September/October Miscellaneous

 No one thing has been interesting enough to post about, but  it has been a busy couple of months.

I have been dabbling in artisan bread.  Bought a Lodge cast iron dutch oven and using the recipe from Mark Bittman, I have been keeping us in plenty of bread.

There's been some sporadic knitting going on.  Why, oh why, do I choose to work on such dark colors when most of my knitting is done in front of the TV at "night"?  But this one is coming along nicely.

Still quilting.  This one is a quilt from the Tri-County Quilt Guild that I am quilting for charity.  

I used the Chantilly pantograph on this one.  

My mini group and myself were the speakers at our last guild meeting.  We talked about how the three of us met at another guild some 20 years ago  and became fast  friends and then our show-n-tell consisted of all the quilts that we challenged ourselves to along with some of our own personal quilts.  As nervous as we were and so unsure that anyone cared what we had to say, we did pretty good and got lots of compliments on the whole thing.  Then to top it off, we have been asked to repeat the whole thing at another guild.  Yikes!

I did find the time to get a baby quilt made for my godson's new baby, Luke. 

I did this one with 1" increment stitching and bound it in one of the blues that were on the front of the quilt.  

Charity for the guild is still keeping me busy.  Even with being speaker this month, I still tried to do my duties of charity chair.  I was pooped by the end of that meeting,  Next month we are preparing for charity sew day.  

We hope to be making a few of these quilts.

We have asked the members of the guild to make 4-patches with all their scraps and with the scraps that I have in the charity room.  We are collecting quite a few!  In fact, I am getting buried in 4-patches at the moment.  Hope to use up a lot of them at charity sew-in day.  

These will be donated to kids who have aged out of the foster care system.  

The guild's Fall retreat  was this week and I had to prepare some things for  me to work on.  I am looking forward to getting away and just sewing for myself.  So pretty much starting from scratch, I made these basket blocks that will require a lot of flower and leaf applique.

Picked up a project that I started at  a Karen Stone retreat back in 2005 and hope to continue on this one.

Also, started a couple of Christmas gifts at retreat that I will share later.  

So you can see, not one thing is worth a whole post, but there is progress being made if not a little at a time.  

Happy making!