Sunflower Patch Quilt Launches 2010

I have always referred to applique as the A-word. I love to look at it but my big hands just could not manage anything so dainty and beautiful. Then a friend taught me Pearl Pereira's freezer paper method of applique. I started with something simple, rounded and scrappy.


Orange is my favorite color so it was fun to find every shade variation of orange in my stash. 144 petals. I will be keeping this one so I decided to use Quilter's Dream wool batting. The quilt is only about 55" finished so perfect for the recliner.


This is all free-hand and ruler-work. The outer border is that circle, hook, fern feather I learned from Carla Barrett. I stretched a serrated leaf into the green parts of the border and double-lined the blue parts of the border. Ricky Tims blues are in here. Love those denim soft colors.




I have seen this quilted with big sunflower leaves in the background but I decided to use small leaves to enhjance that loft. I pebbled the centers of the sunflowers. Here are some photos. Thanks for looking.

Happy New Year 2010

This is going to be a great year. That is my hope anyway since I know what the raod behind me has been like. LOL.

Did you watch the Rose Parade today. We watched the HGTV network of the parade, no commercials. Those floats always amaze me. But my favorite part has to be the Natural Balance dogfood float. They had snowboarding bull dogs on their float. It was a hoot watching those dogs. They were having a blast on that board, some of them actually moving their legs down the side to get them going.

Happy New Year to you.

Playstation 3 and the Rock Band Beatles

We had a concert in our living room on Christmas Day. It was loud and so much fun. We bought the game Rock Band for our grand-children for Christmas. My son, Jacob and his family came up for Christmas dinner.

While the rib roast baked, we cranked up the PS3. Jacob was on guitar, his son Hunter (the other redhead), was on drums and our 4-year old firecracker, Gavin was on vocals. I wanted to raise my arms and sway with the music. I was a sophomore in high school when the Beatles first appeared on the Ed Sullivan show. 45 years later, they still sounded pretty good in my living room.

I have finally caught my breathe

The Christmas quilting rush was both exhausting for me and invigorating for my checking account. My November bottom line was bigger than all of 2006. December was good, too, but mostly because I finished all my quilts by the customer's deadlines.