have it on iTunes, so I should play it today.

This is my least favorite of all the blocks...not because there are sooooooo many hard places to match up, but I think there is too much negative space (the light background). Maybe it will look better when it is quilted.

It was really hard...I spent all day yesterday working on it...This is another 112 piece block. The next one is a 104 piece block.

Y'all are gonna spoil me...and I'm already past my sell-by date.

Stephen Colbert

Ten, Nine...

I finished # 10 last weekend before I left for New York to see Jeffrey star in "Honk!", but I didn't have time to post before or after I got back. Then I left for Dallas (95 degrees!) and Chicago (45 degrees!)  There are 112 pieces in this block!

And now today I have finished # 9! Can I tell you how good it feels to be in the SINGLE digits? There are only 104 pieces in this block.

A bed without quilts is like a sky without stars

Sankofa -

The African American Quilt Guild of Oakland held their first ever quilt show on Saturday! It was sooooo good! You know that fear of throwing party and nobody comes?  Imagine if you throw a quilt show and nobody comes? Of course, you know your family and friends will come, but aside from that...Well - we need not have worried. There were HUNDREDS of people there! Family and friends, of course, but it was great to see all my friends from EBHQ...and members of my mini-group - Susan and Anne were there - oh, it made me miss California so much! Saturday morning, Doris, Regina and I walked Lake Merritt in the morning...

..., then I went to the show. This is my favorite quilt from the show...it is Swirling Batiks by Benita Jones...all those curves!

Sunday morning I went for a walk at Redwood before I headed back home. I am so out of shape...

This hill near 'bout kilt me. And this was the easy way! Redwood Park was about 15 minutes from our house...it was a lot easier to walk with such a beautiful place to hike so close to home. Farther down in the valley, there are waterfalls and more beautiful Redwoods.

No atoms casually together hurl'd

Could e'er produce so beautiful a world.

John Dryden

11 More to Go!

I am sooooo happy to have more finished than I have left to go. I'm happy to have finished this block, because I will not have time this week to do any more.  Tomorrow I'm going to dinner with Leslie, who is here from Washington, D.C., for a diversity conference, and Wednesday night I'm going to dinner with Anne and Jennifer. Thursday night I will be packing (oh, who am I kidding? I won't start packing until Friday morning when I leave!) for California. I might maybe wash Thursday night. The weekend after that I have to go to NYC to see my nephew Jeffrey starring in The Ugly Duckling. I have managed to be home for a bit, but then I have to go to Dallas and Chicago back to back. So if I manage to finish three more blocks this month, it will be a miracle.

I'm going to California because The African American Quilt Guild of Oakland is having their first quilt show. I will be showing the Liberated Shaded Nine-Patch, because I didn't finish the shoe quilt.

If The Phone Doesn't Ring, It's Me. ~Song title by Jimmy Buffet

Halfway there!

12 down, 12 to go!  The blocks are definitely getting harder...way too many places to match up. After ripping these seams out about 3 times, I finally came up with the idea of using my walking foot. Duh!  So the problem is that even though my piecing is accurate, fabric shifts and stretches and pulls...and in some of the places where there are 12 pieces of fabric intersecting, the feed dog pulls the bottom fabric away from the top at an uneven rate.  Using the walking foot moves the top and bottom layers along at an even rate.  I mostly use my walking foot for putting on binding; never thought about it for piecing.

Never do anything you wouldn't want to explain to the paramedics.