Last night we moved our clocks forward one hour.
I am not usually too impacted by the time change but today it seems to have hit me harder than usual. The graphic above definitely does not reflect how I am feeling about the loss of an hour of sleep!
Even Joey seems to have been caught a little off guard!
Last Saturday at our guild workshop, I offered to help Kathy with her machine quilting. I brought along some of my smaller quilts to demonstrate that there is a lot you can do to machine quilt your quilts with your domestic sewing machine (DSM) and your walking foot.
Kathy commented that she should be writing down the ideas. No need to make notes, these pictures are posted for you, Kathy.
This first quilt is a rail fence miniature. As long as the curves or arcs are gentle, they can be accomplished quite nicely with a walking foot and there is no need to drop the feed dogs and wrestle with controlling the stitch length and moving the quilt at a steady speed while stitching in free motion.
This quilt was marked with a blue marking pen using the edge of a glass to make the arcs across two strips. 
This picture shows the closeup of the stitching on the blocks.
This is the back of the same quilt. The scallop design on the border was accomplished with a stencil. Again the curve is gentle and easily accomplished with the walking foot.
The secondary design was not intentional and has the appearance of the apple core block.
The alternate squares in this miniature nine patch were stitched to look like the nine patch blocks–simple straight lines.
I love it when a secondary design that wasn’t part of the original quilt plan emerges in my quilts. When I finished this log cabin quilt and showed it to my husband he declared that he could find the surprise in my quilt–the birds. This quilt was a simple two colour log cabin and there was no intention on my part to arrange the blocks to form four birds in the four corners of the quilt. Further to that, without realizing it, my quilting accentuated the bird image.
Simple parallel lines at an consistent angle finish off the border.
I believe they call the block in this quilt, Sister’s Choice. 
This is my favorite technique for a narrow sashing or border–a serpentine stitch. This stitch is a modified zig zag type stitch on my Bernina.
The following article appeared in Sunday’s newspaper. I read it and had a chuckle–it is so close to the truth! Click on the article and it should appear large enough for you to read it. Enjoy!
My sewing machine quit part way through yesterday’s workshop. There was a short in the power cord. I have ordered a replacement cord but it hasn’t arrived yet. Since piecing was out of the question today, I had to amuse myself with other activities–after the laundry and vacuuming of course.
I was chatting with Linda J. this morning and we were talking about baking. The discussion ended up with us agreeing that a recipe that included chocolate would be a great idea today. I had bananas to use and I added chocolate chips to the banana loaves I made to be sure and make this a “chocolate Sunday”! I believe Linda J. was making chocolate cake. We wanted to meet for coffee but the distance between us only allows for chats over the Internet and each of us in our own houses with our own cup of coffee. Maybe one day the virtual coffee break will become a reality!
Banana bread has been a favorite in my household for many years. My kids deliberately stop eating bananas when there gets to be only three left in the bowl. They know if they leave them so that they over ripen mom will turn them into banana bread!
I also finished the hand sewing on my Wicked Easy quilt. This project was started in February and finished in March–I don’t think it even made it to the UFO stage because I didn’t leave it to “season” on the shelf!
Today was our quilt guild’s We Care Workshop. We had 29 guild members in attendance and a total of 35 quilts were worked on. These quilts will go a long way to filling the need in our communities’ hospitals, long term care homes, and women’s shelters.
