A5 Cathie's Campfire - practice

So I've finally chosen colors for my Dear Jane quilt, but now I need to buy enough background fabric for the entire quilt, which is quite a lot. Many people buy an entire bolt to make sure it carries them through the whole project. I'm going to head over to my local quilt shop this weekend and see what they have. If I order a bolt, I imagine it will take several weeks, and I'm dying to get started! In order to satisfy my Dear Jane urges, I made a practice block. As with all of the Dear Jane bloggers, the picture above doesn't really give a good idea of the scale of the block. It is a 4 1/2" block (5" unfinished as above). It is very cute, and I may have to carry it around with me for a few days so I can pull it out and look at it at will... Talk to me 100 blocks from now and I'm sure it will be a different story!!

Roaring Camp Railroad

This past weekend we celebrated my dad's 75th birthday with a family outing to Roaring Camp Railroad in Felton, CA. My parents had taken us there when we were kids, and we thought it would be fun to go back out there again. I knew my nephews would have a great time. We rode a steam engine train through the redwoods on a trip that lasted about an hour. The weather was beautiful and a good time was had by all.

Have I Gone Mad?

Okay, so it's not like I don't have any projects to work on. Why on earth would I decide to do this? Well, I just don't know. Some things just call to you, I suppose. As you can see from the picture above, I have decided to make a Dear Jane quilt. If you have not heard of this quilt, you can read all about it at the main website, hosted by Brenda Papadakis who wrote the book. In a nutshell, a quilter named Jane Stickle made a sampler quilt in the 1800's around the time of the civil war. It contained 225 blocks, most measuring 4 1/2 inches square. The others are triangular pieces in the border and also corner blocks. It is an astounding quilt that many many quilters have reproduced. There are clubs and on-line groups and all kinds of things designed to help quilters on their Dear Jane journey. I've joined one of the groups, and purchased the book, software and special rulers (see picture). I'm as yet undecided on my colors, but I'll decide soon and then I'll be on my way. This will be a quilt many years in the making. Wish me luck!

More Summer Class

Here are a couple more pictures from summer workshop. Here are some of the Buzz Saw blocks. We put them up on the wall as they were completed.


Here's one of my mom sewing on the first day. The folding chairs in the building are a little too short for comfortable sewing. Everyone had pillows and cushions with them on the second and third days.

Creative Blogs

July seems to be the month for sewing in Blogland. There are two blogs that I like that are celebrating sewing and crafting with great links and tutorials this month. The first is Sew Mama Sew!, which I've mentioned before. A great website that you can get lost in, with all of the links to creative people and projects.

The next is one that I just found recently, called WhipUp. They are having their "how-to month" with lots of links to tutorials. These may not necessarily be sewing projects, but definitely crafty and fun to look around.

I'm inspired to create now -- too bad I'm stuck at work all day!

Workshop 2008 Ends

Another summer workshop came to an end and we had a great time, as usual. It's so nice to spend time with these wonderful ladies. We shared lots of laughs and worked on lots of projects. Below are pictures from the first day of class. In back are my friends Lori and Susan who both take the evening class. In the foreground is Barbara, who teaches the afternoon class as well as one of the projects in this workshop. Aren't they just working so hard!!


Below are a few ladies from the afternoon class. On the wall are samples for Barbara's quilt.

Here are more ladies on the other side of the room. We had 15 students in all.

I have only a few more pictures, but Blogger is being fussy, so I'll put those up in another post soon.