It’s been a crazy few months.  I’ve been taking classes full-time which quite honestly has kept me absolutely swamped night and day.  A friend called me today and said if that was the case I was probably regretting my decision to go back for another degree. Not at all!  I like a challenge and this has certainly been one.  I made all A’s this summer and then found out they don’t have the dean’s list for the summer session.  Say what!!!  So far I’m on track to repeat that this fall but there is still 5 or 6 weeks to go so that could all change.

I have finished a few things, starting with a king-sized triple Irish chain quilt shown above that I made for a friend.  Her husband had passed away mid-February, and she’s a quilter too.  I was at her house a day or two afterwards, before the funeral, and asked if she would like me to make a quilt for her out of his dress shirts – the rest is history.   I worked on it a little bit at a time, sometimes bigger chunks than others, and I finally finished it at the quilting retreat this summer.  I put a small border around it simply because sewing with dress shirts that are a cotton blend turned out to be a little tricky and I wanted to make sure the quilt was straight on each side by the time I finished.  I quilted a traditional feather pattern in the white sections and orange peels throughout the X’s and then feathers again on the white border.

Before I finished that one, I also had a friend who graduated from Concordia in St. Louis to become an ordained pastor.  This is called a Jerusalem cross and is loosely based on the logo for the local church, although I’ve seen variations on the colors they use (which is a marketing no-no if you’re trying to create a brand but I guess churches don’t do that!).  Anyway, I wrote out a pattern in EQ7 and spent most of my time on the long-arm for this one.  The back of it is in the blue picture above.  I left a square blank as a reminder that none of us are perfect.  I was happy with the way it came out and I think both people were happy with the quilt.

I had one more big thing to show you, but now that I’ve searched the house – I can’t find it.  I was published in a new quilting quarterly called Curated Quilts.  If you remember the slate and peach mini that I made a few months ago, that was the piece that I entered for consideration – and they chose it!  My name was in it which was pretty awesome.

I’ve knocked out a few bench pillows such as this one. I have another one ready to go on the long arm but I’m waiting for – are you ready? – for my pro-stitcher to be installed later this week!  Yep, I finally bit the bullet and decided to add that one.  October is always the month to make these decisions because pretty much everything is on sale in the last 2 weeks of the month, right before Quilt Festival.  And sure enough, even with tax I paid significantly less than I expected to, because I bought it the day the local store started their sale, unbeknownst to me.   More on that in a few weeks, but the game plan is I’m going to practice on some charity quilts that I have ready to load and then I’m considering a December special to see if there’s any interest in quilting for others on a very small scale.

That’s actually not my main goal though and I’ve been working on a business plan in the meantime to possibly start a quilting related business about a year from now once I officially have all of these classes behind me.  Step one is getting the Secretary of State to approve a business name for me.  My first one was rejected because it was too similar to someone else’s name so I’ve just submitted a second choice to them.  More on that at a later date!