Quiltaversary

Today is the five year Quiltaversary for the Quiltmaker's Garden quilt. It's exactly five years since I started it. Coincidentally, and entirely appropriately, it's also the day I expect to finish it. Yesterday's sewing had me rounding the third corner of the binding. (Query: Can you "round" a corner?)

After that, I went back to work finishing up the remaining four blocks for the second row of the Shop Hop quilt. Among them, this cow block. For "America's Dairyland," what else could it be?

Now, I hear some of you have gone shopping while visiting the links to these shops. And my response to that is: Shop on! I'm sure they appreciate it. We visited Quilt Essentials while traveling down the dusty trail. You can read my blog post about it right here. I'll warn you that it contains pornographic images of the UW mascot, Bucky Badger. My friend Sue hails from Oshkosh, and she sent me the image while we were on the road. If you're serious about shopping, you can find the shop's website right here.

This next one has a story behind it. We'd been visiting another quilt shop in Garden Valley, Idaho, when our previous truck decided to have nearly catastrophic transmission problems. We got into quite a pickle while parked on a rather steep incline in the quilt shop parking lot. The transmission had been acting up along the way, but not causing as much angst as it did on that particular day. We had no choice but to return to Boise (not in our travel plans) to have it repaired. And so this fabric is a monument to the idiom, "When life gives you lemons, make lemonade." You've probably heard that one, but you might not be familiar with its corollary: "When the going gets tough, the tough go shopping for fabric."

This was a huge shop, and I enjoyed it very much. You can read my blog post about it right here. According to their website, it's the largest quilt shop in Idaho.

Now this next one is the one I traveled the farthest to acquire. I picked up a bundle of Irish fabrics at the one quilt shop I visited while on a tour of Ireland. This was such a fun day. Traveling on a bus, I'd seen all up and down the Dingle Peninsula. On the way to our hotel, we stopped off at this little shop.

You can see some pictures and read about it right here. I'm not sure if the brick and mortar shop is still open, but you can find a web presence right here.

Finally, this one, which I know has closed since our visit in February of 2011. You can read my blog post about it right here. It was a lovely big store, and so it's too bad it's gone now.

Usually when I'm purchasing these regional fabrics, I only purchase a fat quarter for purposes of this quilt. In 2011, I didn't yet have the idea for the Shop Hop quilt. In any case, I loved this pretty fabric, and so I bought several yards of it. One of these days I might actually make something from it using a larger piece than what will be used for this project.

With two rows finished, I decided to go ahead and sew them together. Until I saw it like this, I hadn't yet decided whether to sash all around the outside of the quilt blocks.

Now that I've seen it laid out like this, I've decided it makes sense to add the sashing and cornerstones around the outside. It's going to be 80 inches wide even without a border (and 80 inches long as well). With that in mind, I need to make sure I have enough fabric, and then I'll probably go ahead and add those sashings, and forego any contrasting border.

While I was working on the quilt, Sadie and Mike were watching the Indianapolis 500, recorded earlier. I'll say one thing about Sadie, she knows how to get comfortable. She likes this quilt especially. It's flannel and soft, and it matches her furs purrfectly.

It was getting close to day's end by that time, and so I strained the strawberries out of the infusing vodka and funneled it back into its original bottle. Pretty, huh?

And that made for a very pretty Lemon Drop.

We make ours this way: 1-1/2 oz. vodka (infused or plain), 1-1/2 oz. sweet and sour mix, dash of fresh lemon juice. Yum.

There's just one more project I really want to work on before the end of the month. Today I'll get started on the May block for Tuxedo Tales. It shouldn't take too long, and so I'm hoping I can get it finished today. After that, I'd love to get back to the flamingos. It was good to take a break from them after finishing the class last weekend, but now the flamingos are squawking at me: "Puh-leeze, give us our bodies!"

Oh yes, my friend Wendy tells me that a potential fix for the Blogger notifications woes might be to leave myself a comment and check the box that says "email follow-up comments." With that in mind, I'm going to try leaving myself a little love message at the end of this post and see if I start getting notifications of comments from y'all. It's certainly worth a try.

Edited to say that it works! But if you want to try this on your own blog, know this: the comments will come across as "no-reply." My friend Charlene was the first one to leave a comment, and when I tried to reply, it showed her as "no-reply." So, I clicked on her name and found that, indeed, her email is available. I just copied and pasted the email into the "To" box and was able to reply to her in the usual way. (I hope that makes sense.) Hopefully, Blogger will fix this annoying issue soon, but for now, that's the fix I'll be using.