Got the Quilting Bug Again

Much has happened since my last post.  I spent 3 weeks in Great Britain on a tour.  It was simply amazing.....so much history and beauty there.  Here's a few pics:

About a month after my British Isles trip, I went to a quilt retreat for a week.  I got several small wall hanging quilts finished, which only needed the binding added, got the borders added and the quilt sandwich made for my fan quilt, and worked on a new Sunbonnet Sue quilt that I started.  It was great fun and I got a lot accomplished.

After the quilt retreat, I've been busy working on the Sunbonnet Sue blocks and designing some new appliqué patterns to play around with some different ideas.  Also I have been spending a little too much time on my quilt software  (Electric Quilt) playing around with different colors and blocks.  Here's some of my favorites.

The possibilities are endless as far as combining blocks and colors.  Eventually I'd like to try some of these in fabric, but I'll probably do mini quilts for wall hangings as opposed to full size quilts.  They're so much easier to deal with.  For now it's just fun to play with digital quilts.  I have this book called "501 Rotary Cut Quilt Blocks" by Judy Hopkins, of which I've picked out many of my favorite blocks and drawn them in the quilt program.  That way, if I do want to make them I can get the size and cutting info from the book, as I've not figured out all of that kind of stuff in the program.

So....the other thing going on in my life is that my son is now permanently moved out and I'm taking over his room.  I actually boxed up all his remaining stuff and gave away a couple of furniture pieces that we didn't want and we took his stuff over to him last week.  I did ask him if he thought he might want to move back home at some point, but he assured me that he wouldn't.   So today I've been washing down the walls in preparation for painting the room......guess what color......yes, pink!  My husband says it's the color of Pepto Bismol and I guess it is, but I've always thought that was such a pretty color.  Can't wait to get it painted.  I'm not quite sure how I'm going to arrange it yet.  I was going to make it a doll room, but now I'm thinking of putting my sewing stuff in there.  Whatever I decide, I'll post some pics when I'm all done.  I plan on getting some white cabinets of some sort from Ikea....not sure what yet, but I know they'll be white.  Unfortunately I have a lime green cutting table that will need to go in there, but when I was a teen, I decorated my room in pink, lime green and orange, so I guess it will be ok, although there will be no orange.  Ya, back then I painted the walls lime green.  It was actually quite pretty, I think, and bright!  So anyway....I better get back to my wall washing.   Bye for now.

I've taken up zentangle and coloring again.  Most of the coloring I did before was done with watercolor pencils, but I got some new books that I really like, but the paper doesn't work very well with watercolor, so I've been using my Prismacolor pencils.  Although watercolor pencils are easier to use, I'm finding the regular colored pencils fun too.  The secret to getting them nice and smooth is using either a blending pencil or a lighter color to go back and smooth the colors out.  If there's any tooth to the paper, the pencils will leave white showing through, so you have to "blend" them to smooth out the color.  Being the perfectionist that I am, I must have nice and smooth color!

Here are my first two from the book "Balance" by Angie Grace.

I wanted a small coloring book to take along with me on my trip to the British Isles, so made myself one with my own designs that I had made some time ago.  I made a few new ones but mostly reduced my larger designs down by removing some of the outer edges.  I didn't want to just reduce the whole thing because I was afraid the parts would be too tiny.  Here are two that I've colored so far.

And now for my latest zentangle.  I have a small Strathmore Visual Journal, which I'm using for zentangle.  It's nice and small  (about 3.5 x 5 ") so it's easy to slip into my purse and take along when I have spare moments to doodle.  Also, because the pages are small, it's not so overwhelming to fill up a page.  Here are my latest designs.

The following design was done from a tutorial I found on Zenspirations.  She has some great tutorials.  The page after that was done from a post I found on Pinterest.  The dangles are really fun.

 The last one, I saw a picture on Pinterest that someone had done and loved it, so used it for inspiration for this one.  That's one thing I love about Pinterest....so many wonderful ideas.  I want to color these but am saving that for some other time.

So this is what I'm up to these days.  I'm leaving for a trip to the British Isles on Aug 30th and will be there on a bus tour for 22 days.  I'm so excited about that and hope to come home with lots and lots of photos and am thinking of trying some watercoloring, using the photos for reference material.  I've been wanting to play around with watercolor for some time and have everything I need to do it.  It's just a matter of sitting down and playing.  We'll see how that works out.

Bye for now!

I have too many blogs!  One for quilting, one for dolls, one for gardening and this one.  I think I just need one blog for everything I do.  I guess this one will be it.  I'm tired of having so many blogs, so I'm just going to abandon the others and have this one.  The real problem is that I have too many hobbies that I like to do.   I really need to settle on maybe two or three and forget the rest.   But I don't think I can do that because I like to do too many things.

Recently I decided to add knitting to my other hobbies because I wanted to be able to knit little sweaters and things for my dolls.  So then I had to start collecting yarn, which I do by buying old sweaters, made with quality yarns, at the Goodwill outlet store and then take them apart and pull all the yarn out and roll it up into a ball to be re-knit into doll sweaters.  It was actually fun doing that, though.  But, when I finally found a pattern for a doll sweater of the right size, I ended up buying ready made yarn for it so I could get the correct size.  I decided I really need to learn how to knit first, before I try using that tiny yarn that was from the sweaters.

Lately I've been working on a quilt.  I get in the mood to start a new quilt and just do it.  I have so much quilt fabric now, I don't have to go out and buy any.  I just choose it from my stash.   I went kind of crazy buying fabric after starting to quilt.  From what I understand, that's what happens to quilt-a-holics.  They become addicted to fabric.  So I guess I'm just normal in that way.

I have been sewing some doll clothes.  Here's some pics.

I seem to go back and forth between sewing for dolls and and quilting.