I had some time earlier in the week to work on these blocks which have affectionately come to be called The Country Mile Blocks. I’m calling the project The Country Mile Quilt because it is one that I have worked on off and on over about the past ten years. I’ve used several different machines during that time, and it appears that I have shifted between a true quarter inch and a scant quarter-inch seam allowance. My points on some of the blocks are a country mile off – hence the name. I was disappointed when I saw how far off the points were on some of the blocks. My first thought was to toss ..read more

2023 has come and gone and we are in a brand new year. I finished up 2023 intent on finishing up some quilt tops that had been in the works for quite a while – years, some of them. While I made progress on a number of projects toward the end of 2023, I still have work to do to join the blocks together to make tops. For whatever reason, joining blocks together is one of the bottlenecks in my process. I hope to continue to clear up the bottlenecks in 2024 and want to finish more quilts in 2024. My intent for the end of 2023 was to finish tops so that I would have a bunch of quilts ready for the ..read more

An accomplished crocheter, I am not. I’ve only been crocheting for a couple of years. To be honest, I learned to crochet because I was attending a crafting group with ladies who mostly knitted and crocheted. I was impressed with the things they made and wanted to be able to make hats, scarves, baby blankets and afghans to donate to organizations serving the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the surrounding area where I already donated quilts. The Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and the area surrounding it encompasses some of the poorest counties, with the highest unemployment rate in the United ..read more

This will be my 15 Minutes To Quilt post for this week. I’ll also share with Scrap Happy Saturday, Oh Scrap! and Patchwork & Quilts. This week I was able to quilt at least 15 minutes 6 days of the week. Most days I was able to quilt quite a bit more than 15 minutes. All in all, I accomplished quite a bit though not all of it has been photographed. I finished “the shoe quilt” top which has been a thorn in my side for a long time. It’s been one of those projects that started out with different intentions. I started out with white as a neutral, but I decided near the end of putting the top to ..read more

This will be my 15 Minutes To Quilt post for the week. I quilted 4 days this week but quilted quite a bit longer than 15 minutes each day. On Friday evening, I took a ton of photographs of quilt projects that are in the works that I am trying to finish. The scrappy Arkansas Snowflakes pictured here were among the photos taken. I mentioned in last week’s 15 Minutes To Quilt post that I have a few scrap projects that I try to work on each week because they are massive and I like to keep making progress on them. Well…this week the scrap projects took me hostage and working on scrap projects took ..read more

I don’t know about you, but I like knowing what fabrics are going to hit the fabric store shelves before they do so that I can be more planned and less impulsive with my fabric purchases. The following is a list of fabric companies and links to their fabrics, current, just released, and coming soon. The links are different for each company because the information is arranged differently on the sites. I hope you’ll find this list useful and that you’ll come back and use it often. Andover Fabrics Collections What’s New Art Gallery Fabrics Fabric Collections Coming Soon Fabric Lookbooks Benartex ..read more

15 Minutes To Quilt is a weekly blog linkup meme hosted at Life in Pieces. I’m writing this post for the linkup. I started the week with a long list of things I wanted to accomplish and good intentions for quilting at least 15 minutes a day. Some things I have accomplished, others, I missed the mark with. This pink, gold, and green top is one of my successes. I’d hoped to finish the top this week and I hit the mark. Yippee!! Also, on the list for the week was finishing the pieced backing for the bright colored quilt top that I finished up a couple of weeks ago. I’ve got most of the backing pie ..read more

My goal for the end of the year is to get some of the quilt pieces that have not been joined into blocks joined and to get the blocks joined into tops. I want to have a bunch of tops ready to put on the long arm so that I will be ready to dive in and do a lot of quilting early in the new year. You’ve already seen some of my projects that are in the works for quilting in 2024. Those include the green batik quilt (which still needs to be finished into a top), the turtle quilt (which still needs to be finished into a top), and the wild color scheme quilt, among a lot of others that I am still wor ..read more

I’ll be honest and start by saying that I’m not very good at self-care. Self-care is defined as making your mind and body a pleasant place to inhabit according to this inspirational self-care poster. Most of my self-care falls into the personal, emotional, and spiritual spheres according to this chart. Much of my self-care comes in the form of relaxing long enough to quilt, sew, crochet or do some other handwork. Often in the hustle and bustle of a busy family and the demands of a home, the time to quilt and crochet is eaten up by other activities or I’m just too tired to do it by the time it ..read more

For a long time we were a normal household with a normal number of cats. But back in about 2009 or 2010 we began the journey that resulted in a slow slide into being identified as crazy cat people. For us feeding the cats that hung around the yard looking hungry was the start of it all. When I noticed a skinny black cat with a too tight collar hanging around the back yard, I did what any sane, kind, person would do and opened a can of cat food and set it out for the stray kitty. That kitty seemed uninterested in the food so I left it there in case my presence was keeping her from eating. She ..read more