While house/kid sitting the past week, I brought along some hand sewing to occupy some of the down time. Although I made this quilt quite a while ago, maybe even a couple of years, I had not finished the binding. It was a year long, mystery, row by row quilt class. You received the block pattern and instructions on making the block each month, then you went home and made however many blocks that were required to make a row. The number of blocks needed to make a row depended on the size of the block.



As a bonus to taking the row by row class, at the end of the year long class, your quilt was long arm quilted at no extra cost. And this is where the trouble began.....

I won't mention the name of the shop that offered the class and quilting, but they are no longer in business for other reasons. Anyway, I finished the top and turned it in for quilting. The quilting was so sparse that I took it back and they added more quilting by quilting between the rows already quilted. There were areas of 10" to 12" with absolutely no quilting! You know how a quilt feels "quilty" after it's been quilted? It just has a wonderful feel and drape. This quilt felt like simple layers of fabric, nothing else, because of the sparse quilting. OK, so it gets more quilting which helped things immensely. It is far from being even moderately quilted, but I felt like I could put it in a washing machine without it completely bunching up and falling apart. Now.....when your long arm quilter isn't paying attention to the backside, it can turn out like this next picture. There were evenly spaced borders around the green center and now, on one side, the black border is completely gone! You can't see the scale here, but this is a long, skinny, twin sized quilt and those extra borders were about 8" wide. That means that when this quilt was placed on the long arm frame for quilting, it was 8" off center. An inch or so off center happens often, but 8" is negligence.




Well, at least this beast is finished! It's been sitting around in my craft room for ages, just leering at me and reminding me of the poor quilting. I lost my enthusiasm for completing the binding and put it away. It was a lot of work to piece this quilt and to see it finished with very poor quilting was hard to swallow. Oh well, life certainly goes on. At least this is a quilt that will get some use, as I won't feel like I need to save it for special occasions. I think it will make a great picnic quilt!
(Thanks for listening to my ranting!)

It's that time of the year.....another birthday for me! Kathy baked this wonderful homemade carrot cake for my birthday and was kind enough to only make me extinguish three candles. We've been "clapping" them out lately to keep from spraying germs on the cake and I'm thinking that this is a great idea all of the time.




Here's the cover of one of my cards. It's funny but certainly not far from the truth at my age!

Thanks to everyone for making my day special!

If you go all the way back to my April 21, 2009 post, you will find details about Kiva, a loan program that helps entrepreneurs in impoverished areas build their businesses.

The loan that I told you about in that post and made on that day, was paid back today. I have re-loaned the same money to another business woman, a 46 year old woman with a grocery store in Mongolia.

If you have an interest in Kiva, please check out my sidebar for a link. You will find information on each of the entrepreneurs, all waiting for your help!

Hmmmm....this doesn't look like the Christmas exchange project that is supposed to be my top priority.....life happened and I'm still behind on that project.......

Meanwhile, I was piecing the quilt below at my church this past Saturday. Everyone liked the quilt and suggested that I donate it to an auction that will take place on Saturday, October 17th to benefit the Woodburn Christian Children's Home. Yikes! Only one week (less than) and many other obligations to take care of during this time. I got it done.....the proof is in the pictures! Just goes to show you what you can accomplish when you set your mind to something AND there is a deadline...not to mention that any money that it raises will go to a great cause.

Does this quilt look familiar? It's the same pattern as the last charity quilt, just different fabrics. Same pattern, same quilting design. I needed a fool-proof and fast quilt and this one worked out nicely. The color of this quilt is actually a soft mint green....much prettier than this picture shows.

Fold over of the back side. I attached a label on one of the corners with Matthew 19:14 on it. "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these."

The quilt was delivered to the home today and was in time to be included in the auction and in the accompanying auction brochure.

FYI.... Here's a link to one of the auction information pages. Maybe you are looking for a good charitable cause. :)
http://www.wcchonline.org/2009%20Auction/Auction%20Letter%20Businesses%202009.pdf

The October BOM, all finished. Now I've got to get busy on my Christmas exchange in order to get it mailed out this month......that's the next project to finish!