Quilts and Books

Back if February, in preparation for our annual retreat, the organizers passed out the first page of directions for a mystery quilt. Like I don't have enough projects already to work on ? You can download these things for free from Judy Hopkins here and so I cheated and took a look at what the completed mystery would look like. It looked attractive and called for 15 different fat quarters. Hmm. I have a few thousand of those. I should use some up. And then last week I got a new one of these. You should know. That's a "big deal" to a quilter. So now, here's what I'm working on. Lots of little seams to iron. Sadly this does not count as a UFO. Definitely ADD.

This baby quilt with the cute monkey fabric was basted together last week and is all ready to quilt. I should get it started this weekend. My goal is to have it done by my next guild meeting in mid-April. It doesn't count as a UFO, though, as I started it after I created my UFO list. And set up in my basting frame is the 9-patch musical instrument quilt for my son. It matches the pillowcase he made himself last year. Since the basting frame is all set up, I will probably baste another large quilt from my UFO pile when I'm done with this one. I hate basting. But here are some pictures of "Springing Up Fun." I am getting so excited about how this has turned out. I had to quilt clouds in the sky. Here you see my first stitches on the first cloud. Then you see just the sky portion. If you click on the sky picture you can see the cloud stitching. And finally the whole thing is quilted. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that there are a total of 20-24 hours ...

Today's post was supposed to be about this month's TBR read which turned out to be Barbara Metzger's Truly Yours . I no sooner finished reading TY when this review prompted me to dash over to the library on Monday and give Anne Mallory's The Bride Price a try. I found it interesting to read these two very different Regency historicals back-to-back and found myself comparing and contrasting the two. So rather than try and write a traditional review of Truly Yours I'm going to talk a little about RegencyWorld as it is used in each book. Like many romance readers of a certain age, I was introduced to the Regency era by reading Georgette Heyer in my teens. I have a small collection of her books and over the years I have re-read my favorites many times over, such as The Grand Sophy or Frederica . There was a part of my life when I didn't read much romance (although I loved when books in other genres had romantic elements in them) until I discovered Mary Balogh...

I finished with the grass section tonight. There are a lot of open areas and it took awhile. Clouds are next. I get nervous everytime I start a new section and have to work myself up to it. I know how I want to do the clouds but I'll need to practice first by doodling on some paper and then on some scraps. Here's a look at the 3/4 of it that is quilted. Boy is it dense. And heavy. For the grass alone I used most of a 500-yard spool of thread. That's a lot of thread! I've also made a little more progress on that baby quilt. Fortunately, it doesn't get borders. I should get it sandwiched soon.

February was not only a productive sewing month, it was also a good reading month. And so far, March hasn't been too bad either! Finally, here are my Phaves: 5. Instant Attraction by Jill Shalvis . Told with lots of humor and genuine emotion, we have the story of Katie who craves adventure and Cameron who has had so much adventure he's burned out. This book has some great secondary characters as well and left me eager for the next book in the series. I should add that I'm a regular reader of Jill's blog and this book, set in the Sierra's in the middle of winter seemed to have many elements of the area Jill describes every day. I enjoyed the connection between the two. 4. A Rose at Midnight by Anne Stuart . This was my TBR Challenge book for February. I thought this was just a marvelously constructed book and it stuck with me for days afterwards. 3. Scandal by Carolyn Jewel . Another book I reviewed and one that has been well received around the 'net. This,...

I am way behind on some posts. Here's how the work on my UFOs went during February: First, I finished a quilt! This is a gift for a family friend. This was a "quick" 9-patch. It's about 5' x 5'. One of my UFOs is a floral sampler. I finished another block and now have 4 of 9 blocks done. This is identical to the finished quilt above. This one is for my son, just made from fabric he picked out. I took it to the retreat and got the borders on.  This is another quilt for my son. Again, I just got the borders added while at the retreat. It's made from Boy Scout fabrics. Now here are a series of pictures of "Springing Up Fun". I got started on the quilting. I quilted rocks. I quilted water. I quilted grass. I got about 2/3 of the quilting done. All of this was done on the retreat.