Cows are finished

"Dairy Tales" for Morgan.  Cow and Castle with princess, Disney princess and Snow White fabrics.

"Winnie The Moo" for Mackenzie.  Cow in Pooh red sweater with 3 different Pooh fabrics and a teddy bear fabric background.

"Super Moo" for Jack.  Superhero cow with cape in Superman, Batman, and Spiderman prints flying over a city skyline of Spiderman fabric.

"Monkey See Monkey Moo" for Mallory.  Cow with 2 pink monkey prints, with green monkey print fabric in the background.

"Chugga Chugga Moo Moo" for Lucas.  Cow standing on a flatbed rail car pulled by an engine with Thomas fabric and three railroad fabrics.

All in all, they came out pretty cute, I think.  Each is tailored to the kid's specific interests.  I think they'll like them.  I'll try to post Cowfest pictures after the actual event.

Hold Still

Just try to get 5 kids to hold still, and smile for a group picture.  It seems to be impossible with my bunch.  Every time I have them all in one place I try for this.  Most times, I can't even get them all in one spot for long enough to aim the camera.  For this attempt, they couldn't decide on sitting or standing.  Rather than fuss with them, I figured some could sit and some could stand.  Not your studio pose, but oh well.  And then, every picture I tried where they were actually looking at me, Jack was standing at the back, arm raised like he was holding the statue of liberty.  I'm not sure what that was all about.  It was the fourth...or Captain America Day according to Bubba.  I realized they had better things to do like swing, play with the dog, or eat desserts, so I gave up. I guess that's alright.  It all sounds more fun than just sitting still, and there will be plenty of more photo ops in the future.  But, they are a great bunch of little kids, don't you think?

P.S. I changed the background.  I don't know where this city is.  I just thought it was fun.  I wish I could change the walls in my house so easily.

Starry Starry quilt

I'm on my last round of the Liberated Round Robin.  I love these as I never know exactly where they are going or how they're going to turn out.  The instructions for this round were to look for "serendipity" in the quilt and finish it.  Serendipity is not exactly how I was feeling about the quilt as it stood.

My wonky stars were seeming a little claustrophobic after the last round of color. The pink seemed too much. I also had two more stars to work with. So, as much as I hate to rip.......I had to back off some. 

  I added the other two stars to balance out the center design. I didn't have enough pink to completely encase the larger design, and I didn't think I wanted to anyway. So I decided to cut some more of the yellow sporadically  into that bright pink border. 

I was feeling pretty good about it now, but the stars are so subtle. I wanted to do one last thing to help them stand out against the bright colors, so I quilted around them. I think you can see it, they almost puff out in person. Here's another picture of one of them. 

   To finish it off, my quilting friends all seem to be in agreement that the binding should be one of the darker blues, so that's what I'm going to do.  They all have a lot more experience than I do, and besides I don't have enough yellow, and I can't take any more of that pink.

I think it's going to finish up as a cute summertime table runner.  Perfect for a nighttime party that includes star gazing.

Liberated Round Robin 2- Step 3

Step three of the liberated round robin was to add color or black and white.

I tried a bright blue, but that made the whole piece shades of blue which seemed to miss the point of adding color.

I tried purple, but it didn't seem to look right.

I tried black, which was ok looking.  I tried white, which seemed boring.  I even tried a black and white print, but that was too busy.

Finally, I decided that I had already used color in the small yellow and hot pink splashes.  Why not go back to that.  I didn't have any more of the yellow, but I had a gold with yellow print, and I have more of the hot pink.

The pink border is wide, so I have plenty of room to play with it, depending on the next round's instructions.

So far, so good.  I think I like it.

Liberated Round Robin 2-step 2

I love a liberated round robin.  You have no idea where you are going.  It really is a great imagination stretcher.  I started with 5 liberated slash and stash blue stars and a reject Block Lotto violet.

In round 1 I used one star and the violet and came up with this.

For round two we were supposed to incorporated "made" fabric from scraps.  I used the yellow as an accent for my made fabric, but when I tried to add it to this first block, that hot pink was just too......pink!  So I cut the pink down some, grabbed two more blue stars and put the pieces back together.  This is what I came up with.

I like it.  We'll see what round 3 will bring.

Liberated Round Robin 2....step 1

I'm trying my hand at another Round Robin. This one is intentionally liberated, so it could have some crazy steps.  We'll see.  For round one, the instructions were to start with some orphan block and "liberate it" by cutting, slashing, adding too, whatever.  I am starting with these.  The five stars are already liberated in that they are a little wack-o in shape.  They were an experiment in the technique of stacking five pieces of material, cutting them apart, reorganizing them, and then sewing them back together.  They have been sitting around for quite some time with no idea how to use them.  The bright pink violet is a reject from the Block Lotto.  This one didn't line up right, so I couldn't use it for Block Lotto because I have to send them to someone else.  While I don't mind imperfections for myself, I can't send them to other people.  After selecting these, I stared at them for quite a while to figure what I wanted to do. I really didn't want to slash the stars further as some of those pieces are already pretty small, and as I said they are already liberated.  So the answer, of course, was to slash the violet and then piece them back together.

Here's what I ended up with:

I think I like it.  We'll just have to see where the other steps go to see if any of the other stars can find a home in this quilt too.

OH, and a political sidebar.....
Here in Missouri we had a Republican Primary and Republican Caucus. The Primary was not going to count, it was just a beauty vote since the caucus is how the delegates are picked.  None the less, Santorum won the primary by a big margin.  Well, the caucus a month later, in Greene county the people attending the caucus picked something like 64% of the delegates to be for Ron Paul, ignoring the primary vote completely.  Somehow, that doesn't seem right to me.

American values

"I stand for honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you’d want to be treated and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values. That’s what I stand for…I also believe in dance.” - Ellen

I listen to all this campaign rhetoric.....all the personal attacks...all the biased twisting of the facts.  So many people seem to be afraid.....of people of a different race....of people of a different religion...even of people who are unemployed or in need of government assistance for one thing or another.   The people that scare me the most are the ones that buy into some of these fears or some of these political statements without any thought or investigation of their own.

Just saying.....