Signs of a sick mind

I can’t help it.  Everytime I get a new spool of King Tut, I drool all over it and pet it for a bit before I put it safely away in my thread cart, safe from light and lint.  Sick huh?

King Tut by Superior Threads is hands down my personal favorite quilting thread, and I use it for all of my own quilts.  But it’s expensive, nearly twice the price of my next favorite, which is So Fine!, also by Superior Threads.  I have a ton of colors in the So Fine!, and I’m working on building my collection of King Tut.

I’d picked out my fabric selections for the embroidered monkey quilt I am getting ready to start designing, and needed a spool of thread to match for the quilting.  Five other colors just happened to jump into my shopping cart all on their own!

The Hoffman Bali Batik was the start point for the project.  It made me decide that this monkey quilt is going to have an island theme.

The rest of the fabrics include a teal, a lime-ish green, and a blue-ish purple.  I don’t think the purple cast in my blue fabric shows in this picture very well.  Of course the embroideries and appliques will be on the off white fabric.

I won’t be using the original designs nor the pattern from the first “Five Little Monkeys” quilt.  I only have 5 weeks (one of which I will be gone during!) to design, embroider, piece and quilt this one, so I may not make the fair deadline, we’ll see.

My former blog, “The TinkleTimes” continues to recieve more traffic and new people registering all the time, even though on the front page I’ve left a final post up saying the blog is going away.  So this morning, I imported the entire blog over here, and you can access it by clicking on “CJ’s Former Blog” at the top of this website. 

The pictures only imported in thumbnail size, I will try and replace them with full size images over time, but only the Bernina related ones, which show tips and whatnot.

Today's project

Shelving!  Or a start at least.  Most of you are aware that I am using our attached garage as my longarm “studio”.  We have no desire to finish it because we haven’t made up our minds yet if we’re going to stay in this house, and if we do, then eventually we will build a detached studio for me somewhere on the property.

That would make the entire house workable for us, as my studio would be large enough to house my longarm and my sewing machines, freeing up the upstairs guest rooms for… guests!  And the garage could be one big extended pantry/broom closet… which it more or less is now, but I have to share it with my longarm.  Ugh.

Jim and I put up these two shelving units today, and I was able to move some of my fabric and batting out of my sewing room and down into the longarm area (I hate to call it the garage, sounds bad!).  We’ve decided there is room for one more unit, with it’s back to the garage door and corners touching the end of the other two.  My rolls of batting can all go onto that one for easy access, and that will open up two more shelves for bolts of fabric.

I don’t have a huge selection, but I do keep a small supply of Moda Bella Solids, Moda Marbles, and Hoffman Batiks that I am more than happy to sell when customers bring their quilts over to be quilted.

Anyway, I am tickled to have more shelving!

Next project… figure out how to fit the AccuQuilt Studio down here.

Blocks for comfort

There’s an online forum that I’ve been a member of forever, that deals with farming, cooking, sewing, etc.  I feel like I know these people because we’ve all been visiting there for about ten years!

Anyway, one of the women was diagnosed with leukemia, and the quilting group is making her a comfort quilt, and everyone is supposed to send a block, the theme is “loosely” garden/floral, and her favorite color is blue.

I had some flowery blue and green charm squares, and my favorite off white Moda Bella solid that I like for baby quilts, so I made two blocks with the blues and greens from the charm pack.

I’ve no idea what this fabric collection was, there are some pinks too, and it would have made a wonderful baby quilt!

Bolts!

I still haven’t done any sewing for a few days, but at least I accomplished something!  I did a bit of work outside… and I still have to mow today, ugh.  Probably no sewing again.

Last night the UPS man arrived with 27 bolts of fabric I ordered, all Moda Marbles and Bella Solids!  That should keep me busy for awhile!  Tomorrow I have the second part of my Lone star class, I’m really looking forward to it.  This time I made sure to pack the snap on table for my Bernina 630!

A long time ago, I posted a picture of my very first quilt top I pieced.  I never got around to quilting it, because for the longest time my HQ16 was only setup at eight feet.  Of course my Millennium is on a 14 foot table so I no longer have the excuse of not having a large enough frame to quilt this monster.  The borders are about as friendly as they can get!  I remember my thought process when I read the direction on applying them, and thinking to myself, “how silly!  Why not just cut strips of fabric, sew them to the sides of the quilt, and chop off the excess?”  Which is exactly what I did.  LOL

I could of course remove them and fix them, but I’m not going to.  I figure at some point a customer is going to give me a quilt with “friendly” borders, and I could use this quilt as a learning tool and see how to deal with it.

I was so proud of this quilt when I made it, I made an embroidered label and swapped it out for one of the blocks on the front of the quilt!  hehe.

Check out my Cooking blog for a great way to make fish!