Welcome to the Meet and Greet Blog Hop!

Well, hey there! Thanks for stopping by! I've got the place all spruced up for you, and it's lovely to see you! I'm one of the stitchers participating in the Meet and Greet Blog Hop...international, baby! A big thank you goes to our Lady of Blog Hops, Madam Samm for organizing and hosting this event. I hope you'll visit the other participants as well. You can see the list right here. As a person partial to hand embroidery, I've pulled out some of my favorite projects to show you today, so let's get started.

When I was much, much younger, I did a lot of needle point and crewel embroidery. When my kids were born, I took a lengthy, shall we say, leave of absence from all kinds of stitching. I didn't actually learn to quilt until I retired in 2008. Very shortly thereafter, I became acquainted with the world of embroidered quilts. The first one I saw hanging in a quilt shop was "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" redwork by Crabapple Hill. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it, but all that embroidery was very intimidating. I saw it again in the same quilt shop and admired it out loud to one of the owners.  She told me she'd seen it done in blue and that it was beautiful.  That made it even more desirable to me, but I was still intimidated by the hand work. Then I saw it again in yet a different quilt shop, and I couldn't resist it any longer. I ended up purchasing the pattern. Third time's a charm right?

Once I got started on it, I quickly became hooked on a daily dose of hand-stitching, and so this quilt is just the first of many, many hand-embroidered projects.

My talented long arm quilter was Tammi Ortega who used a pearlescent thread to quilt large snowflakes onto the quilt. Also, I embellished some of the snowflakes with hot fix crystals.

My favorite block is this one with the snow lady hanging candy canes on her clothesline to dry.

Coincidentally, while I was working on the Winter Wonderland quilt, I was in the process of working on a block of the month quilt designed by Lynette Anderson, called, "A Kitten's Tale". When I purchased the kit, I thought it was going to be fusible applique. Little did I know there would be so much hand embroidery involved, and so I like to say that I cut my embroidery teeth on this one. It was quite a challenge for a novice embroiderer to be doing satin stitch through fusible applique. Nevertheless, I got it done, and this is one of my favorite quilts. It hangs in my family room now.

As a new quilter, this was also my first time making yo-yo's. These are about the size of a dime.

There's that dastardly satin stitch through applique. Sheesh. A thimble comes in handy.

Tammi Ortega did the quilting on this one too. You can see why I was saddened when Tammi sold her business and returned to the traditional work force. 

This is sweet quilt was created with Lynette Anderson's very own cat and dog in mind. And here they are:

As a cat lover, I'm very familiar with this next scene. What cat owner hasn't gone to sit down in their favorite chair and found it already occupied?

This next quilt is another one of my favorite quilts ever, called "A Day in the Life of Mr. Bear". It was designed by Tricia Cribbs. It's the story of a little girl's day with her best friend.

The beautiful quilting for this quilt was done my Marcia Wachuta of Marcia's Crafty Sewing and Quilting. I gave Marcia just a few guidelines, and she went to town with some of the best free-hand quilting I've ever seen.

This is the largest center block:

All of the blocks for this quilt are sweet, but I particularly like these next two, showing the two main characters reading together:

and Mr. Bear having his wounds tended. When I finished embroidering this block, I wrote a little story to go along with it. You can read that story right here.

This next quilt is my "most decorated" quilt. I was thrilled when it took first place and won the large quilts division in the 2014 Oregon State Fair. This is the Vintage Miniature Sewing Machines quilt pattern designed by Ella & Skyse Designs.

It was interesting in that I learned a whole lot about the history of sewing machines while making it. For instance, this one:

As my husband and I like to say, "How do it work?" I liked the block setting the designer came up with as well, which incorporated strips of silk into the pieced block border.

I used a fancy stitch on my sewing machine to stitch a row of sewing machines above and below each embroidery motif, and then I quilted it with a simple spool of thread unspooling with a threaded needle at the end.

Finally, I wanted to share this small stitchery design that was featured in Quiltmaker magazine a few years back. The original stitchery had a banner above that said "Bless this Home". I made this one as a housewarming gift for my son and daughter-in-law when they bought their first home in October of 2013. I changed the wording in the banner to read "Home Sweet Home" and I added their house number below the upper window.

I was thrilled when Quiltmaker published my project in a subsequent issue of Quiltmaker magazine.

So there you go. I hope you've enjoyed my little trunk show today. Before you go, don't forget to leave a comment and enter my giveaway.

With this being a post about embroidery, I thought this little fat quarter bundle of Lazy Dasy Baskets to celebrate Redwork from Darlene Zimmerman for Robert Kaufmann would be just the thing. 

There are six fat-quarters and one 23-inch panel in this pretty little bundle. All you have to do to win is leave a comment...any comment will do. Followers of this blog can get a second chance to win by leaving a second comment letting me know how you follow. If you'd like to become a follower, just check up there in my left side bar for lots of ways to do so. Finally, be sure to leave an email address. No way to contact you equals no chance to win. I will ship internationally, and so everyone is welcome to enter. Don't dally, though. I'll choose a winner sometime on Monday afternoon.

To return to the blog hop, click right here.