After Much thought...

I have decided the Purple Carpenter's Wheel will be a dual sized quilt. Yes another one. The center I'm currently embroidering with a basket of flowers and butterflies flying off each corner of the quilt. This plan allows me to keep the ribbon border for the back of the quilt. I'll show it off later, when it's more than one thread color done.

I'm planning a bit of a surprise for the family tonight. Dinner outside! Jessica has never eaten outside before, but what with me having the oven on to cook dinner, it's way to hot in here.

I ordered the invitations for the Mum's the Word thing so hopefull those will arrive quickly for out party is planned for the end of this month!

Not Sure...

I've been thinking about options for the last border for the Purple Carpenter's Wheel Quilt. I came up with this one, but I'm just not certain. These two borders would bump the size to 70" and I ask you, who wants a 70" square quilt? At the current 55" square I can think of lots of things to do with it, but at 70" it feels like it will need something more to bump it to a full sized quilt or perhaps thrown on the couch.

This ribbon border means making 15 blocks per side plus the cornerstones, and that seems like a whole bunch of work. Perhaps it wont seem so bad in the am.

Row Robin for May

Lori's Row is here for the row Robin. When I first saw her row I really wanted to make a snow covered town and glitter paint it. Of course I've never done glitter on fabric, so the cost is a bit more than I'd like, so we'll see over the next couple of days if I can come up with something different to do.

I was outside with DH and Jessica long enough today that I picked up a tiny sunburn on my shoulders. Lucky for me if anyone burns in this house it's me. This is my passion vine plant. Mine is not "self fertile" and therefore it wont set passion fruit. The pretty purple flowers only last a day, but based on the number of buds I should have flowers everyday until late summer.

Pieced

The Carpenter's Wheel is all pieced, thank goodness. I did this one a little different than others I've seen. If you look at the corners of the quilt you'll see it's a corner of the center star instead of the normal circle outward flow. For me it feels like an exploding Carpenter's Wheel. I've added the border, which brings the size to 55" square. I'm going to add at least another ring of purple around the outer edge, but I'm not sure how I want to do the corners on those.

I thought I wanted it to look like the border of purple was jutting down into the white, but now that I look at it, I think it might be cool to turn those corners into trapezoids like the rest of the shapes within the quilt.

For the back this will will have flannel (and thereby stay put on a bed). The flannel DH found for me is a blender that looks like you took every single purple in the quilt and mixed it together. Kinda neat. Of course there will be photos of that later.

How often are you hearing the ice cream man around your neighborhood? Right now I can hear him. I think it's the 3rd or 4th time today, and I was gone for a couple of hours in the afternoon. I was a suburb kid that moved to rural Arkansas so I went from having an ice cream man in the summers, to not having one ever. I missed that in my childhood, and I was certain as an adult I'd be the parent running to meet the ice cream man every time his music played.

Guess what? I'm not that mom. It's still early in the summer and I hear that all the time. Makes me a little twitchy. Sometimes he'll go around even AFTER I've put Jessica to bed! Maybe I've read to many bad "stories" about "ice cream men". While I enjoy a treat as much as the next person I can send DH to the "corner store" where he will spend less and be back faster because he doesn't have to wait in line, not to mention "safer". Isn't that awful? At least I'm still supporting the "little guy" as my "corner store" is owned by locals that live right around here.

The Bewitching Hour

What does that mean to you? My mom always used to call the bewitching hour the time right before bed when all small children act crazy, and you know it's time to put them to bed. For me the Bewitching Hour occurs when I've been working on a quilt for a while and I'm starting to get tired. A part of me (the sleepy part) would really like to stop and leave everything for later, but I know as I look around that if I do all the pieces I worked so hard to line up will be run through and in a huge disarray by morning. I know some quilters are lucky and can shut the door on those carefully aligned pieces. But here with three cats, and a toddler who more often than not wakes up before me...

So I sewed together all my little pieces (and left the rest for later). Good night.