Sewing away ...

I let out the cat and couldn’t go back to sleep. There’s nothing like a little insomnia to make me sit still long enough to update my blog. Now that I take time to think about it, I sure have been a busy woman! This fall, after my daughter’s wedding, I put on a quilt show, visited Indianapolis with my daughter and granddaughter, helped my sister with another wedding, celebrated Thanksgiving, and finished my Christmas shopping early. And I’ve been sewing—a lot.

After the quilt show, I picked up my daughter and granddaughter in Tennessee, and we hit the road to visit dear friend Ellen in Indianapolis. Ellen likes red, and this is the quilt I made for her, called “Red Potpourri”:

It is a version of Kaffe Fassett’s Yellow Potpourri quilt from his book Simple Shapes, Spectacular Quilts. Very simple to construct—3-, 6-, and 9-inch squares. Since I can never leave well enough alone, I added random circles and used my machine’s decorative stitches on the edges:

 I love red, too, in combination with almost any other color. Check out these beautiful primary colors of the Dale Chihuly glass sculpture at the Indianapolis Children’s Museum:

What a place! Go there, even if you don’t have a child with you. The Barbie exhibit was a trip down Memory Lane!

My family celebrated our 4^th and final wedding of the year in Marion, Illinois, last month. I made a 9-patch quilt for my niece and her new husband. Here it is, on the bed in the hotel room, finished just in time for a last-minute photograph:

I made some cute little wall hangings for the church bazaar, something called “He Was Born in a Manger,” and a one-patch quilt with appliqued flowers:

I finished almost all my Christmas shopping early—via the Internet—and I’ve even wrapped most of it. I have more time to sew! I was working on Christmas quilts last week when my sewing machine broke. I heard a pop and a clunk, and then there was no more reverse. It’s in the shop, 80 miles away, and I miss it badly!