"My Sister" Wallhangings Finished

 Hi all -

Well, tax season is here. I spent a day this week getting my taxes figured out and mailed in. I wanted to get everything in while there are still people working at the IRS so I can hopefully get my refund some time soon! It's always a big relief to get that done!! We're also getting into college basketball tournament season. My team, the Kansas Jayhawks, are in the Big 12 and their tournament starts today while March Madness starts next week. I'm going to be watching a lot of basketball! The Jayhawks have been having an up and down season. They started the season ranked #1, but are now unranked for the first time in 4 years. 😥 Hopefully they'll be up for the rest of the month!! I won't bore you with too much basketball news here, but this means I'll probably be doing a lot of hand work in the next several weeks.

I'm happy to have a finish this week. Actually, it's two finishes! Of course, the projects were small, but I'll still take it! I finished the My Sister wallhangings for my sisters:

My Sister - Stash Fabric Version

My Sister - Kit Fabric Version (Drunk Orientation)

The quilting isn't great, but I still love how these turned out! I ended up using hanging triangles rather than hanging sleeves:

My Sister - Hanging Triangles

These are just triangles of fabric that are sewn into the binding, but open on the diagonal. I hang my wallhangings using thumbtacks (the old-fashioned flat head kind, not push pins). I can just slide a thumbtack under each triangle and then push them into the wall.  It's really easy to do and doesn't do much damage to the wall. If you want to use a nail in the wall, you can get a small wooden dowel from the hardware store and cut it to fit the width of the wallhanging and hang that on the nail. This is a lot easier than a hanging sleeve! Since I had already put the binding on the first wallhanging when I made this decision, I had to unsew the binding at the corners, slip in the triangles (I resewed over the stitching attaching the front of the binding to the quilt to make sure the triangles were strongly attached  to the quilt) and then resew the binding to the back.  But it all looks great and should be strong (not that strength is really needed in wallhangings this small, but I can't help myself....). I'll give these to my sisters the next time I visit.

Ii also spent more time working on my Desert Blossom Blanket designed by Rohn Strong. I'm now working on the border rounds:

Desert Blossom Blanket

There are 20 or so border rounds, so there's still a lot of stitching left. And it's a bit frustrating for me because the numbers in the pattern are off for all of the border rounds. In order to make the square, you increase two stitches in each corner on each round. If you didn't do this, you would get a box instead of a flat blanket. But the numbers in the pattern, while having you make the extra stitches in the instructions, only add 4 stitches to the total stitch count on each round. I'm hoping this will end up not being a big deal. It really depends on the stitches used in the round and whether they depend on having a certain multiple of stitches. Oh well, however it turns out it'll be soft and warm!

Yesterday was our BOM/Mystery Quilt small group meeting with my quilt guild. This is a monthly meeting where some of us come together to work on our own BOM (Block Of the Month) or mystery quilts that we have in our stash. I've been working on my Ruffled Roses quilt designed by Sue Garmin. This was the 2011 BOM from The Quilt Show. I started it back then, but it got put aside as other priorities popped up. Currently, I've only been working on this quilt at our monthly meeting so the going has been slow, but any progress is welcome! This month I worked on the 4-patch border. I had already stitched the squares into pairs, so yesterday I got all of the pairs of squares stitched into 4-patches, I cut all of the setting triangles and I started stitching on a few of the triangles:

Ruffled Roses

It doesn't look like much, but I'm happy with the progress. There are 72 regular 4-patchesand 4 4-patches with the colors moved around (the ones in the upper right of the photo), so it did take a little time. I'll try to finish this border at home, but then this quilt will probably be put aside again as I start work on the Jungle Magnolia BOM that I mentioned last week. We get the first fabric set for that quilt at the end of this month.

Since I went to town for the BOM meeting, I also made some progress on my Flower Pincushion designed by Sue Spargo:

Flower Pincushion

This is my travel project so I make progress on it whenever I go to town for a meeting. I'm a little weird so on meeting days I go to town in the morning and don't come back until the meeting is over, even though most of the meetings are in the afternoon. I do this because I take my dog to daycare and it costs almost the same for a half day as it does for a full day and I want her to be able to play as much as possible. It's a 45 minute drive to town, so I drop her off, go out for breakfast, run any errands and then go to the library and do some hand stitching until time for the meeting. It's actually a nice day for me! And once a month I use that time to get a pedicure. 😎

Finally, I was wanting to work on something new at home so I looked through my collection of kits. I was thinking I wanted to do some cross-stitch, but then I came across this embroidery kit and I decided to work on it instead:

Flowering Shrubs

This is just a cheap kit that I got from Amazon, so I don't know who the designer is. But I'm really enjoying working on this! There are 2 more designs in the kit, so I have plenty to do!

Nancy