Blooming

Beautiful blooms

Levitating dog

Sneaky snake

Happy New Year!

 Happy New Year!

1. I'm not going to apologize any more for lack of posting. I think y'all understand I work full-time and posting is harder than it used to be. I'm going to post what I can when I can.

2. This will be a long Christmas and New Year's post. :)

3. I'm still quilting! I know, silly thing to say. I even got one more quilt finish for 2020. Eventually I'll make a post about it. :)

So Christmas was a little different this year.

I think that's something everyone can say.

For the most part we stayed home.

We visited Dwayne's parents down the road on Christmas and went to his brother's New Year's Eve.

We video chatted with my mom and some dear friends. That was different but fun!

We got snow for Christmas!

It did take a couple of days for all of it to melt.

This is our first Christmas with the new camera.

I captured quite a few good smiles!

:)

Why use a pocket knife when you can use a bigger knife.

Someone's excited!

Happy writer.

Happy for hearing protection.

Really cool powerful spot light.

It's so powerful it reflects the stop sign a mile away!

New knife.

I missed the smile on this one.

How many 15 year olds are excited to get the complete collection of the Federalist Papers?

This history buff certainly was!

We got this silly melting snowman.

It's basically softer silly putty with snowman pieces.

It's been fun watching it melt over and over.

Three generations.

Really bad photo of the video chat with Grandma Knapp.

Chicken feet socks!

(Connor pulled up his pant legs so you can see.)

Bolt tank top that he really likes.

I got a couple of quilty things.

One of them was this cool pin-cushion magnet.

The pins lay so that the heads are easy to grab.

You can drop them on it and they turn to lay like this... well most of them anyway.

Then we discovered that you can balance one on its point.

We did manage standing two at once but the photo was blurry.

The aforementioned quilt! It's a Christmas quilt for the family to enjoy.

And we got ourselves a new stove!

I've named it Big Iron.

So that leaves us to today, New Year's Day.

The new year has begun with an ice storm.

Maybe 2020 wasn't ready to leave yet! ;)

The power went out for about 30 seconds and thankfully came back on.

I know others in our area weren't so fortunate.

An ice storm isn't exactly how you want to ring in the new year.

It is beautiful though!

I'll end this post with photos of Nolan playing with Pepper.

Quite cute!

Not a spoiled dog in the least!

The Dragon Quilt

 I finally finished Nolan's graduation quilt. AKA the dragon quilt. I finished it a couple of weeks ago and took photos. However, I didn't pay attention to the settings on my camera and none of the photos turned out well. I've had to wait a couple of weekends for good weather to do another photo shoot. (It's too dark by the time I get home from work.)

This quilt makes lifetime finish number 36. It's the first (but not last) finish of 2020.

It took over a year from start to finish...longer if you count the research and design time I put in as well.

Nolan gave me some suggestions of what he wanted and I went from there. I found a free-for-my-use dragon image that I imported into my quilting software and traced. He wanted Celtic/rune letters as well as a dragon. I did some research and did not like the meaning behind the typical ones I found. So I used the rune letters from the How to Train Your Dragon movies to write his name. Nolan loved it.

This is the fourth full-sized quilt I have hand quilted. I spent 201 hours over nearly 7 months to quilt this one. I'm not sure why it took twice as long as the others. Maybe it was all the curves in the quilting. I chose not to pre-draw the quilting pattern. All the wavy lines around the dragon were drawn free hand as I got to the area. That was something completely outside of my comfort zone. I like patterns and uniformity. Making it up as I went was a new process. I was a bit nervous as I couldn't see the final product until I took it off the frame. I'm pleased with how it turned out.

This quilt has traditional patchwork piecing, foundation paper piecing (sewing by number), and hand applique. It challenged my quilting abilities. I enjoyed every step of the process.

This photo shows the closest match to the right shade of blue for the blocks and dragon.

The others are a bit off.

Letters for Nolan.

Letters for Schultz.

Someone wanted to play.

She ran over the corner of the quilt at one point.

Silly dog.

If this quilt panel had been in the stores before I designed the front it would have been the front!

Nolan really liked it too so it became the center of the back.

Quilt stats:

#36

79" x 91"

hand & machine pieced

hand quilted

Pepper photo bomb!

I called her to me so she could get out of the way.

Almost.

Goofy mutt.