48 Hours

As of this morning we are 48 hours into the new year and what a wild ride it has been. It ended with my furnace conking out just when the morning temperatures were in the 20's... that's Fahrenheit to those of you outside of the states. It was darn cold and, until then, I was pretty proud of knocking off a couple of more UFOs.


First off I got both of the quilts quilted I had been given to quilt for the Quilt Teal, ovarian cancer, project. One of the quilts looks like a standard sample of 12 blocks and I stitched along the lines to hold everything together. Pretty simple quilting but a bear at the intersections where wrinkles kept getting in the way. The other was a much more experimental quilt sampler with hand and machine appliqued blocks along with some others that you need an odd color sense to appreciate. The second quilt I free motion quilted making little designs in each block and stipple quilting the sashing with hearts and loops. This was much easier when it came to wrinkles and went relativlely quickly.


Both quilts were an incredible challenge as the person who basted them together used very few safety pins and some of those were closed so that the bulk of the safety pin was on the back side of the quilt. For quilts this size I use between 100 to 200 safety pins so that there is no chance of the layers shifting while quilting. I counted a total of 40 pins in total for both quilts. Yikes!

Here they are, packed up ready to go back to Sunflower Quilts. The next person in line can sew on the bindings prior to shipping them off for auctioning on Ebay with all proceeds going to ovarian cancer research.

I lied about the NYE mystery quilt. I did not get it done on New Year's Eve but late on New Year's Day. I will be taking it around to the various neighborhood groups so they can all have a good laugh at my quilting misadveture.


Which brings me to my only New Years resolution. I will finish up UnFinished Objects (UFOs) from pre-2008 work at the pace of at least 2 per month for 2008. At a maximum, I will not undertake any new projects this year as the new heating and air conditioning units I am having installed will be taking a lot of my spare cash for the foreseeable future! I really have some wonderful projects here that have not been moving along but I am sure I will be able to get a few new things started and completed in 2008. So let's start counting - one NYE mystery completed (a bit of cheat but true)and two quilts that needed quilting for a total of three so far. Not a bad beginning to a New Year!


I hope the first few days of 2008 have been kinder to you than they have been to me because baby, it's cold outside!