The Endless Summer Sails On!

We have had a rush of one gorgeous day after another!

Although last week a snail was at the top of my post, I have to admit I am getting quite a bit done lately, in spite of the continual distraction outside.

At the top of the list is still "My Christmas Album"... it's entered in my guild show in less that two weeks. I think a full day of quilting and a full day of binding will do it. For quilting, I am trying to do swirls in the background of the blocks, stitch-in-the-ditch, and a grid in the plaid border. I have a competitive edge here-- absolutely none of this quilting will even show. LOL

 I saved some of my test embroidery stitch outs to practice quilting on. (You should, too.) While the swirls were going well, thank God I looked at the back, because little puffs of batting were punching through. It may be because I needed a fresh needle, but there's no way I am muffing this up at this point, so I stopped everything to wait and get some black batting. You can see I picked one of those gorgeous metallic Hoffman Christmas prints for the backing.

 

In the meantime, I digitized a cute label and sleeve-- it's at the top of the post. I intend to post this as a freebie (for you to finish your quilt) some time this weekend. We do have two more gorgeous days ahead-- maybe I should say Monday morning! If you're on our email list, you won't miss it.

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August's Cross Stitch is next on the list! My birthday is this month-- I LOVE AUGUST. My seahorse needs a bit of seaweed, and the missing block is going to have a cute cottage. It will debut as early next week as possible, weather permitting, heehee.

So those are my day job projects-- as you know, my hobby is also embroidery and sewing, so here's a peek at my spare time projects!

Most of us love stitch 'n flip blocks-- I love designing them and our entire Summerhouse Quilts series was full of them.

Right now, I need a guitar.

I sketched this months ago and it's usually so easy to just measure and cut the pieces from a graph paper sketch. Unfortunately, this one is on an angle. As much as I love math, I knew I was getting into the weeds when I started multiplying by the square root of 2. (The mathematicians among us will know why.)

Not only do you get measurements like 3.8796523," but it turns out, I should have been using TWO grid blocks, not ONE for "x," in x times the square root of 2.

Lost you yet?

Suffice it to say, 

my pieces were going to yield one king size guitar!!

To double check the math, I made this tiny ruler on a sticky note... in a perfect moment of inspiration, I realized I could just use my little ruler to measure the size of the pieces-- no calculator required!

I started, very timidly, in the middle, 

and over-sized the pieces just in case...

Well, it turns out the technique worked so well, that any mistakes were caused by too large pieces-- my little ruler was flawless, and I should have completely trusted it!

 So I hope this encourages you to restart some problem quilt--

 if you can use the "little ruler method" or not. And as a metaphor for life, yes, pay attention to the "little things"-- they hold the key!

I now have all the blocks needed to finish this quilt for a "new sheriff in town"... can you tell what state this little guy lives in?

Thanks for reading!

Now get out there and enjoy some sunshine!

xox

Carol