Sweet Caroline

Happy Thursday everyone, and hello from somewhere on the road to Baltimore!  There's a good chance that right as you read this I am lifting and carrying boxes or something else that people my age really should be past by now. We'll be settling into our new home in no time, but in the meantime I took some beauty pictures of a pre-blogging quilt for this throwback post.  Please enjoy, and please think good and happy thoughts for us and the move.

Here is my throwback quilt, and I'm not throwing it back:

Gosh, I love this pretty quilt!  It's pink and green, which is one of my favorite combinations, it's cozy, and it's just the right size for cuddling with my granddaughter.  Plus it reminds me of a very nice time I had with friends at my favorite quilt shop, Patched Works.

I made this quilt in 2012, I think.  May have been before that.  It was a sew along with each block designed by individual designers.  I wish I had kept the patterns so I could tell you more about it, but I do remember that we got them at the quilt group meetings.  They were printed out in color, so that alone tells you it was a long time ago!

I think this may have been a Civil War themed project or something similar, because I recall the sample quilt (and the patterns) being in reds and browns.  Of course, I chose a much more cheerful color combination.  The fact that I had virtually no red or brown had nothing to do with it, really.

I'm pretty sure this is one of the first quilts I had longarmed, and it certainly was worth it.  It turned out to be a good investment that I have repeated many times.  This quilt has a lovely texture that I really like, with all the swoops and swirls.  Plus the quilting pattern almost matches the swirly pattern in the border fabric, which was nice but completely unintentional.

Striped binding!

The name of this quilt is Sweet Caroline.  At the time, I thought it was a perfect name for this happy, girly quilt (and it had nothing to do with the Red Sox, Boston fans).   Years later, when one of my granddaughters was born, I discovered that this quilt had indeed been perfectly named. I'll leave it to you to connect the dots and figure out why that is.  Needless to say, this beauty will be hanging around here for years!

So, there's another throwback quilt from my pre-blogging collection! There are quite a few others, but for now this one is my favorite.  (Guess why.) I'll save the others for another time, but it will definitely not be when we are moving, because I am not moving again.  I said that before, but this time I really mean it!

Pieced cornerstones!

Hope you're all having a good week and getting lots of stitching done.  I'll see you next week from our new home, hopefully with some pictures of my new (enormous) sewing room!

Sharing at Confessions of a Fabric Addict, Finished or Not Friday, Brag about your Beauties, and Sandra's next Throwback Thursday.

Down memory lane

Hello, friends!  Long time no see! What can I say?  Life happens.  It has been a jam-packed couple of weeks. I went to my usual conference and participated in a panel presentation, which was fun and interesting, but exhausting.  The conference was in Pittsburgh this year, and let me tell you-- Pittsburgh is a beautiful city! We didn't get a lot of time to explore, but I would definitely go back. After the conference we went to visit the grandchildren, and that was pure bliss.  My oldest grandson kept calling me "honey," and they were all just a joy.

On the home front, I've been trying to sew, but literally every time I pull out the machine, someone wants to look at the house.  This is great, but frustrating! We think we may have found a house in Baltimore, too, if someone else hasn't bought it before this publishes.  The housing market is crazy!  We've scheduled times to look at houses, only to get canceled because someone bought it before we could get there.  I guess we'll know pretty soon, though!

Since I haven't been sewing, how about a trip down memory lane instead? I have a few pre-blogging quilts that I've never talked about and they're feeling neglected, so how about a good look at this one:

Wow, that's a lot of color! It's really a lot, because this quilt is huge-- 74 by 96. I'm pretty sure that was the biggest quilt I had made at that point.

I made this quilt in 2006 for my daughter to take to college.  She was very involved and helped choose the fabrics and the backing.  You can tell she's my kid, because I think there are 52 different fabrics in the blocks, plus the background, backing, and sashing, and all of them are colorful.  Most I wouldn't have chosen, but they work great here.

This quilt taught me so much.  It's from a pattern in Quiltmaker magazine (sorry that I didn't keep the pattern so I can't even tell you when it was published, but I think it was 2005) and is the first quilt that I fully paper pieced.  I think I had made a wall hanging size quilt to learn paper piecing, but the blocks here were all paper pieced.  I remember tracing the pattern onto a lightweight paper instead of using a copier, and there are 48 blocks, so you know that took forever.  It certainly did teach me paper piecing, though!

This quilt also taught me to measure twice.  It happens that I cut every single piece of the sashing half an inch too short.  10-inch blocks, 10-inch sashing, right?  I cried when I realized my mistake, but then I just cut more, which means that I had pieces of that pink hanging around here for years.  There's probably still some somewhere.

This might be the first quilt I had long armed, too.  It was such a behemoth that there was no way that I could even think of quilting it.  It's also quite heavy, but she went to college in Wisconsin and lived in the dorm, so it worked out! I certainly got no complaints that it was too warm.

I've been storing this for awhile, so now it's going back to live at my daughter's house.  We've talked a bit about cutting into two smaller quilts (horrors!) and that may happen someday if she has more kids.  I'd love to see grandchildren playing with the quilt.  It would make two perfect kid quilts, don't you think?

All this time later, I still love this quilt. It was way outside my comfort zone at the time, and I would do so much differently now (use a copier, for one), but it's still great. And my daughter still loves it, so that's a win all around.

Hope everyone is having a wonderful summer.  I'm going to try to pull out the machine this week and get some things done.  If someone buys the house, that would be better because I could make a mess again, so send all your good vibes! I'll be back sooner rather than later!

Sharing at Let's Bee Social, Confessions of a Fabric Addict, and Finished or Not Friday.