Tag: QOV

Inspiration Tuesday

It’s Tuesday, so there must be some…..

Long before the Corona invasion, there was a guild retreat planned for the first week in May. As with everything else right now, it has been canceled.

However, while there, I was planning to work on something totally mindless…something scrap…..something with nothing but sewing and ironing!!! I was thinking either charity quilts or Quilt’s of Valor.

The last two QoV’s that I made were NOT well planned. I started out with an idea and eventually turned them into tops, although it was NOT an easy task……

And, I even failed to even take a photo of the right one with full borders on it!!!

My plan is to make one and maybe two tops in the next month or so and wanted a definite pattern to work with. Time was spent searching internet images and ideas for QOV’s, coming up with a total of 21 ideas!!!

I picked out my favorites and planned 4 of them in EQ…..

I will probably start with the first two as they are a bit less complicated but I would love to do the second set as well.

Now to get started!!!

Opening My “Too-Hard” Basket

When I worked in an accounting firm, one of my managers would show up about every two weeks with the fateful words “be in my office in 15 minutes and bring your too-hard basket with you”.   This particular basket held all of the little tasks that had been built up in my mind for so long that I simply couldn’t bring myself to attack them.   The sad truth to this scenario was that most of them could be finished in a very short time and I just needed the “push” to get to them.

This post is the opening of my current too-hard basket.   It has been almost FOUR months since I wrote a blog post and so much time has passed that I have had a hard time getting motivated to catch up.  But, just as in accounting, I know that writing the first post will unleash many posts to come……so, here goes……

The first week in March, just after my last post, I had a complete knee replacement.  Since this was done during the middle of income tax season, I was VERY busy trying to recover while keeping up with my work.  I had a wonderful Physical Therapist who worked hard to help me get my mobility back quickly.  She even used some “dry needling” to try to loosen up some of my muscles…… IMG_5181

I quickly moved from using a walker, to a crutch and finally to a cane for a short time…..

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Now, three months later, I am back in the gym five days a week and doing almost everything that I was doing before.  There is still some swelling and stiffness but overall I am happy with where it is now and I cant wait to see where it will be in 3 more months!!!

My reward for making it thru tax season was to attend a 4 day Quilt Guild Retreat.  The schedule was magnificent…..Sew,  Eat,   Sew,   Eat,   Sew,  Eat,   Sew,   Sleep….repeat as needed!!!   I spent the entire time working on a Christmas Pineapple quilt that I started several retreats ago and will probably not touch again until the retreat next April.  IMG_5167

In the last month my husband was out of town for 12 days and I spent a good amount of time in my studio working on several pieces which I will talk about in the next few days.  I will however show a Quilt of Valor that I strip pieced…..IMG_5384I used Bonnie Hunter’s “Basket Weave Strings” pattern as the idea for the quilt and did the paper piecing on blocks cut out of an old phone book.IMG_5338

The piecing was fun especially because I could just put the pedal down and sew as fast as I could go……IMG_5346

  The paper was also super easy to remove and the blocks went together perfectly.   And, as an even better perk, I really was able to clean out a bunch of my scraps.

To come, there are two challenges that I have worked on, another QOV, some great quilting time with my friend Claire and two new projects that I have just started having ideas about……..stay tuned.