startitis

My terminal case of startitis has been flaring-up.  I have started three shawls and a sweater.  The shawls need to be frogged and put back in the yarn stash.  The sweater looks like a keeper even though I have restarted it twice.  I have bought the yarn for a matching set of mitts and balaclava for Sister Suzy.  I have the patterns printed and everything in a bag together.  As much snow as we have had in the last week I should have got them done two weeks ago. : >)

I have two quilts I've started and lost the inspiration to finish.  Got two more planned but haven't looked in the fabric stash yet.

I need to knuckle down again and get something finished.  Otherwise, the projects start piling up and my monkey-mind gets to driving me crazier than I already am.

Been cooking and canning up a storm.  The grocery store had all the ingredients for salsa on sale so I went nuts and bought enough to do 24 pints.  Only this time I dehydrated the salsa after I made it and the salsa fits in a 1/2-gallon ice cream container.  The stuff tastes great after re-hydrating which was a concern when I came up with the idea.  Made Hubby two kinds of pickled jalapeños with the leftover peppers.  The recipes say to let the jars set for a couple of weeks before trying so I'm not going to publish the recipes until we have tasted them.  Cabbage was on sale, also, so we picked up two heads.  I want to dehydrate them to make up a soup blend of vegetables to have handy for when I want to make a quick soup.  If it turns out well I may get more cabbage.

My desire to wear clean clothes says I need to start the laundry so back to the salt mines!

Everybody have a good day!

Judy

tossed nine patch quilt

This is the fourth quilt I made for the girls.  It is called tossed nine patch and this you-tube video was the inspiration for it.

Sister Suzy wanted this one for herself.

I cut 5-inch square patches.  I used the dark-purple print in the border for the center blocks.  Then I used random purple squares for the outside corners and random green squares for the four inside blocks of the nine patch.

I had to add a fourth inside border on each end because the center of the quilt wasn't long enough to fill the space for a 48" by 72" quilt.  I cut a small diamond stencil that fit on-point and using my washable quilt pencil drew around the stencil for the quilting of that border.   As you can see I used stitch-in-the-ditch for most of the quilt and put a big X in all the larger blocks to make sure the batting didn't shift or bunch in those squares.

One of the things I did differently for this quilt was useing up a bunch of scrap batting that was the same weight or loft.  By spraying the backing well with the spray adhesive it was easy to butt the pieces of batting up against each other and get complete coverage without any shifting or bunching.  The quilt will have to be washed several times to see if I have enough quilting to hold some of the smaller pieces in place. I plan to try it again with another quilt with higher loft scraps.

I decided to go with big squares for the backing on this one.

And here is the label so it can go to it's new home with Sister Suzy.

As a Side note:  I was off-line for about a week as Hubby rebuilt my computer and him trying to get all the bugs worked out.  He ended up having to replace the new motherboard he installed because Windows 7 would not recognize the video card on that board.  The computer is still choking every once in a while so he has some more fine tuning to do.  So my access may still be spotty for a while.

I hope everybody is having a good day!

Judy