Quilting Up A Storm

 Maybe with all the bad weather we're having that was a bad choice of words.


Anyway.  I was away from home last week for 5 days attending the funeral of my dear Uncle Bill who passed away on February 26th.  I got to spend some quality time with my mom and see my sister and her family a bit, as well as many extended family members.


I was going to blog about how my uncle was the last of our family patriarchs but my cousin Steve stole my thunder when he gave such a sweet message to our family as part of the funeral service.  Maybe another day.


So I've been back home for 3 days.  The night I got home Anna was at a ballgame so when SHE got home she ran to me screaming and whooping it up.  As she hugged me she said, "I felt like I didn't have a mother!"


Well, now she does.  All week. No daddy either, since we are tag teaming it and he is gone this week.  So she'll be sick of me by Wednesday.


I started back working on my quilt for Nathan as soon as I could when I got done with laundry and other household chores upon my return. When I got home from church yesterday I was going to go great guns and get it ready to lay out when my machine decided to be  difficult.


That's the thing with sewing.  You have to deal with machinery that for no apparent reason decides to malfunction at the worst of times.  But, thanks to my amazing sister-in -law
 I got it up and running in no time (after some grumbling and complaining on my part).


Speaking of  my sis (People!  She has INVENTED two different quilting tools and has sold tens of thousands of them) she gave me this awesome tip for getting my cutting table up at a height that is comfortable to use standing up.

See those black things?  Those are the things you can use to raise a bed up higher and it works perfectly for a cutting table.  I'll give you a couple other angles.



















And if you are just a little shorter than me (ahem) they are the perfect height.  They've worked great for me.

Here are some of the squares I cut out in preparation to make my quilt.

And there is the pile of little squares that will make one of the borders.  That's a lot of squares!

And then a pile of triangle squares begins to appear...

Laying out the quilt body.



So, it is coming along quite nicely now. I'll have to look at this for a while to make sure I like it.   I'm not sure I have a space big enough to lay it all out but it WILL  happen somehow.

What are you working on?????