Getting Settled

What a crazy couple of weeks I've had. The day I returned from the retreat, I began preparing the house for a baby shower which meant unpacking and attempting to bring some semblance of order to my front yard (aka, the mud pit) while the city repaved the street and installed new driveway approaches, curbs, and sidewalks. The shower was Saturday and I think it went off wonderfully and the new street is open and so smooth!

The house still isn't finished, but I thought I'd take a few photos while it was cleaned up for the shower.

The kitchen.

It's open to the living room, which I initially didn't think I would like, but now I think I love.

My sewing room is functional and I started on a new baby girl quilt.

(Recognize the pattern, Michelle and Lisa? :-)

I wish I had more free time to spend in here. I love being surrounded by all the color.

But, I've got a huge stack of new work projects (the kind I actually get paid for which means they take precedence over the fun ones) and a commissioned knitting project (a fair isle Christmas stocking) to work on this week.

At least my house is all cleaned up for Thursday. The family is coming to my house for Thanksgiving!  Who else is having Thanksgiving at their house?

Quilting Retreat

I went on my second quilt retreat this past weekend with the Dallas Modern Quilt Guild. On Thursday afternoon, I drove south into middle-of-nowhere Texas to the Compass Centre, just outside a tiny town called Mount Calm. The Compass Centre was built from the ground up as a retreat facility and sleeps about 30 people. They cooked yummy meals for us and kept the iced tea flowing.

I didn't take very many photos, but here's a look at the quilting area. You can see the work of the talented ladies, Juanita of Settlers Peace and Michelle of Tapestry Tree on the design wall.

There are more photos in the DMQG flickr group. This is only about a quarter of the room. The pretty Amy Butler patchwork on the design wall to the right belongs to Lisa of Vintage Modern Quilts.

At the retreat, I finished binding a Freshcut string quilt, 

finished piecing the Good Folks quilt top,

and started on a new project, my first solids quilt.

I worked on other projects also and left feeling like I got a lot accomplished. It was fun to catch up with friends I hadn't seen in a couple of months and make some new friends too. I cannot wait to get together with that group of creative and fun ladies again! It was a blast, girls!

Life is good...

when one of these is about to open within walking distance of your house.

Inspiration by osmosis

We made a trip to our storage unit yesterday for some of our rugs and I came across one of my vintage quilts. I have a number of other quilts in storage, but this is the only one I was able to liberate yesterday.

This quilt came from my grandmother's house. My mom thinks it was made by one of my great-aunts on my dad's side. We remember a number of the fabrics in the quilt from various things around mamaw's house, such as one of her kitchen aprons. My mom has a baby quilt of mine that's made from many of these same fabrics and has the same backing. That would date this quilt (and me) in the early 1970's.

It's beginning to feel a little like fall around here, so I placed this folded quilt across the foot of the bed last night and used it as an extra blanket when I got in bed. The entire quilt is very random, but this area made me think of a string quilt. I wanted to sleep in today, but I woke up early with an idea to do a simple, wonky diamond quilt inspired by these blocks. Inspiration by osmosis.

In the sewing room, I had stacked my Good Folks in two stacks, warm and cool, and they jumped out at me as perfect for this project. I spent most of my morning turning these strips...

into this. I asked Sean for his opinion and he said "They aren't straight," so now I'm worried that rather than looking wonky, they just look like I didn't know what I was doing.

I've got some sewn together and I love it. I love it so much that I've already decided to hand quilt it and I think the quilting will emphasize the wonkiness even more (see the chalk lines above). I just hope the wonky looks intentional and not accidental. What do you think?