The Improv Spool

I belong to a virtual quilting bee, The Bees Knees, a Quilting Bee.

The ladies in the group are wonderful, although I haven't met any of them in person, yet :)

The month of August was Kim Walus' month to send out a block for us to sew.

She also sent extra fabric as a gift for us to make a block for ourselves.

Kim even asked us which one was our favorite color.

As you can see, I chose mint green :)

The block was paper pieced, but very easy to sew.

Here's the block I made for Kim, she sent all the fabric already cut.

The one on the left is mine, but I like the dark color Kim sent for the spool, better.

I'm always limited to the variety in my stash, lol!

I copied Melissa McCrory and made a mini to hang on my wall.

The free pattern can be found here.

It's by Konda Luckau, she has a lot of cute ideas for the block.

Be My Neighbor

I have a group of Instagram friends, and we always exchange homemade gifts for Christmas and birthdays.

It was becoming quite time consuming, so Lynette came up with the idea of this Be My Neighbor quilt.

You can get the pattern here.

For everyone's birthday, we make them two blocks from the quilt.

We are each pre assigned two blocks, and we make those same two blocks for everyone on their birthday.

There are eight of us, me, Tazzie, Nessa, Joanna, Lynette, Annette, Kristie and Leanne.

The blocks are made with fig tree fabrics and we all used the same Moda color for the background.

Here are the blocks I received on my birthday.

The blocks below are the ones I made :)

Look how beautifully all the blocks match!!!

The rows will be separated by sashing in the background color.

Every quilt has a story, this is one about friendships :)

"Framed" quilt

I made the quilt "Framed" from the book Simply Retro, by Camille Roskelley.

It was 5 blocks across and 5 blocks down, but I made it a little smaller for a baby quilt, 49" square.

I machine quilted it on the diagonal, and then the other direction to make little squares over the entire quilt.

I sewed next to the painter's tape, to get a straight line.

Then, I removed the painter's tape and used my walking foot to measure from the original line.

Whoops, I thought I cropped my feet out of the photo!

The fabric is Punctuation by American Jane.

The background fabric is an off white Kona.

I backed the quilt with a kiwi green minky, it's velvety soft!

I think the quilt turned out really well, I loved the pattern!

Now it's ready for a sweet little baby boy :)

Girls Camp 2017

I spent the week before last at girls camp, with 200 young women ages 12-17, and 100 adult leaders.

They are all wonderful girls and I love getting to know them!

I teach a destiny class to six different age levels, one class at a time.

My destiny class this year, was "Be the Light".

This was my class setting that I created, in the woods.

I made all the pom poms, that took a little bit of time :)

I wanted the girls to be fed visually as well as spiritually.

I had the posters printed from this etsy shop.

These are the ladies I have a great time working with :)

Pat, me, Julie and Kate

Each day we chose a costume to wear, and we all dressed alike.

I made the tutus too!

One day, we dressed up like the three little pigs and the big bad wolf.

Well, the wolf wasn't big and bad and we weren't so little! Lol

We even have tails!

Every time I breathed, the nose would make my glasses fog up!

One day we wore beautiful princess quote shirts.

I had them printed at this etsy shop.

The best is the day we dressed as bookworms!!!

(The theme was "My Once Upon a Time")

Pat made these cute costumes!

Notice the antlers and the dark glasses for bookworms?

We slept in a yurt, which was pretty comfortable.

Our camp was in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

It was beautiful and warm in the day, but in the night and first thing in the morning, it was freezing!

These are the ladies I shared a yurt with, they are all amazing!

I wrote a bedtime story about eight little girls in a yurt.

I'm going to give it to them when we meet this week.

I gave them cutesy names and wrote a paragraph about each one of us, pretty funny!

We had someone snap this photo of us just before we left and locked up the camp.

We made enough memories to last a lifetime!

My quilt is loved!

I made the Farm Girl Vintage Sampler quilt for my lovely little grand daughter for her 10th birthday!

She's now in the double digits :)

This quilt took two years to make, and was difficult, with all the little pieces that make a 6" block!

I gave it to the perfect person, she really appreciates it :)

Isn't Kennedy the cutest?

A couple of days after she opened her gift, Kennedy and her sisters went to their aunt and uncle's house for a few days.

I asked Kennedy if she took her quilt with her.

She told me she didn't take it to their house because she was afraid it would get dirty.

Perfect answer!!! Lol

Kennedy is perfectly awesome!

She is kind, thoughtful, happy, funny, creative, pretty, and she's made of spice and everything nice.

She's a lot like her mother, like me, my mother and my mother's mother.

How cool to see so many generations wrapped up in one sweet little girl!

Farm Girl Vintage Sampler quilt finished!

It's done!!! Yay!!!

It's taken two years to finish and I love it!

I sent it to my grand daughter Kennedy,

 who will turn 10 on July 19.

A gift of love and time!

I love all 52 - 6 l/2" squares :)

 Here I am busily binding my quilt so I could put it in the mail.

If you want to see more photos of my quilt, or the corner sawtooth stars, or the machine quilting, you can type Farm Girl Vintage in the search button at the top right of my blog.

Thanks for following me!

Farm Girl Vintage Sampler is quilted!

I finished machine quilting Kennedy's quilt!

She doesn't know it's her quilt, I'm giving it to her for her 10th birthday, this month :)

I followed the gingham fabric, quilting along the gingham, every 3 stripes, back and forth, creating a crosshatch effect.

You can see on the mint green minky back :)

See the crosshatch design?

I outlined the starts in each corner.  

I followed Lori Kennedy's "simple flower" motif and free motion quilted the design in the center of each block.

I used the wavy stitch on my Bernina, to outline all the blocks.

I did a free motion reverse loop, on the second border, outside of the flowers.

One problem with machine quilting with my sewing machine, is that I can't get the fabric taut like you would be able to on a quilt frame or long arm machine.

I'm going to choose one of these 3 fabrics for the binding.

Can you help me choose which one to use?

Just tell me in the comment box below :)

I like this Sew Cherry yellow!

I think the pink is different, because it contrasts with the red, ever so slightly.

The blue would be pretty too :)

Thanks in advance, for helping me.

I'll post photos of the finished quilt next week!