Lovely Frankenstein's 31 Days of Halloween: Halloween Books

If you like to DIY your own Halloween decor, then this is one from Lindsey at Better After that would be a good one for you.  You can make some spooky looking old spell books (Think Hogwarts, or Hocus Pocus!) with some really inexpensive supplies.

The top left was made with some of those gummy plastic party favors from the dollar store.  Effectively creepy!  CLICK HERE for the tutorial. 

You're harshing my mellow, Broski.

So after Blogspot decided to "do maitenance" on its server (I think the proper term is "screwing ish up") it dropped my most recent entry. Isabelle, you're a witness! So let's try this again.

I made another quilt, blah blah blah, I didn't care for the original colors, blah blah blah, so I did it my way in lots of reds and oranges and gold with a spash of green.

It's AMAZING how easily I just summed up a 5 paragraph post. "Blah blh blah" has got to be my #1 favorite filler when I'm annoyed about something, which, I am VERY annoyed that the post got lost in who-knows-where of cyberspace.

So anyway, enough grumbling and grousing and whining. I got the pattern out of the book Fast, Flirty and Fun  by Sarah Bisel from That Patchwork Place, which we have available in the shop.

See? It's an adorable pattern, but those colors...I can appreciate them but they're just not my thing. So...of course I changed them.

This is MY color way. I gotta say, I'm very pleased with how it turned out. Most of you know I'm not too shy about color, and I know what I like. Even though purple, believe it or not, is my absolute favorite color...I heavily lean toward the reds, oranges, browns and golds. Actually, the quilt I'm about to finish (which I've had since January...) is also reds, golds, browns and oranges...I need to step outside my box and do a blue quilt.

Did you hear that? That crashing sound was the sound of my motivation coming to a grinding halt. I like blue all right, but I think I'll leave that to someone else.

As always, the hardest part was trying to be "random" with my color placement. I just don't think I have it in me! I'm too persnickety, too Sheldon-esque, too whatever. Ask my roomate...I had this quilt spread out all over the living room floor and I was asking her every 5 minutes if the color placement looked okay. It's like the people walking around who look like they just rolled out of bed...most of them spent an hour in front of the mirror with a blow dryer and a fistful of pomade to get that look. Don't ask me to do random. I can't. lol.

One of these days I'll invest in a nice camera, one that's not attached to my cell phone. Of course...my birthday IS coming up in September...*cough* :b Anyway, the green there isn't quite that bright. It's the dark green piece from Patrick Lose's Mixmasters line. I LOVE that fabric. I really do. Let's just be honest here...I just like Patrick Lose (not as much as Debi does though). But I think the African ladies are gorgeous, and I've been meaning to do a quilt with them in it for a while...cultural stereotypes be damned!

The Sunbonnet Sue Saga, Part II

This has become a MONSTER! Had I known what a huge project this would become...yeah, I still would have taken it on. I'm just being dramatic (what else is new?). I decided to halt production on my Sues in order to organize the project because quite frankly, I was getting overwhelmed by all the hundreds of pieces and fabrics flying around.

So I let my OCD side come out and play! for those of you that know me, you know I have my "Aw, screw it" side and my "Sheldon Cooper" side. I was trying to loosen up and let this quilt be serendipitous but it started to get to me in a big, big way. So I stopped trying to go against my nature and I started organizing. I cut out all my fusible pieces for each Sue, and each Sue got her own plastic sandwich baggie to live in; all the pieces are in the bag and the bag is labelled as to which Sue it is (Wales, France, Tahiti whatever). Whew. Feeling much calmer now!

So after getting that done I decided I would work on a couple new ones...this bring the count to 9 I think. Only 40 more to go! *groan*

One day I will have for real, normal lights in my house and I will have a for real camera...but until then please excuse the crappy lighting. It skews all of the colors! The background is actually really a light, cool toned gray.

Atlantis. Ariel with a seahorse! :D

Mexico. Something tells me in rural Mexico they don't carry cactuses like that.

Saudi Arabia. I was happy to get this one spot on with the clothing! That red plaid was a difficult find. Hooray for Mom's stash :D

Even still, I am finding that rooting through my 2 huge bins of scraps is giving me more headaches than making this whole thing easier, so I think I'm going to get even MORE meticulous and sort out my scraps into categories so I can actually find a skin tone or floral or whatever when I need it. You wouldn't believe how long I spend rooting around those bins for the mermaid's Ariel's tail only to find it had fallen out of the bin without me noticing. Dang it! Then I'm thinking I'll just fuse and cut everything out for each Sue and then assemble them all at once, assembly line style. That organization style worked well when I did the Bigfork Bay Wolf and Lion patterns, so I think following the same principle here will do just fine. Next time (if there is a next time...yeesh) I think I will forego the serendipity and just stick to over-organizing. Hey, whatever works, right?

The Sunbonnet Sue Saga, Part 1

I got a few blocks done tonight...they're taking me about an hour or so a pop. I know that sounds unreasonable just to fuse the 'Sue to the background (no stitching), but when you consider all the steps I'm taking, I guess it makes more sense - picking fabric, assembling on a pressing sheet, losing pieces, replaing pieces, then finding the lost pieces...

Little miss Holland took a while to assemble.THANK GOD for applique pressing sheets, otherwise this would have taken even longer and I would have had to re-trace a lot more. lol.


Of course, my dog Darwin had something to say about all the attention I was paying to the quilt and not to him...

That little nerd hound climbed up on my shoulder to give my color choices the puppy side-eye. And yes, for those of you wondering why my dog has such a non-doglike name, he is named after Charles Darwin...My dog is a pint sized evolutionary theorist...and his owner is a bigger nerd than previously thought.

And he REALLY didn't want me to work on these blocks tonight!

"Lauren," he seemed to say, with paw on my leg, "Dis iz uh interventions. More noms, less qwilts."
Yes, despite his position as the Chihuahua incarnation of the Charles Darwin himself, I still maintain that a dog his size automatically warrants LOLcat grammar(z). Hehe. But yes. He was sick of my nonsense.

So yeah, anyway. An hour a pop. This is giong to take forever...the final product better be cute as a dang button for all this work going into it, lol!

Sherlock 'Sue! This, obviously, is the England block. I was beyond psyched to have an excuse to use that quilter's tweed for the jacket.

This is my favorite thus far...Holland! She turned out too freakin' cute, I gotta admit. Those shoes... <3 The example in the book was kind of disappointing, honestly. I thought it was bland. This one certainly isn't! The colors are brighter than my camera phone and crappy lighting shows, lol.

Vietnam. I have to say, I'm not digging the way this one turned out. I'll leave it for now, but I may re-do it. I'm not wild about how the fan is looking. The dress basically looks like th example in the book though. I liked it enough that I kept that part...but that fan...eh.
Anyway...My goal is to do 3 per night. We'll see how that goes! The road to a finished Sunbonnet Sue quilt is paved with good intentions :-D

Yeah, Yeah, I know. :-P

Hi, My name is Lauren, and I am a wholly inconsistent blogger. I'll try and be better, I promise!

So that mermaid picture I promised? Let's just edit that to say "coming soon." I got it all fused, but finding a border that works with the whole composition (not just in my cluttered ol' brain) has proved to be more difficult a tast than I thought it would be. That being said, it's at the shop in the office waiting for a border to find it. Someday soon, yes, I'll have a picture up.

So on to other things...
I HATE SUNBONNET SUE. I'm not intending to show disrepect to traditional quilting, but this is definitely not my style. This block specifically I find particularly boring and just...*gag* It's too sweetsy for me...I mean, I feel like I need to take a shot of insulin to compensate for the syrupy sweetness it forces through my eyeballs.

I take great joy in seeing Sunbonnet Sues gone wrong. I've posted these on our Newsletter before (which if you aren't signed up for already, you might consider it...it's neat!) but I'll post them again here:
Sunbonnet Sue has a dark side...
These Sunbonnet Sues are just plain bad.

But when Mom was with a rep the other day, she bought a Sunbonnet Sue book that...it pains me to say this...I liked. It is so friggin' cute:

Yeah, I'm a sucker for cultural stereotypes. My inner anthropologist (hey, I gotta make use of thise degree somehow...) simultaneously rejoices and cringes: my thesis was on quilting, and I'm fascinated by how different cultures represent other cultures, but the cultural stereotypes also kind of bug me for a bevy of reasons that I'm not going to get into right now...keep it quilting, keep it kind! But here's a sample, that incidentally I took a picture of for my friend Isabelle (Oooh yes, this is definitely a shoutout to my girl Isa!), who hails from Switzerland/Germany.

This is Swiss Sue. Each little Sue holds what the author has decided is a symbol of the country. For Switzerland, she chose the Edelweiss. Personally, I would have picked chocolate (Mmm...Swiss chocolate...) or cheese (Mmm...Swiss cheese...) This diet is going to be the death of me!

Anyway...I decided I would do this. Hell, I've never done a traditional style quilt so hey, why not. Little did I know! This is a HUGE FREAKING QUILT. It's got 49 Sunbonnet Sue blocks, then sashing and borders (duh) but at it's longest is ~90". That's a big'un! Oh and by the way, it took 6.5 yards of fusible even using the tricks to best use fusible area...and how long did it take me to trace all of those? An hour? 2 hours? Yeah...try 4 evenings at ~4-5 hours a pop. Clearly I've got too much time on my hands. Shouldn't I have a social life or something? lol.

So after 4 days of tracing (UGH) I finally got started on gettibg all of these little beasties fused. I'm *trying* to use my scraps. Honestly, this is a good way to buzzsaw through your stash...you might consider something like this if you have lots of little odd-sized scraps. So, here's block 1...little Chinese Sue!

The lighting sucks (I actually have those dang tube fluourescent lights in my house..yeah, like from the 70's)  so the color is a little skewed. The pants are black and the shirt is dark blue. I'm trying to keep the colors as similar to the pattern as I can, and I'll add my own little twists to the block when I embellish, which the quilt doens't call for. You know me...I can't just follow instructions like a good little quilter. Nope.

So...1 down, 48 to go. I must be crazy. lol.