quilting, quilting, more quilting while cheering on Olympians!

Pat Sloan issued a challenge to her peeps - to finish a quilt during the Olympics - read more about it on her "Death by Quilting" website, blog, etcs: 
http://www.deathbyquilting.com/
http://quiltmashup.com/
http://patsloan.typepad.com/pat_sloans_corner/

Pat is an amazing talented, full of energy and ideas kind of person - I love her!  she's such a quilt enabler!

While I'd like to be doing nothing BUT quilting, there are other obligations a quilter must attend to, and those things have taken a lot of my time this week.  You know - eat, sleep, shovel snow, and sew on and sew on!
 Here is what I've been working on:

can you guess where this was taken?  Not much of a challenge, huh?  This quilt is getting big - and I've run out of places to pose big quilts for their progress cameos, so bear with me!  Until the weather warms up enough to put them outside, at least!

These blocks are from Pat Sloan's Turkey Tracks Block Swap last October - only one of these is mine, the rest came from swap participants, who all did wonderful blocks, as you can see!  I received six blocks, but only know three of the names.

I put the sashes on yesterday and then sewed the rows together and added the first red borders today.  Another border will be added, and then it will be a twin/large throw size.  This is an excellent way to make seven 12" blocks into a twin size quilt.  The only tough part is calculating the size of those setting triangles.  I'll put this one on the HQ16 to quilt it - as soon as the weather (i.e. basement!) warms up a bit.

Tomorrow is the last day of February - Are you ready for March?  It comes in like a LION, remember?

snow removal done well!

I was ironing fusible fleece to some muslin in my studio this morning when I heard what I thought was a bulldozer coming down the street outside - since I don't have a window that looks directly out onto the street, I came rushing downstairs to see what was going on - hoping that nobody had a collapsed roof, etc. and this is what I saw:

 

and  the best part was, they were removing the additional 6" of snow we had last night as well as the accumulation of snow piles between cars all the way to the sidewalks!

Every time the big dump truck was full, it went away and came back empty a few minutes later, and again the little snow blower vehicle would follow the truck along the street and "blow" the snow up onto the dump truck!  This is wonderful!  We can park again - at least for today!

In case the UPS guy is looking for our house, it's behind this mountain of snow:

it's not a big house to begin with, but it looks even smaller now!  and do you see the icicles hanging from the porch - and from my neighbor's roof?  Icicleville - that's where we live!
I'm going back to my studio and sew until it all melts... or bedtime, which ever comes first.

 

I'm going to add a few embellishments to this today...

and do a little machine applique too.

I'm going to hang up the snow shovel for today

Cheerie bye for now.

Lestoil or More Toil, that is the question....

The unmistakable odor of LESTOIL hit my nose this morning... it was coming from under the kitchen sink!  I thought perhaps I had been sloppy when I used the Lestoil to clean the kitchen floor last time, so I poked around trying to find the source, and sure enough it did leak, but not the way I suspected!  It turns out the bottom of the bottle had cracked, and leaked a whole puddle of LESTOIL under the bottle and it's surrounding bottles - into a mess that I cannot describe in words, so here's the picture:

I thought I could just wipe it up and put everything back under the sink.... but that didn't work out so well, since the LESTOIL had dissolved the paint - it just doesn't seem to have a bottom anymore - the wood is so saturated that it continues to leach out of the wood under where the paint was....

 

very penetrating stuff!

 So, instead of playing in the snow (with a shovel, of course) this morning I am coping with this mess:

So, if any of my deadlines are missed this week, you know why.  I looks as though we may have to replace the kitchen cabinet (and hopefully NOT the floor UNDER the cabinet!) to completely purge the odor, since I don't think I'll ever be able to completely suck all that LESTOIL out of the base of this cabinet.

If you have a suggestion for how to get LESTOIL out of the wood, please - by all means!

Because I'd love to get back to the studio and do more sewing, or painting, or even tidying up my fabric stash!

a snowy, sewy weekend

Good Morning Snowbunnies -

We've made it through the 4th worst snow storm of all recorded time (for Pgh, PA, at least) and so far, so good!
Actually, I spent the day in the sewing studio with a bunch of little square friends.....

getting ready for a block swap!

We had about 16 to 18" here in Greensburg, just east of Pgh, and dh spent a LOT of the weekend digging the cars out so we could fulfill work and social needs with the help of an angel with a snow blower - and I made it to teach the first of a four part quilting class to very appreciate newbie quilters. 
... so, how was your weekend?  have you made a new friend lately?

lots and lots of squares

Yesterday, I spent the day cutting up 5 yards of fabric into squares.  Today I sewed half of the little squares to the corners of the big squares.  This evening I'm snipping threads and clipping corners.  Mindlessly seaming endless corners.  Looking forward to what they will look like when they get together with all the other squares from the FB Quilters Block Swap.

 

And, I'm almost done putting the binding on this little beauty:

 

 

 Tomorrow I'll be teaching, so watch for another post over the weekend.  Let me hear from you - don't be shy!