Sue and Sam, and a Amish Wedding

I haven't been doing much sewing, except for the hand piecing at our little group last night!  Our last 3 meetings were canceled due to icy roads.  It was really great to be back at the group, even though it was just 3 of us who showed up!

Prior to the meeting, I went to the town office to sandwich the Sue and Sam quilt together.  I love that I can use the big long tables in the meeting room, shove 3 together, and sandwich any size quilt!  Pinning the middle is tough, and hard on the back, but at least I'm not on the floor!

Here is the Sue and Sam with pins all over!

And yes, it's pieced so it lays long-wise horizontally.  I did it on purpose, as this will be for my MIL to wrap herself up in when in her chair, or can lay it across the back of the couch when not using it, and this way, all the Sues and Sams are standing up!  She pretty much lives in the living room.  When my FIL was alive (he passed several years ago), he needed to be propped up in bed, because he had a laryngectomy, and if he lay flat, he could choke.  So he pretty much got the bedroom, and mom stayed on the couch.  This was life for them for the past 20+ years.  So I think she is set in this way, and I hope that the quilt will make her spot on the couch a little nicer!  As I've said in my blog before, she turns 80 in March, so this will be done by then!  I have over a month....woohoo!

And as I was piecing last night on my flower garden pieces, I was thinking that I was nearly finished hand piecing the top of my Amish Wedding Ring!  This morning, the search began for where it was hiding!  I finally found the tub, and when I put it on the design wall......YES!.....it is nearly finished piecing!

The white tags are my markers for not getting it mixed up when I brought it to our meetings to work on.  When I started piecing it, I never gave too much thought into where the different colors sat.....it's a total mix.  But when the circles and slivers came together, I found a lot of same color right across from each other.... it took many hours of moving stuff around one day, to come up with the placement so it was still random!  And there was no way I was going through that nightmare again, hence the markers!  They aren't coming off until the whole thing is in one piece!  This top was started when I lived in Hull, Massachusetts......13 years ago!  Sheesh!  But I still love it!

My plan for the wedding ring is to attach black borders with a 1 1/4 inch strip of mixed squares between them.  The ring pieces are 1 1/4 inch wide.

As with so many other bloggers right, I too, have been purging the stuff in the house!  I went through several stacks of my quilting/crafting magazines, and found many that are of no use to me now!  Post-its on pages got yanked when I realized "I don't even like that now!".....and sooooo many magazines had no post-it at all!  I went page by page, just in case, and still found no reason to keep it!

I'd given up all of my quilt and craft mag subscriptions when I realized that I had at least 6 subscriptions, and months would go by with nothing of interest in any of them!  What a waste!  Does this happen to you?  The gals at the meeting last night were of the same consensus.

So now, when I'm in the bookstore, I flip through the mags, and if there is something I just MUST make, then I'll buy it.  But no more subscriptions!  I'm finding I get a lot more inspiration from reading the blogs of other like minded quilters (antique/reproduction/traditional) and looking around on Ebay.  As it is, I've NEVER followed a pattern exactly as written....I've always changed something about it to suit my taste/need.  I've never liked the idea that I was making the same exact quilt as a 100 others were.  That kindof bugs me.  That's one reason I really love scrap quilts.  No two are alike, even with the same pattern.

And with that said, I'm heading back to the sewing room, cuz there are leader/ender squares to prepare for my next project!  (I hate starting anything new, without having those squares ready to go.....Bonnie Hunter is a genius!)

regan