More Catching Up

Last of the garden harvest was these onions. It was fun digging for them, like having an Easter egg hunt. ;)

They didn't get as big as 'normal' onions you'd get in the supermarket, did they? But I decided I honestly liked the small sizes. Sometimes onions give me digestive problems, especially if I eat a lot of them, or if I eat more than one one raw ring on a hamburger. Which is a shame, because I love the taste and smell of onions, if I could, I'd be eating them raw on subs and slicing them for my salads, putting handfuls in my soup, etc. But anyway, these little onions were just perfect for me. I could add one small onion to a skillet or casserole and then I didn't have a lot of raw onion left over stinking up the fridge and getting dried out. I gave half of them to my neighbors, and stuck the other half in the fridge.

And I'm only a bit late on revealing another quilt I did for Quiltmaker magazine. I have always wanted to try a gradient, and with Diane Harris' generous stash enhancement of some BEAUTIFUL blue batiks, I planned this in EQ:

There's everything in this quilt, a huge variety of blues. Some of them were used in my mom's blue and beige quilt, s couple of the batiks in the Linkin' Logs quilt, some of them calicoes I'd had in my stash forever. You can read more about the fabrics and design process on Quiltmaker Magazine's blog, Diane Harris did another super writeup about it. Here's a closeup of some of the fabrics I used:

And here's what the actual quilt came out as. I realized it wasn't going to be bed-sized unless I added another border after the flying geese, so I came up with the tumbler gradient idea. I love the tumbler die I got from accuquilt, the small 3 inch size. It was a great way to have a scrappy but cohesive border.

Before I used the tumblers as a border, I had to see how they went together and how long a section of 2 of them was, or ten units in a row, so I could plan how many to cut. They went together so well it was almost goof-proof. Having the dog ears cut off the corners really helps the accuracy! So before I knew it, I had this many on my design wall:

And here it is with a final border of tumblers on it - almost looks like stained glass with all the different colors being backlit by the light from the window, doesn't it?

Bad Blogger, bad blogger!

I haven't posted in months - I've spent more time on facebook than on my blog. I did realize that I ought to be doing both, because I like my blog for use as an online journal. I like being able to go back and read about when I was working on a quilt, when I finished it, etc.

So a little catchup is in order.

Here's the EQ design of the Quiltmaker quilt I did at our retreat in June. I couldn't show it to anyone until the magazine came out, which is why there were no posts about it.

For more information on the design process, visit Quiltmaker Linkin' Logs page And here's a picture of the finished top. It's still unquilted, but it's nicely folded, with backing, in a Kroger bag, like all my other unfinished tops.  And since I did something different with the border so my quilt would have those curls at the corners, I made a web page on my personal website telling people how I did it: 

http://www.forestjane.com/linkin.htm

And let's see, what else haven't I shown here? Oh, the guild I belong to makes blocks for our president. The last president selected a simple tulip block. This is easy and would be great for a spring border. She should have enough for a whole quilt, and with all the tulips in different colors, it should be lovely:

And that takes me up to August, I think.  More later!