The Thimbleberries Lady strikes again!

Marsha the Thimbleberries Lady brought me this cute throw to quilt.  One of the most recent quilts I did for her that wasn't a Thimbleberries pattern (gasp) was a finalist in the Schnibbles contest.  You can see all the finalists here, including Marsha's. Her quilt is the third from the left in the third row.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/martingaleandcompany/sets/72157624963296232/

I haven't mentioned to Arabella (my Gammill Classic Plus longarm machine), that she is for sale -  I'm afraid it might affect her performance.  I've decided to sell her and buy a new machine made by Innova.  It is hard to give her up since she is the one that taught me to quilt with a longarm but I'm very excited about my new machine! I'm advertising in several places and chomping at the bit to get her sold.

Yikes!

It's been a while - not because I have been especially busy but because life has been kind of uneventful.  I did go on a Garden Railroad Tour last weekend where I saw this in Nancy's backyard.  Nancy is a friend from Prairie Quilt Guild and her railroad was our favorite of all that we toured.  She made her husband put a quilt block on the barn - it was really cute.

I did a program for the MO-KAN Machine Quilters Guild in Overland Park yesterday, so I had piles of quilts out as I was getting ready to go.  Elsie thought it was cat heaven, she would like us to leave a large pile of quilts on the dining room table all the time since it makes the perfect cat perch!

We had to call a plumber to fix a few leaky faucets and to find out why one of the pipes in a downstairs closet was leaking.  Ahh, the joys of owning an old house!  The old cast iron pipes had rusted, so the plumber had to cut a four foot section out and replace it with PVC pipe.  Here it sits waiting for the junk man to pick up.

Next month I will begin serving as President of my quilt guild.  Fortunately I will have a wonderful and very experienced Board which will make my job much easier.  Traditionally, the President makes nametags for the Board so I just finished seventeen nametags that I will hand out at the first Board meeting.  I still need to make more for Committee chairs, but that can wait a few weeks.

Wednesday we had severe thunderstorms all over south central Kansas and for a while a real nasty one was headed our way.  They were warning of golf ball sized hail and sixty MPH winds.  It ended up missing us but south Wichita saw these... YIKES!  This picture is from the Wichita Eagle website.

Give the Central Kansas Shop Hop quilt a hand!

All of the quilt shops involved in the Central Kansas Shop Hop (this year it is October 1-3) make a quilt using the theme fabric.  Charlotte of Charlotte's Sew Natural in Newton asked me to quilt hers and that is the quilt in the picture above.  The theme fabric is the lighter background fabric in the quilt.  It was designed especially for the shop hop and has the names of the local towns involved printed on it.

I tried not to do too much quilting in the center four patch of each block so the neat kaleidoscope effect would show through. 

When we dropped the quilt off at the shop, Mary gave me a Cotton Picker, which she says is wonderful for removing little threads from your quilt.  Peter is the Head Thread Picker at our house, so he gets to model it:

He decided to make a little stand for it.  He scanned his hand, then glued the picture to some foam board and cut it out.  It's goofy looking - I like it!

Here it is all dressed up.