Bonnie Hunter's Challenge

Last year Bonnie Hunter issued a leader ender challenge.  What are leader enders?  When piecing you have a easy pieceing project stacked next to your sewing machine that you can feed at then end of every section you piece.  Leave these pieces in the sewing machine. This saves you from wasting lots of thread and you leaving these in the machines so when piecing your next project these 'enders' become 'leaders '.  Bonnie wanted to make cheddar bowties.  Scraps for the tie and cheddar color for the back ground like the vintage quilts you can find in antique malls.

BTW the green bucket is where I have been stacking them.  I need a bigger container!

So here is how many I have made so far 100!  I need to go back through my scrap bins and cut more.  I cut the sizes needed and then stack them in block groups so I can grab the pieces for one block at a time.

  I may need to change my back ground fabric as I had been using all those tone on tone printed muslins(ya know form the 90's).  I think I have cut them all up so I might go for unbleached muslin(I seem to have various pieces of that too!)

Here is the link up blog post where you can see everyone's bow ties so far!

Keep Dreaming...Colleen



A new necklace design I made.  Do you think it would sell?  I have lots of wire in different colors and plenty of beads. 
I need to use up some bead stash as well as fabric stash.



Sewing Machine cover swap

I'm participating in a cool swap to make a sewing machine cover.  It was something I had wanted to make for myself but I love the idea of someone else making it for me!  What is it about me always more motivated to make something for someone else and not myself?  Is it that I get more from the process then the product?  Really other then a few small wallhangings and one small lap quilt I have given everything else away!  Even my first quilt along quilt!  Now I have plans and tops and block sets I would like to have for myself but... Anywho...

Here is what I started with.  Some natural colored linen, and some wonderful scrap packs of Denyse Schmidt I got from my fav LQS  Karen Gray (whose shop is in Quilt Sampler this month!)  I actually auditioned several fabric combos including this delicious Valori Wells green leaf linen from KG shop.

Here are some of the other fabrics I auditioned

And I do mean auditioned..I put all of these int he fickr discussion and enjoyed seeing who chose what combos.  All of the smaller pieces came from KG scrap bags.

And here is the front pieced...

and the back...

and what I'm thinking for the quilting on the front matching pearl cottons and beads.

Haven't decided on the back yet...maybe my secret partners name?  I love quilting names and words(oo ooo!) in pearl cottons.

*****

future blogs

•  Stone mountain natural textures
• Triangle Modern Quilt Guild and Spoonflower
• Thimble Pleasures

Keep dreaming...Colleen



This was the first quilt I ever made in my first quilt class. 
 A kaleidoscope string quilt where we created the fabric with wavy free hand cut strips.
Ive always been a little different so I turned the one pattern piece
so the strips ran the opposite of what they were supposed to.
 My teacher had never done this and was impressed.
 I call it Crosses or Four Patch deoending on how I hang it. 
My fabrics were pretty strange too...can you guess the fabric year?