Roscoe's Ma

The new addition to our family Christmas stocking collection (posted about that here) is finished.   Hooray!  Finally I am getting some things done!

I decided my reunion raffle quilt should have the Ohio Star as part of the design since the reunion would be in Ohio.  I also decided I would use Thimbleberries fabric as I always wanted to try a quilt with this traditional fabric.  I really admired these fabrics!


I began working on the quilt and I loved it.  I became very attached to it, actually...even after being totally overwhelmed about pushing a queen-sized quilt through that little space in my sewing machine. Let's just say I learned a lot about what not to do.  As time passed, I showed the quilt-in-progress to a few relatives, and it didn't get much love.  These family members gravitated to a flannel raggy quilt I had made for our living room and commented on it (pictured below) with much more enthusiasm than the reunion quilt I had spent hours on. 

SO...I made a homespun raggy quilt for the reunion with red, blue, and green country colors that seemed to be a hit with the family. (I forgot to take a picture of it.)  And I happily kept my Ohio Star/Nine Patch quilt.

P.S.  I tend to overbuy fabric when I am working on a project.  I had plenty of fabric leftover for this:

  

by entering this:



There is still time to win if you visit Quilty Pleasures blog ASAP!  Good luck!!

I had just moved to Minnesota and had a new machine...my beloved Bernina 1230.  I had no local friends and was a SAHM with a new baby along with two grade-schoolers.  I needed to 'get out'.  (This was pre-household internet, quilt blogs, and wonderful blog friends!)  So I took a quilting class at our local big box fabric store.  The class was based on the Quilt-in-a Day series and you could choose from the Log Cabin (which thankfully I did) or the Lover's Knot.

I had so much fun choosing the fabric to sort of 'match' our family room...browns and greens (which have now faded to blues.) Yep.  Calicoes!  I used the really thick bonded polyester batting that was so popular at the time.  The edges were finished by folding over the backing to the front of the quilt.  (I had never heard of proper binding!)  I tied the quilt with DMC embroidery floss.  It is still the quilt my family members grab for cuddling in front of the TV or wherever.

When I was a kid, my Christmas stocking was one of my dad's socks that was safety pinned to an arm chair.  We started that same tradition when my son was born in the '70's.  But at some point, I decided my first two children needed a proper stocking.  I bought a McCall's pattern from the neighborhood Avon representative and a tradition began.

Since I was really into counted cross-stitch at the time, I decided to modify the Avon pattern and cross-stitch the kids' names on the cuffs using ideas from this book.  I used 22 hardanger cloth to make the letters fit.


  Here are my first two stockings...

I continued with the 22 Hardanger for the children-in-laws but my eyes were not so keen working on the last one of those.  The blurriness of the closeup is appropriate for how I was seeing this as I worked on it!

So I switched to 18 Aida with the first grandchild and modified the alphabet and little charm pictures a bit to fit seven letter names on the cuff.

 Next year there will be another stocking on the mantel too.  Life is good!

I had a great trip to NYC a week ago.  I accompanied my older daughter and my newest granddaughter to a conference...granny nanny gig!  It was so fun to spend time with them.  A big bonus was to get to visit my younger daughter (and sweet hubby!) who I hadn't seen for 10 months.  It's been the longest stretch we ever had and I was more than ready to hug her.  We had all had the BEST time and there was a lot of laughing.  Here are the four of them as we wait for the subway.