We went to an RV rally in Amargosa, Nevada which is only about 50 miles from where we live. It was the first rally we have attended as the ones held where we used to live were always during the summer and we worked during the summer. It was a lot of fun and we'll definitely be signing up to attend more. We got there on Tuesday and came home on Saturday. One of the fun parts was the raffles, door prizes, auction, and the 50/50 drawing. Surprise of all surprises, I won the 50/50 which was $63.00. WooHoo, more money for fabric; like I need more fabric. We also obtained a couple things from the auction, a really nice set of knives from Stanley, and a couple RV things Miles wanted for our RV. Okay, enough about non-quilty things. While at the rally we did go over to the China Ranch Date Farm and got all kinds of date goodies: date nut bread, date nut muffin, a date chocolate chip cookie, date and almond treats, and a date shake. Yummy.
I didn't get a lot of stitching done, but one thing I did was fix Rosette 9 so it didn't look like the little guy from "Ice Age". Here is the new Rosette 9.
Before
After
I did make two foundation paper pieced blocks for my quilt guild. I really like the red, yellow and black one, but not so much the flower basket one although the lady at the guild in charge of this project loved it, which is a good thing.
I had been to the library recently and gotten 3 quilting books. Our library does have to many quilting books and the ones they do have are pretty old. One I read was "Prairie Children and Their Quilts" which is very good and I highly recommend it for those of you who enjoy a little history thrown in with the quilt patterns. There are several pictures taken out on the American frontier with stories of life on the prairie, which as we know was not easy in the 1800's. You can still get this book from here. The book is pricey so you might see if your local library has it. The Kindle addition is a lot less at $9.99.
Another book that I'm still reading and will probably buy is "Easy Machine Quilting 12 Step-By-Step Lessons From the Pros, Plus a Dozen Projects to Machine Quilt. This book is amazing, but can only be purchased used on Amazon for very low prices. The shipping is more than the book in a lot of the cases. You can purchase it by going here.
I also recently discovered Massdrop and purchased several items from them. If you haven't every used them be sure to check them out. Here are some pictures of the goodies I've purchased. You join and then you can designate what group or groups you would like to be in. Yep, I'm in the quilting enthusiast group and get periodic emails of the purchase options. You can opt to purchase when it reaches the lowest price.
I have done about half the stitching on my lamb block for the Christmas Mystery Quilt Blog Hop and hope to get that finished up this afternoon.
I also visited my local quilt shop last Monday and purchased the rest of the items I need to make the travel bag and read through the cutting instructions last night. I'll probably go over to the clubhouse tomorrow and do the cutting as they have a really large cutting mat in the craft room which would expedite my cutting.
I'm on Instgram as jennifer433 and joined in a couple of swaps. One was a fat quarter swap that I did with two other people and I've received my goodies from one and will pick up the other from the post office on Monday as it arrived while we were at the rally. Another one was a charm swap. You bought or had in your stash a yard of modern low volume fabric and cut it into 56 charms and set off to the creator of the swap who will sort them and send out to all those participating. You get 56 different charms of modern low fabric which I really needed. So, it has been an early Christmas for me this past week. The next swap is a fabric postcard swap, but I can't post a picture of what I'm doing as my swap partner reads my blog. I'll post a picture of it after she receives it. It is the first time I've attempted to do one and I'm hoping it comes out okay.
I do have cataract surgery coming up this Tuesday which I'm not looking forward to, but the news is I will be able to see clearly again which will probably make a big difference in my quilting. They'll be doing my left eye first and then about a month down the road they'll do the right eye. My left was much worse than the right.
Happy quilting.
