Design Wall Monday 8/23

Actually, this is coming off my design wall as I finally appliqued the border, sandwiched it, and quilted it.  Here is my new Koi Fish Bowl which I first put up on the wall on 8/2.  This was a Connecting Threads kit I got a few years ago and so it is UFO#14 done.  Dang, I have to learn to make better circles.  Someone said to use avery circle labels - I'll have to look into that, otherwise, I'm happy with it.  I'll have it out in October as it is the right colors even though I am not a "Halloween" person myself.  You can't see it, but the border lines are completed by the quilting - I repeated the corners with just quilting lines duplicating the curve of the bias line.  And here's the back:

There's a short story about it.  I bought the material at a yard sale.  Found it in a pile of clothes - it was a scrubs top.  I liked the fabric so much I went ahead and bought the top for 25 cents.  The back was just the right size for this project which happens to be 18" square.  I like both sides of this one.

Sunflower or ?

Did it again - got the "change" bug and made a few changes to a quilt block and came up with my version of sunflower.  The original has white space in the four corners so that there are really only 2 petals in each side and the center is a square.  Then to avoid adding another ufo to my mountain of ufos, I went ahead and finished it into a table topper.  I'm not too thrilled with it.  Since I added a black inner border, I think I should have had dark binding also. But it turned out to be a light green because that was what I used on the backing and I brought it forward to form the binding.  For the backing I was able to use up another orphan block so that makes this ufo#15. I think I like the back better.

I showed it to my husband and he quips up:    "Oh a worm hole!"     Ay ya yi - back to the drawing board.

Well, Summer has finally arrived!

Yep, it's official, a month before Autumn is suppose to start we get our summer which is usually hot, hot, hot.  This was the coolest of summers except for a 5 day span of hot weather way back in late June. Weird.  But here are two surprises at least in my garden from this weather:  a second blooming of our bougainvillea due to water stress and a surprise of naked ladies( I call them pink beauties) earlier than expected - they usually bloom in late Sept for us.

Design Wall Monday 8/16

These blocks WERE on my design wall last week, but I was unable to take a picture to show you.  So in the past week, I put Judy Laquidara's Scraps Ahoy blocks together and came up with another preemie top.  Now the purpose of the pattern was to use up scraps.  Well I had so many scraps left over from cutting the sizes suggested, I decided to use them for the back of this quilt, and for a time I entertained finding some plain back material and make two quilts, but then I just broke down and used the material I made with the scraps as the back.  It's the second picture.  Thanks for the pattern, Judy.  You can see it at her blog Patchwork Times which a button for it is located on the sidebar.