And here is today's post

 I am just about caught up on all my chores for yesterday and today, and as promised here is today's real post.

I have such a challenge photographing larger quilts.  I think one of my husbands projects this year will be to come up with a way that I can display them in their entirety.  In my mind I am seeing a long bar, that can be hoisted up....once I attach a quilt to it.  I'll tell you right now he is going to LOVE that challenge.  (there really needs to be a designated sarcasm font!)

Anyway back to the quilt.  

This quilt came to us from the Faith Lutheran Women's Auxiliary.  One of their members, Becky had passed away and her husband donated all of her stash to them.  Becky had many large quilts that were just to large for the group to take on, and they were donated to Iowa Comfort.  This is one of those quilts.

Becky called this quilt her Dahlia quilt.  There is another row of blocks that can not be seen in this photo.  If you would like to see the full quilt you can find it on the August 3, 2013 post.

Each of those flowers were hand appliqued  to the white background fabric.  What a dedicated and talented quilter Becky was!

Before I left for Alaska, I put out a call for someone to bind this quilt for me.  Kathy B generously volunteered to do the binding, and did a wonderful job of it.  She even made me feel better about my choice of binding material.... I really had wanted to match the plain purple but couldn't find the right color.  So we ended up using a darker purple with a print.

Kathy has made it to every community sew day that we have had, and is always generous with her time and talents!

When she dropped off the quilt top there was a little surprise in the bag also.  Here it is.

I know next to nothing about this afghan, other than it is warm and beautiful and it came to Iowa Comfort via Kathy B.  I love the fall colors and as all other afghans before......the center will love receiving it.

Thank you Kathy B for binding the quilt and the afghan.  Thank you also to all of the members of the Faith Lutheran Women's Auxiliary for donating and sharing Becky's stash.  I will make sure that the center knows how this quilt (and all of the others) came to them.

I plan to quilt a small quilt yet this week.  I have a customer quilt to get done also.  I have also been cutting kits for pillowcases this past week.  Well that is my week in a nutshell. 

Hope that your week will be wonderful!

Grandma duty

I had Owen over the weekend, and then again yesterday because he was ill.

I am being a bad grandma and using him as an excuse of why I didn't get my post ready for today.

I will try to get the real post up later today, after all the chores I had on the books for yesterday and groceries.

Should I not get one up today there will be one tomorrow.  I have a quilt to show you and a beautiful afghan.... I just need to get them photographed.

Fabric Donation round 2

I can finally get around to showing you the second part of that donation of fabric from Fons & Porter.

As I told you in my Feb. 18th post, it was a huge donation of designer samples.

I think I will just post the pictures of the fabrics.

 There was novelty fabric, in two different color ways.

There is wild life fabric.

Here again we have the same prints in two different color ways. (Love the butterflies)

Here we have basketball and baseball themed fabric.  Will make a nice little boy quilt.

I love this fabric... I now have it in three different colors.

More butterflies in two different colors.

Soft florals, that I think I can mix mix and match together even though they are two different color ways.

Several additional sets of novelty fabrics.

And Asian Fabric!

I am really excited about the Asian fabric.  There is enough of it that I can cut layer cakes from it and make Missouri Stars "Double Slice Layer cake quilt" here is the link to the tutorial  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxC-0T5lXw4.  

It should make for some beautiful and quick quilts for the center.  But of course I must get the tops hanging in the closet done before I start piecing future quilt tops.  

Thanks again to Fons and Porter for the fabric donation.  Special thanks also to Colleen for thinking of Iowa Comfort.

The plan for this week is to get donation paperwork done and make a couple of deliveries.  Also hope to quilt one bed-size and one toddler quilt.  Now if I can just get it done....

Hope you all have a great week!

I have recovered

I loved visiting my sister and brother in law In Anchorage last week.  The only thing that I didn't love was the getting there and the getting home.

With a 4 hour delay getting out of Des Moines, I missed my connections and had to be rerouted on Wednesday. I was at the airport at 4:30 am and due into Anchorage at 3:30 (7:30 pm Iowa time).  I arrived in Anchorage at 11:00 (2:00 am Iowa time), and my luggage failed to arrive with me.  Luckily it came in on the next flight... so the airport delivered it at 1:00 am (4:00 Iowa time), which meant I was up for 24 hours solid.

Danie and I had 3 days packed with adventures.  I took 152 pictures, but I won't bore you with them all.  Just a couple of my favorites.

Danie and I did go to two quilt shops while I was there.  I learned something very important.  I must remember that quilters have their own language.  Can't tell you how many times I saw a deer, or should I say moose...after all I was in Alaska, in the headlights look on her face.  Eventually she would just ask me for the translation and I started pointing to what I was talking about when I used terms like sashing, cornerstones, focus fabric ect.

The shops were on the SMALL side, and I was disappointed that there wasn't much wildlife fabric.  I did find one shop sample that I really liked, but not in their colors or the size that they had it made up in.  I told them that I wanted to buy the fabric there but I wanted to make it king sized rather than a throw.  I was promptly told that pattern was only available in the kit.  They didn't even offer to let me look at the pattern so I could make sure I was purchasing enough fabric.  Not very good customer service as far as I am concerned.... I just hope I did the math correctly and bought enough fabric.

Have I ever told you guys that I find mountains majestic?  I could have spent every minute of the trip just looking at them.  The top picture and the bottom picture was at a park just about 30 minutes outside of Anchorage.  Although the I didn't get them in the pictures there are glaciers on the right hand side.  Danie says that the glaciers have really receded in the 20 years that she has been there, so sad.

The middle picture is of Sleeping Lady.  The legend is that the lady's love was killed at war and she was so distraught that she laid down on the mountain top and fell into a deep sleep.  According to the legend she will reawaken when the world is at peace and there is no war...

We also went to see the snow sculptures.  There were about 25, these were my two favorite.  Since Anchorage was having temps in the high 30's... many of the sculptures were rapidly deteriorating. I feel fortunate to have been able to view them when I did.

On the third day that I was there I got to watch the ceremonial start of the Iditarod race.  69 teams all mushed a 20 mile course through the Anchorage city limits.  The night before the city brought in snow and built up a course for the mushers.  I was surprised at how small the dogs were.  I expected to see Hollywood's version of dog teams...large Huskies and what not.  You can tell how small those dogs actually are when you look at the way they are transported.  Those cubbies look SMALL!  Obviously there is no way to pass on this course.... so 60 miles north of Anchorage the race is restarted the next day.

The last night before I traveled home I went to a melodrama that my sisters mother in law was in.

That is her with the microphone.

Anchorage has a wonderful woman's choir that she belongs to.  The choir travels all around the world in competitions.  They use the festival, and the play to help fund those travels.  They learned several years ago that ticket sales alone would not support all of their travel.  So they started selling popcorn also.  Last year they sold $50,000 worth of popcorn during their performance.  No worries not much of it actually gets eaten.  It is mainly for pelting the cast and fellow audience members with.  I had popcorn in places I am not even going to tell you about....it even got into my zippered shut purse.

This is the floor at intermission time.......

Well I am going to stop rambling and just say it was a great trip.

I will be back to regular posts next week.

Have a great week everyone!

I love scrap quilts

 Today's show and share was sent to me from Diane L.  Diane is a quilting friend of mine, and we belong to an online quilt forum.  

You can find the original post here  http://iowacomfort.blogspot.com/2013/08/magic-closet-time.html

 hopefully that link will work, if not it is the August 24, 2013 post.

I was finally able to quilt that top this last month. And I love the finished quilt. (can I just say I will be glad when spring gets here so I can go back to photographing these quilts out side again!)

This is the type of quilt I hope to be able to start piecing.  Diane used her stash and scraps and created this beautiful quilt top.  I really like how when I step back from the quilt I can see two distinct patterns, the center squares or the big X's.  If I had found this quilt top somewhere..... I would have purchased it and kept it for me.  That is how much I love this quilt top.

But since I can't do that, I have taken a close up of the block and will work to recreate it in the near future....okay I will be honest it is on my 5 year plan.

That block is just two colors in mirror image of each other.... shouldn't be to hard should it?

Because the quilt top was so scrappy, I decided to make the binding scrappy also.

I had a bunch of 2 1/2 inch strips in 18 inch length.  They were in fall colors and I thought it would work as a scrappy binding.  I was really pleased with how it turned out.

Deb Y. volunteered to bind this quilt for me, and she did a wonderful job.  She even laundered the quilt before bringing it back to me, saving me that step.  All I have left to do is to get a label on it and get it delivered to the center.  They will love this quilt, it is the perfect size for their housing units!

Thank you Diane and Deb for your donation of time and your talents.  I have no doubt that this quilt is going to brighten someone in needs day!

Down to the wire

It is Sunday afternoon, and my mind is going a HUNDRED MILES a minute!  I am trying to think of all of the things I need to get completed prior to boarding the plane bright an early on Wednesday morning.

So right this minute I am making myself write two blog posts to take me through the time I am in Alaska. With that being said there won't be any posts on my adventures in Alaska until March 11th.  I normally only post about our quilts, but I will break tradition and share some of my outings with you on that post.  I DO PLAN to frequent at least a couple of quilt shops while visiting my little sister. My anticipation is that I will see fabric there that I can't find locally in Iowa.  Time will only tell if I am correct or not.

Now back to your regularly scheduled post:

Can I just say that quilters are the very best people in the world!

Remember the post from 2/4/14.  The little cowboy quilt?  Well Nancy H. went through all of her beanie babies in search of a horse for that quilt.  She couldn't find a horse but she found this adorable little cow to go with that quilt.  So those cowboys are out on a trail drive now!

As long as she was going through her collection, she boxed up all of these little guys for future Hope Quilts.  

Aren't they just the cutest things in the world! And as if that wasn't enough Nancy bound two Hope Quilts for me, and supplied us with beanie babies for them also.  Check them out:

Both of these quilts were pieced together by the women of the Adel Christian Church.  These women also create children's quilts for a local hospital. I truly appreciate all of their generosity, thank you one and all!  And don't those two stuffed animals go perfect with each quilt?  I think so.  

And last but not least, when Nancy finished trimming the quilts....she cut down all of the scraps for the doggy beds! Yippee these scraps go from this bag directly into a doggy bed when I get home from Alaska.

Thanks again Nancy and the women of the Adel Christian Church for all of your help and generosity.

Hope everyone has a great week! I know I will in Alaska visiting my sister and husband.

Fabric Donation!

First thing I want to say is that I am still not accepting fabric donations....that being said there is an exception to every rule and this was it.

I received a call from Colleen T. that Fons & Porter was doing some shop cleaning and she wondered if I could us some fabric for Iowa Comfort. I was told that most of it would be designer samples that the shop had not used.  You just can't say no to that, or at least I couldn't.

Colleen dropped off a box and a large shopping bag one night in January.  It took me several days to start sorting through it... but when I did I was amazed at what I found.

There is no way that I will be able to show it all to you in one or two posts...so depending on whether I have completed projects to show you, the posts on this donation may be split up. 

As I started to unpack the donation I realized that I new nothing about how sample fabric is sent to shop owners.  What I received was several pieces of varying lengths of fabric from a line. Sometimes there was a panel with coordinating fabric.  Other times it was the same design in a different color way. 

I have to admit I was dreading the idea of having to go through the box and getting everything wrapped on to my mini bolts for storage!  Imagine how pleasantly surprised I was when I realized that each sample had little hangers attached to the fabric. (BIG SMILE! NO FOLDING) 

Once sorted these pieces were promptly transported downstairs to my walk in closet (also know as Iowa Comfort storage closet) to be hung up next to the quilt tops patiently waiting for their turn on the longarm.

I now have more fabric, batting and quilt tops in that closet than I do clothes, and it is my main closet.

I am going to show you a couple more photo's before I close off this post.

There were a lot of fat quarter bundles in the donation.  It appears to be from four different lines.  I am going to keep them all together and try to come up with a quilt top that  works well with fat quarters.

This box is all Christmas fabric.  I have some other Christmas fabric that I haven't used. I just wasn't sure that a Christmas quilt would be appropriate for the center.  I will talk to them about it next time I go in... but as I sit here and type this post a thought just popped into my noggin.  Maybe I could use this fabric to make Christmas stockings for the residents of center...that might be truly appreciated. (of course if I do that I am going to have to find a super easy pattern because I don't sew, I quilt!).

This post is getting long so I will show you more of the donation in future posts.

Thank you so much Fons & Porter for the generous gift.  We will make some beautiful quilts with this fabric for people in our community!

I see cowboys

I promised a completed project for this post so here is is.

Joyce S. created this quilt from her own stash and donated it to us. 

The top was made out of flannel, and is so warm and cuddly.  You can't really see the print of the blue and cream fabric in the picture above.  I wanted you to see how cute this quilt is going to be for some little guy...so check out the close ups of the fabric.

I see cowboys and busting bronc's.  Won't this be such a fun little quilt for a little boy?  Right now I have a buffalo beanie baby to attach to the quilt.  I do have a new supply of beanie babies coming in so if I find a better one (like a horse) I will switch out the buffalo.

As luck would have it I happened to have some bandanna fabric that we could use as a backing material for this quilt.

  
I think the red bandanna fabric was a good match for the quilt top.

The only thing that might have made it better was if it had been flannel also.

My generous friend Celia took this quilt top home and  quilted it for me on her longarm.... which I so appreciate!  After she finished quilting the top, she passed it back to Joyce.  Joyce also bound the quilt for me.

Meaning that all I need to do is get a label on it and complete the paper work.  I love it when I have donations like that!

Thank you so much Celia and Joyce for all of your kind gifts to Iowa Comfort.  All of your talents and generosity are truly appreciated.

I also want to thank Deb Y and Kathy B who volunteered to bind my last two quilt tops that I had waiting for binding.  You guys are the best.

I can hardly wait to show you all those two completed tops.

Have a great week everyone!