Old Red Barn Co.

Dana over at The Old Red Barn Co. is giving away the most beautiful quilt. Click on the link at the bottom of the page or below to enter. Good luck to all of you that enter.
Take care and God bless, Cory

Book Give-away

Carrie at "Chocolate, the Other White Meat" is hosting a give-away over here: http://chocolatetheotherwhitemeat.blogspot.com/2008/06/growing-closer-to-god-and-free-book.html It is for the book "The Pursuit of God" by A.W. Tozer. Click the link and you can enter for a chance to win this book also. Good luck!

The Wonders of a Wagon.

Riding in a Radio Flyer will always make you feel young!

Local Celebrities!

These two were recently featured on Good Day Sacramento, the local morning news program. It was fun seeing them on t.v.

We see these two bulls on our way to church every Sunday and Wednesday. The kids still check on them every time we pass by and occasionally people pull over to look or to take pictures, just like we did. I feel luck to have gotten a picture so close because they are normally along the back fence of the pasture. The owner told the reporter that they don't like people so they stay away most of the time. Right after I took this picture, this bull moved behind the other one so we couldn't see him. I guess they are camera shy. :-)

This picture was taken in October and their horns are even bigger now. I'll have to take an updated picture soon.

Take care and God bless, Cory

Three Great Books

I found a great give-away that I wanted to let you know about. Head on over to http://good-knights-news.blogspot.com/2008/03/give-away.html The Knightly News. It is for three books by Max Lucado. Go check it out and enter your name to get a chance at winning these. Take care and God bless, Cory

Another One Done!

This quilt is a Thirteen Flavor Nine-Patch. It was a class I took in April '02' through the guild I belonged to then. It was taught by Carroll Griffiths. The theory of this quilt is to use 2 colors in 6 shades from light to dark and one background to make the thirteenth fabric. I had a hard time deciding what color scheme I wanted to use until I found the border fabric which is red and purple raspberries. I really enjoyed piecing this quilt. It looks very fussy to work with but you strip piece the nine patches and it goes very quickly.

Once the top was done it was put away as I have been struggling getting over my fear of machine quilting. Well, I have conquered that by quilting on scraps or donation quilts to learn and get better before I started quilting on the tops I want to keep or give as gifts. This quilting was a freemotion design that I played with on paper before I started on the quilt. And I quilted a donation quilt with a meander with flowers and leaves scattered about. Unfortunately, I don't have a picture of that quilting. On this one, I started in the middle and worked my way out and around each row until I reached the outer edge. I really like how it turned out.
Thank you for stopping by. Take care and God bless, Cory

Is it a fish? Is it a cloud?

One the way up into the foothills several weeks ago, we were admiring the sunset on the clouds.
Then we took a curve in the road and found the biggest small mouth bass anyone will ever see.

Done!

This kid has been waiting for this quilt since last Christmas. The top was pieced in time for wrapping. He picked out the wonderful flannel on the back and now it is quilted and bound. He loves it.








The center blue area is a printed panel and the outer borders are pieced. This is the first time I have free-motion quilted anything like this and I am very pleased with how it turned out. The fur is rough feeling like real fur with the quilting I did there.
That is number one off the UFO list and onto the Completed List.

Quilt-a-thon Day 2

Saturday I got to work on personal quilting.

These are steps 4 and 5 of the mystery quilt I am working on.

Step 4 was to cut the strip pieced units into 2" subcuts. There are 5 different combinations and each color combo was cut into 32 pieces. (not all are shown)

Step 5 was to take the squares that had the triangle on the corners and add the red and green rectangles to them. There are 64 of each of these pieces.

We have two more steps of this mystery and then I should have more that enough time to get it completed before christmas.

Thank you Judy for giving us the motivation to get something done. Take care, Cory

Quilt-a-thon (a day early)

I am participating the the Quilt-a-thon over at Judy Laquidara's Patchwork Times http://www.patchworktimes.com/.

I used my extra day yesterday to get a lot of quilting done. It was all for the Hugs Ministry at our church. We give quilts and stuffies to the local sheriff and CPS for kids in crisis situations.

This quilt was orphan blocks from another Hugs quilt that was all demin and red four patches. These 5 orphans went together perfectly with the blue strips, red gingham and solid blue. It is about 40" square. I haven't picked a back for it yet.

This blue, tan and green is the delectable mountains block. One of the ladies who help took the half square triangles I had pieced and cut them and sewed the mountains and then pieced the top together. Yesterday I layered the batting, backing and top and sewed around the edges and turned it (envelope method of finishing).

I still need to quilt it but that won't take long as I do an easy meander on most of these donation quilts.

This next one is a disappearing nine patch. Those are fun and quick and give you a really easy way to get sashing. This one is also finished envelope style and ready for quilting.

This last one is a top that was donated by one of our church members. It was almost queen size and had been pieced almost 30 years ago. There are lots of fun fabrics in this. I cut it into four pieces, added 4.5" borders and got 4 really fun, unique quilts. This is number three. One and two are already gone and number four is ready to be layered. This one is also ready for quilting.

I have been quilting today and will share that in the post later today after I get them ironed.

I hope everyone has been having fun quilting. We should do this again on National Quilting Day on the 15th of March.

Take care and God bless, Cory

Here is a contest for a blog makeover that I found while surfing this morning.

TheTrendyMommyBlogDesigns.blogspot.com

You can enter to by going to their blog and posting a comment.

If I win, I will use it to create a new blog with a great look for the Hugs Ministry. I'm crossing fingers and toes on this one.

Good luck everyone. Cory