quilting — Page 2

Fabrics in a Box

March 18, 2017 at 9:48 am by Claudia

I decided to stop (at least for a while) my monthly subscription to SquintBox. It’s been wonderful, but I feel that I have all I need at the moment. I’m not working on anything, have no place to put the little minis except in storage, so…that’s it for a while.

As I was looking at quilters’ blogs the other day, I came across a modern quilter who was writing about a modern fabric subscription box called Culcita. I was very intrigued. You can set it up in any number of ways and I chose the bimonthly subscription. Why? I could use some modern fabrics in my stash, I don’t have a quilt store nearby, and I thought this would be the perfect way to gather some fabrics I wouldn’t see otherwise. So, every other month, I’ll get a little box from Culcita.

Like this one:

It arrived in my mailbox yesterday (2 day priority mail!)

12 fat quarters; this month from Art Gallery Fabrics’ Take Shape line.

Lovely. Beautifully presented and such fun to open.

Included was a lovely handwritten welcome note, and a card highlighting this month’s fabric line.

Also included was a quilt pattern and two labels. Oh, and a fortune cookie with the fortune reading:

Eat, Sleep, Sew. Any questions?

This isn’t a sponsored post or anything like that. I’m just writing about it because it’s such a neat idea. Subscription boxes are the new thing, for books, minis, makeup, food, you name it. I’m not one who signs up for these things as a rule, but this particular subscription has a very fair price and I figure I can handle it every other month.

Okay. Now I have to run some errands before it starts snowing. Again. Only a couple of inches, but come on! Enough already. We’re both in prep mode, gathering together what we need to pack. In Don’s case, it’s obviously more complicated. I’m only gone for 6 days.

Happy Saturday.

Stella is Out of Here

March 15, 2017 at 8:48 am by Claudia

I see Spring Home Tours sprouting up all over the Internet.

Here’s mine:

The car on the right, completely buried under the snow, is mine. When we moved some snow away from the kitchen door so we could fully open it, I grabbed the tape measure.

22 inches. Just under two feet.

All day long the winds blew, the snow fell – sometimes at a rate of 3-4 inches per hour – and it covered our windows so completely that we couldn’t see outside.

We have a heck of a lot of cleanup to do today.

The good news: the aforementioned delivery of heating oil and…we never lost power. At one point in the late morning, the lights started to blink. Don was in the shower, so I shouted that he’d better finish quickly. (Since the water pump is electric, if we lose power, we lose water.) Amazingly, that was the only scare we had.

I know some places – NYC for instance – didn’t get quite as much snow as expected. Trust me, we did, and then some. Toward the end of the week, the temperature is going to hit 40 degrees and it will start melting, but it’s going to take a while for all of this to disappear.

Don’s thinking he’ll leave on Saturday. We need a couple of days to get him ready since we lost two days this week.

In the meantime, I added a few items to the gallery wall:

I read, I went online. I looked out the window repeatedly. I ate: apple pie for Pi Day.

And I finally did some hand quilting:

Since the quilt design is very linear, I’m quilting interlocking circles of varying sizes. Nothing plotted out, just whatever I want to do at the moment. It’s taking me a bit of time to get back into that hand quilting rhythm. I like my stitches to be fairly even, but it takes a while to get there. I don’t know how long it’s been since I worked on this, but I know that at the very least, it’s been since last year. When I opened up the quilt, my ‘memory’ of having done a fair amount proved to be untrue. I have a lot to do! A good project when I get back from NYC and have to fill my evenings without Don.

Okay. Have to eat some oatmeal and suit up for shoveling.

I have some gardening books that I’m going to review over the next week. First up: tomorrow.

Happy Wednesday.

A Project

March 6, 2017 at 9:27 am by Claudia

A sunset for you. Friday night? I think so, though life has been rather unfocused lately. The past three weeks have been a blur and, though some of it has been lovely, much of it has not been lovely. I’m trying to stay in the now for the next 8 days before Don leaves. I’m a bit resentful of this virus and the fact that it ‘took me away’ from Don. Of course, it really didn’t, as he was here and taking care of me. I guess I mean that I wish I hadn’t felt so god-awful so we could have had lighter, happier days. Ah, well. There’s no replay allowed, so we’ll move forward and enjoy the next week together.

I do have to go into the city tomorrow for a run through and then I’m done for about a week and a half or so, until final dress rehearsals begin.

Perhaps because I read that lovely new quarterly magazine, QuiltFolk, perhaps because I know my evenings will soon be something other than a time to cuddle with my husband – whatever the reason, I brought out this work in progress:

I pieced this together a few years ago while working in Hartford. It’s meant to hang on a wall, though it would also work nicely as a throw. (The wall it was meant to hang on is now our ‘gallery wall’ by the stairs.) I started hand quilting it back then and I’ve pulled it out a few times, but it hasn’t been touched in a while. Hand quilting – which is the only way I quilt – is slow going and I have to be motivated to do it.

I’m feeling motivated. I think it will be the perfect thing to do as I pass the time ‘of an evening.’ Nothing is quite as fun to watch alone as it is with Don. I’ll probably end up watching MSNBC, cursing repeatedly, and jabbing my needle into the quilt.

We’ve started watching Rachel Maddow again after having stayed away from the news after that man was elected. Maddow is brilliant, of course, and she manages to weave information together into something coherent. She does the hard work for us and like the teacher she is, leaves us knowing more than we did by the end of her show. A lot more. We find we’re clinging to her nightly show because we need to connect the dots and that’s something she does better than anyone else.

The winner of a copy of Wilde Lake by Laura Lippman is Katheryn! Congratulations. I’ll send you an email, Katheryn.

Happy Monday.

Fabrics in a Box

Stella is Out of Here

A Project

Lambs Like to Party

A Note

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