Friends again

The Queen and I are friends once again.  I made some significant progress on the Africa quilt today.  The front is fully pieced together and the elephant is appliqued to the front.  The acacia tree is definitely going to be a more challenging applique as it has many more and sharper curves.  I'll have to rest and mentally prepare to tackle that fresh tomorrow.  So far, I am very happy with how this is coming together : )

I am looking forward to sketching in and quilting the elephant face.  I think this picture will be a good guide.

An audience with the Queen

We are in the process of re-arranging the living , yet again, and I have become motivated to finish the Africa quilt to hang in the living room. After blowing the dust off the machine and quilting supplies and digging out all the fabric I spent a little time figuring out where I was in the process (too little time as it turns out).  

 

Eager to restart, I carefully pinned the black strip to the colored squares and merrily sewed up the first seam in more than a year.  Well, let me tell you, what a rude surprise I got when I started to iron the seam open and D'OH I sewed the right side of the strip to the wrong side of the colored squares.  Such a rookie mistake!  It's been too long since I spent quality time with Queen Bernina, my lovely sewing machine, and somehow she is extracting her revenge for my neglect by blinding my eyes, because what do you think happened on the VERY NEXT SEAM?  Yup, you guessed it, wrong again, arghh!

So, my  plan for today, Super Bowl Sunday, is to whisper sweet words of praise to the lovely Queen until we are friends once again and can work together to get this Africa quilt completed and up where it belongs on the living room wall.

A weekend to dye for

What a lovely, and long, weekend it has been. I took Friday off as we had the company golf tournament. Now, as my friends can attest I am quite awful at the game of golf and actually woke up dreading this "fun" event. So, I gave myself (and my unknowing teammates) a gift by begging off. Initially, this posed a conundrum for me as I didn't want to make up a lie about why I wasn't going, like "my dog is sick", it didn't seem fair to the dog or my teammate, on the other hand I also didn't want to just say "hey, I hate golf, don't know what in the heck I was thinking and am just not gonna go", as that seemed a bit too blunt. So I finally settled on " I'm just not feeling up to it today", which was both vague and true.

Saturday we went to a friend's 50th birthday party. DH, being horribly allergic to cats, had the bright idea to use a gas mask in the hopes that we could stay in the house more than 60 minutes before a "total airway closure" emergency. God love him he walked into a house full of mostly strangers for a social situation (party) in a gas mask! Now, I ask you, what kind of cohones does it take for a man to do that! He is a true treasure, you must understand that he basically did this because he knew how badly I wanted to go and have him with me. I love this man.

Finally got around to creating the "sunset" backdrop for the elephant silhouettes in the African quilt. I started with 4 yards of 36" plain white muslin, dyed the entire piece a lovely shade of yellow in the washing machine, then I had to seam it to the approximate dimensions (square 52") and left is very over sized. Now the hard part, I wanted the middle to be orange and the bottom scarlet. So, I basted a couple of "guidelines" in black thread to divide the piece in thirds. Then dyed the entire lower 2/3rd orange on the stove, carefully holding the top 1/3 out of the dye bath. This turned out so well, I got excited and immediately started on the bottom 1/3 in scarlet. Well, not a total disaster, but I did learn that it's not smart to handle your lovely yellow parts with gloves stained in scarlet, damn! Anyway, I knew this was not likely to be perfect as it's the first time I attempted a complicated dye job, hopefully I can cover some of it up with the elephant silhouette. On top of the near dye disaster, I think my washing machine has developed a leak.