Please vote for my local quilt shop.....

There is presently a contest going on for the 2011 Golden Quilter Awards. My local quilt shop is nominated in the category of "Best Quilt Shop - Physical Location". The shop is Serendipity Quilt Shop in Dagsboro, DE. CLICK HERE FOR THE LINK where you can read the nominees in all categories and also vote (by leaving a comment with your choices). The voting must be done by March 31. Thanks to all who can do that, because my local shop is TERRIFIC...only been open a little over two years and has already outgrown their space and building a new, larger place to occupy by this summer!!! (That is quite an accomplishment in today's economy and speaks to how great an owner and staff run that shop!!!) Oh, yes....you are automatically entered to win a prize if you vote in this contest, so why not go over and give it a try?

EXCITING opportunity!!!

AccuQuilt is having their second annual Barn Quilt contest. Last year's was very exciting and you might want to read about this year's event. You can easily do that by clicking on the logo/button that is on my right sidebar.....it will take you where you can read all the info about it. Check it out to see if it might be of interest to you. The prizes are SUPER and it's certainly worth considering!!! The chance to be creative and maybe win a prize in the process...how could it be any better than that??

GOing for a quick gift......

I spent the early part of the weekend making a candle mat in red/white/blue fabrics. I cut the pieces with my GO! and then decided to hand-quilt it. I cut my binding on the bias using a tutorial Gene Black did on his blog (showing what we had been taught by our very knowledgable blogging and quilting friend, Pat Wys, when we spent a fun day with her in Georgia last month. This is a picture of the candle mat.

More "GROW as you GO" blocks.....

Referring to my previous post, I have done 3 blocks since then with scraps cut all with my GO! cutter. Now you can see I have a total of 7 blocks toward this fun quilt. If you click on the picture to enlarge it and study the blocks, you can see no two are exactly the same pattern. I used several dies to cut the pieces......some of my square dies (2" finished, 4" finished and 6" finished), some of my half-square triangle dies, my rectangle die, and my quarter-square triangle die. then I combined them in various ways....did whatever felt FUN to do at the moment to make them be 12" (finished size) blocks. I have to ponder what color sashing I'll use....maybe an off-white but not totally sure (and would welcome some feedback on that from you color-savvy folks). If you have a GO! cutter, this project is a tremendous amount of fun and this is one of the most satisfying things I've done with my GO!......to rescue all the left-over and unused (unwanted!!!) fabric and give it some new life. It's very "freeing" as there is no pattern and you just do whatever you feel like doing, but the end result will be something very nice! (Also...since you are making 12" blocks, this quilt can be done rather quickly.) I'll update you again when there is some noticeable progress.

A great STASH BUSTER.....

I've still been feeling punky with my cough and haven't sewn much. I did manage to go through some fabrics and found (so far) a couple of boxes of fabrics that seem to be in the category of: WHY did I buy these?? I can't recall a specific project for them, so it's time that they become useful to me!
So...I decided to do something that is easy....something that requires very little concentration. I pulled out my GO! cutter and started to work on those boxes of fabrics to reduce them to usable pieces. It is fun to do this and know that I have fabric pieces waiting to be made into scrappy blocks.I think I'll soon make more of the 12" blocks I started to make last year using lots of my scrappy pieces that were cut with my GO! Here is one of the blocks I made using different sizes of GO! cut squares and half-square and quarter-square triangles. So far, I have about 8 of these made. It's fun to put them together and someday they will become a fun, scrappy quilt! Some of you may recall I named this project "Grow as you GO!" because this quilt will grow as I cut up more scraps with my GO!

Another message (a fun one, this time).....

I'm still enough under the weather that I've not taken more than a couple of stitches on anything lately so I have no quilting to report, but I do have another message from someone else. Friends of ours put out a plea on behalf of their granddaughter. Her class at school has been trying to get a postcard from each of the 50 states and has a few missing yet. I figured maybe readers of my blog live in some of these places. I'll list the states and if you live in one of them and would be willing to send this little girl a postcard, please comment here and I'll then reply directly to you with her mailing information. Thanks, in advance, to any of you who can help!

The still-needed postcards are from: Oregon, Mississippi, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oklahoma, and Vermont.

A warning message from a blogging friend...

I've been asked to post the following by my friend, Barbara, who is a blogger from NJ. Some of you might know her. After you read this, you will see that her old blog is GONE and you will find out why....and it might be information that will help some of you, so.....read on to see what she has asked her blogging friends to post....

Wait until you hear this!

Because of a new droid cell phone that requires a gmail account, one was set up for me at Verizon when I got my phone. So, silly me, thinking I didn't need the old gmail account anymore, I deleted it. What a shock to find that account was linked to my blog, so of course now my blog is totally gone.

I've dug on the web a little bit, and this is a common occurence, but there's not an easy answer. Even if I was successful in reactivating my old google account and getting my blog back, the photos seem to be gone forever. So I googled my blog name and found some cached pages which may help remind me of what's important to re-post and a list of the blogs I follow. But my Followers and everyone will now get a notice that my blog is gone, and I have no way of knowing who all of them are.

Would you please post a note on
your blog about this with a warning to everyone NEVER to delete that gmail account even if they don't use it or think they need it. If they want to keep their blog, they need it. I just didn't remember that it was necessary to have a couple years ago when I set up my blog.

I have a new blog already, but there's nothing in it. However, I'm going to post this and hope everyone will be able to find me again, perhaps with the
help
of some of my bloggy friends. It's a different name: http://pinelandstreasures.blogspot.com/