This isn’t on my wall any longer because I have it with me right now as we travel. I’m hoping to get it done over the next couple of weeks to put in the Bear Creek Quilt Guild 2011 Show.

This project was part of a swap – each member of my Day Bee got to pick a block that the other members would make for them. I chose a nine-patch – all with the same background. I made the 99 setting squares on our last trip. It wasn’t nearly as tedious as I expected.

Now, I just have to get the top assembled without my beloved design wall!

A friend of mine shared her system of tracking cards and making sure no one gets the same card twice – thanks Val! I’ve been trying to follow it and hopefully it will work for me.

The color in the photo isn’t terrific – it is actually Night of Navy and Rose Red. I used the Stampin’ Up! set called Bliss. It is retired now but I really like it so some of you reading this will probably see cards using it in the future!

Be sure to check out my travel blog occasionally:  www.ciemian.wordpress.com

My Mom asked for a baby quilt for a special friend and these are the two panels I pulled out of my stash.  The bears on the right is really a pretty big panel and not really suitable if the baby is a boy (they don’t know so I’m going for the generic baby colors.)  I’ve used the Noah’s Ark once before but can’t seem to find a picture of what I came up with to get it the right size.  I’ll have to dive into EQ6 tonight.

Today is my Cottage Garden Card Workshop.  We are all making these eight cards – using the Cottage Garden stamp set from Stampin’ Up!

It was a bit of a challenge to come up with eight cards all using only the Cottage Garden stamp set.  I also limited the cards to only the Soft Subtle color family thinking it would make it easy for my friends if they wanted to reproduce the cards later but it really just made it hard to put on a workshop for 12 since there was so much overlap!

I’ll let y’all know how it goes (both on the card making and quilting fronts) later today!

I finally quilted it last month on my friend Paula’s Statler Stitcher with a tulip pattern. She is great to let me use it!

You can see what is left of the original fabric on the back:

I can’t tell you how thrilled I am to have this project complete at long last.  I have two more UFO’s to post but neither felt as good as getting this quilt DONE!

The back of the package did warn that the markings would come back in freezing temperatures, though.  Still, it all sounded too good to be true (how often do you freeze a quilt anyway?) and I wanted something just like this for my Storm at Sea that I am quilting on my domestic machine.

But, being the good engineer that I am, I figured this needed at least a little experiment.  I started with this piece of unwashed fabric and marked it with the purple pen:

I had confirmed earlier that the markings would completely disappear with a quick touch of the iron but came back in their original form after just a few minutes in the freezer.

I always wash my quilts so this went right into the machine with a small load of laundry on delicate.  This is what came out:

If you look closely, you just see the faintest trace of the markings.  I cut it in half and put the left side into the freezer (still wet) and the other side in the dryer with the laundry.  After the laundry was finished, the piece on the right also went into the freezer.

The markings were all gone at room temperature, but I wanted to see what the freezer would bring up.

I thought I could see the very faintest of marks on the piece that hadn’t been dried near the cut edge.

This doesn’t really concern me since I suspect that the ink will continue to fade with drying and ironing.  I know that my quilts are rarely subjected to freezing temperatures but I figure that if you can see the markings when the fabric is cold, the ink is still there and could reappear (or be causing damage.) If I wasn’t planning on washing and drying a quilt and I wanted to know it would still be pristine in 20+ years, I would probably not use these pens.

But for me, they are worth the risk of at least a try on a quilt.  The pen writes nicely on fabric.  I hear they are available in white as well but they weren’t at my local Target when I checked.  I’m going to get to work on the Storm at Sea today.  Hopefully, the colors I have will show up on the purple fabric.  Otherwise, I won’t get much done since I will be driving all around the DFW area trying to find the white pens . . .

I didn’t have enough leftovers and had to go to my stash for the white stars on blue but luckily I remembered to cut the binding before I started hacking at my scraps!

If all goes as planned I should have it quilted tomorrow!

My friend Paula (who is far out in front leading our Bee UFO Challenge) brought this Predominantly Purple (my name for the quilt, not hers) quilt to Bee on Thursday.  I think she said it was her oldest UFO and had been hanging around for years mostly finished just waiting for another border or two.  It was started with leftover parts from a baby quilt and just kept growing.

The thing I liked about this quilt is that Paula used the dark purple fabric in a bunch of places throughout the quilt so it makes the whole thing very cohesive even while it is still scrappy.

Paula has started cutting 10-1/2″ squares from her left-over fabrics after hearing Bonnie Hunter speak at our Guild.  So, she went with this scrappy back, rather than use up good yardage . . .

I have two of my seven UFO’s completely finished and I’ll post photos next week.  I’m sewing back the binding on my One Block Wonder (which I thought for sure was never going to be finished since it had been on my design wall so long it started to grow roots).  The Green and Yellow is waiting to be quilted and the Soldier Starts just needs one more border!

Of course the two big challenges are bringing up the rear – my Storm at Sea still needs a lot of quilting and the Christmas Row by Row is in the partial re-design stage.  More about these later . . .

The original creator, Chris at Weekend Wisdom, posted a very thorough tutorial that walks you through the whole process.  It only took me about an hour and two trips to the laundry room sink to wash the glue off my hands.  Check it out at:  http://weekendwisdom.blogspot.com/2011/02/scrap-bin-tutorial.html

When I went looking for the fat quarter, I spotted this adorable fortune cookie fabric that says cute things like “failure is the mother of success” and “the best is yet to come”.  I am pretty sure this fabric was a gift from my special friend Pat at Bell Creek Quilts . . . I will smile when I think of Pat each time I take it out of my bag!