quilts in progress

the heat wave has broke!! woo hoo it stayed in the 70's and 80's today. We are getting a ton of rain from tropical storm Lee and it is SO badly needed here. This is the dryest it has ever been in recorded history! I am hoping to get back to the quilting tomorrow!

I have been doing a little organizing...

Fabric for Recycling

Ok, so i have been buying alot of shirts, we went yardsaling today... i now have almost a full closet of shirts for quilts and i have a plan for each and every one of them. See those oranges, i bought another today and as soon as i have 12 or so... it will be this:

I am now using pintrest, i found this from sometimescrafter

i dont know what it is about orange right now but it calling "make me into something beautiful" In the mornings i sit there with my coffee and stare at my fabric stash (a closet full of shirts i have bought) and those oranges keep smiling at me. I get up, rearrange the shirts to put green or blue or brown or grey with them... and yeah i like it... but the oranges dont seem to smile as much... so i saw this and there it is!!! that is what i want to do with my beautiful orange shirts. They need to be alone and smiling.

I have also been buying scrubs. I have a neice who is a nurse so next year she is getting a quilt out of scrubs.

Of course when i need red and blue plaid shirts to finish dallas' quilt, those are the ones i cant find. I am still looking for some red ones.

I have finished the irene flimsy and hope to quilt it and bind it tomorrow... although it may become a lee quilt if it doesn't quit raining in south lousiana which is closer to home. (however it can keep raining here in east texas, please!!!)

Irish Chain Quilt

I am working on adriana's quilt. I have a stack of these:

HST Quilt

and im not sure what to do with them now. I had planned on doing this:

HST Diamonds Quilt

But when i was playing with them trying to decide, ralph really liked this:

Pinwheels Quilt

I will play some more tomorrow maybe matching up the fabrics on the 2nd one.

one of my "leader/ender" projects (thats what im going to call it at least, its really its a "i really love to play with 1 1/2 in squares"

Lovely Little Windows

I have about 30 with 2 sides sewn on and i am LOVING it. But... im getting ahead of myself because this was going to be for NEXT christmas and i need to finish THIS christmas, AND it was going to be for the neice who is now getting the scrub quilt. hmmm this one might actually be for ME!!!

The other "leader/ender" project is an ocean waves quilt, i have been making these and when i have a shoe box full, i will count and see how many more i need! lol.

Ocean Waves Quilt

Its going to be incredibly scrappy and im using every bit of ugly fabric i can find.

I think thats a  pretty good run down of whats perculating in the studio!!

A Quilt for Irene

Having survived hurricane Rita in 2005, and i really feel it was "survival," I know that there is going to be someone from irene who is without a house, or all their belongings and who a quilt will bring comfort, so instead of sitting powerless and i do whenever there is a natural disaster, i started putting together some squares i had started and they are now my quilt for irene. Im sure there will be a drive for quilts eventually and i will send it.

Hurricane rita was the hurricane that came thru east texas about a week or two after katrina hit new orleans. We thought we might get a little rain, we live 165 miles inland! but it did alot more than that. Rita didn't get alot of covereage because new orleans was such a mess, but it did affect my life. We were out of power for 2 and a half weeks, during the storm the roof was blowing off the house i was in, we spent hours collecting buckets of water that was just pouring into the house, i remember feeling the rumble of the cement floor it was a tornado that ripped through forest down the road. The wind was amazing, for 10 hours straight we listened to 100 mile an hour winds rip through the trees, we had a pen of weanlings who were just bawling the whole storm... talk about heartbreaking, there was nothing we could do for them, no shelter we could offer. ugh... i hate thinking about it and i know that lives will be changed, homes lost, dreams broken because of irene and i know that i can make someone feel a little less vulnerable and devistated with a quilt... so im making mine.

Its a modified irish chain out of 2 1/2 and 1 1/2 inch scraps, ive been making the 9 patches for a while now and i have almost enough to put together a full size top, so im going to finish it the next couple days.

Irish Chain Quilt

I have had alot of good quality time in my sewing room this past week, i have loved it (My house is a wreck, but there is always tomorrow)... i think im going to start calling it my quilt studio, i like the sound better and i can retreat to my studio and be an obsessive artist and everyone will say, "ah yes, you know how she is when shes in her studio, nothing else exists!."

Know whats funny, i am enjoying the scrapiness of the irish chain and another one im working on, i find mismatched blocks comforting, the last few things ive worked on, the stripes, the red and blues that im making now... lol they are scrappy but too matchy matchy for me. To me, this irish chain is a scrap quilt and it makes me happy.

Here are a couple other shots i took this morning.

Recycled Fabric for Striped Quilts

some more stripes... im loving stripes!

Ive decided the best way to organize my odd quilting fabric is to leave them as shirts until im ready to use them. So... i now have a closet of shirts, this is my "pastel stripe" collection.

striped quilt

and whats this... a little box of stripes???

once ive cut up a shirt and used part it... to keep it organized im cutting the rest of it into 6 1/2, 3 1/2, 2 1/2 and 1 1/2 squares and some strings as well of course. All the other squares im throwing in bins for that size but my stripes are special and they have their own little box.

wow... im sounding really weird about these stripes... ill stop now. My prayers are going out to the east coast. Hunker down and hold tight, you will get thru this!!