Front above and back below.
Opened out flat.
I spent several hours cleaning up my clutter in the basement. I sometimes have as many as 8 projects laying out down there. Just think, if the art quilters didn't come to visit I would never keep the basement studio organized.
And here is the close up picture. I won't make any final judgement on it until after I have washed it and dried it in the dryer.
Today is cookie baking day and final clean up in the basement. I mixed the peanut butter cookies last night since the dough is supposed to chill anyway. 
Here is a closer view. The lines are not "perfect" because I am not a perfect person. I like things with their subtle imperfections that look they have been made by a human being. Actually I like wonky even better than that. It took and hour and 5 minutes to do the lines in one direction. Now I think I would like it to be crosshatched so I image I have at least another hour of quilting to go.
Earlier in the day I was sewing my H quilt together and I found this piece of fabric (on the left) wrong side up. I finished sewing all of the other rows together and then came back and picked out that piece and sewed it back in right side up.
I promise this is the last picture of "H- I give it 5 Stars". This is the top all sewn together. I did interchange 2 blocks this morning when I looked at and then said "Enough! Sew it".
I sewed a few rows on another quilt too so I feel like I have accomplished a lot. Now I have to start cleaning the basement for my art quilters' group that is coming on Monday.
As far as the front goes I'm pretty sure this is the final layout. After I put the last star in I moved several other blocks around trying to spread out the colors more evenly. I'll take one last look at it this morning before I sew them together. 
I have to convince myself that it is Friday today since it feels like Monday. It is a good thing that I have a page a day calendar on my computer desk to keep me straight. This year I had the Old Farmer's Almanac page a day and it has been very interesting. Today it says "When cooking parsnips, add a pinch of nutmeg to bring out their best flavor".
In the 1970's we had a very active art league in our little town and one of the ladies made quirky and original pottery. This is one of my favorite pieces made by her. She moved away many years ago so I lost touch with her but I think of her every time I look at this. I hope you all have a wonderful day filled with family and/or friends and make new memories to cherish for years.
I didn't sew one stitch yesterday. I did a lot of cutting on my purple batiks, strips and squares and that took several hours. 
I also made 2 more star blocks with a different fabric for the background.
It is now 60.5" wide and 75.5" long. All I have to decide now it if I want to make it one more row longer.
I could also still pull out the rest of the light blocks and change them out with more star blocks.
Today I will shop for the last few things I need for Thanksgiving dinner, sort and remove the piles from the dining room table and kitchen table, and hopefully press some more fabrics and get the rest of my blocks cut out. I hope I can finish this top and quilt it on Friday or Saturday. After a family gathering the house will be clean, there will be plenty of leftovers, and my time should be my own for a couple days. At least I hope so.
I had to move my blocks over to a double wall (8 ft. wide) so the new blocks have been mixed in with the old ones. I made another star block in the same fabrics as the first one and now I think I might make them all with the same star fabric and change the background of the next ones to fabrics similar to the first background. If I don't like that I will make all of the star blocks alike. I need to make about 25 more blocks for a 60" x 82" quilt. I could stop at 75" long and use it as a couch quilt. I'm not bored with it yet so we'll see.
I love my new vacuum cleaner. It is nothing fancy but it sure is better than my old one. I have the whole living room/dining room clean now for Thanksgiving. It is a huge L shaped room. Each section is 15' wide and the long parts of the L are 30'. When that room is done I feel like I have cleaned half of the house. 
I haven't decided if this alternate block is the one I will use. I'm still just playing. I don't design my quilts before I make them most of the time. I just make some blocks and start designing with them on my flannel covered design walls. I'm never sure if all of the color combinations are going to work and occasionally a few blocks get pulled and don't get used in the original quilt. I also rarely know how big I am making the quilt. I work on it until I'm bored with it and then I know the final size.
In the afternoon I went to embroidery club at the sewing machine store and learned about embossed designs in embroidery. Then last night I went to computer club to hear a program about photo finishing services offered on the Internet. All in all it was a fun and educational day. I sewed a few blocks while watching "The Mentalist" last night. I have 2 more groups of fabric to add in today, some Kaffe plaids and stripes and some batiks. I'm going to add a secondary block in now and then too. I haven't decided which one but I'll work on that today too.
I have always wanted to make an "H" quilt. That is my daughter's nickname for me. She and her girlfriend when they were about 9 years old came up with names for us mothers and mine was Mother H. Then it got shortened to "mache" and pretty soon it was just "H". Now I see I have to share that nickname with the head guy on CSI Miami. Every time they call him "H" I have to smile. It was my nickname first, mister!
I got out my graph paper and drafted the block and calculated the measurements of the pieces. The blocks will be 7.5" finished. Now that I have made a few blocks to see if I like it I need to zero in on a color scheme, or maybe it will just be multicolor. I might throw an alternate block in once in awhile. I will have to do a block with 5 divisions like the "H" block is. I love math and drafting patterns in case you didn't know that. I have friends who just start shaking their heads when I try to explain the math thing. They just tell me to give them the answer, the bottom line, no explanations needed.
In the afternoon I went to the visitation for an dear friend of mine. She was 98. In the 1960's I made almost all of her clothes because she was very short and had wide shoulders and was narrow through the hips. I also made clothes for her granddaughters and daughter-in-law since I had a custom seamstress business in my home. When she was going to have her 90th birthday party she asked me if I would mark a hem for her on the dress she was wearing to the party. This was while she was still living in her house. I marked the hem and she cut it off and hemmed it herself. She was sharp as a tack all the way up to her death on Saturday. A few years ago she moved into the same independent living building that my parents lived in. In fact she lived right next door to them so I saw her often. I will miss her smiling face and our conversations.
I got the last seams sewn and thought I would lay the pillowcases out full length so you can click on the picture and see the fabrics better. This is my first attempt at these so I hope my fabric combinations will make the kids happy.
It really felt like November today. It was in the high 40's and damp. It was a good day to stay inside and play with fabric.
I will be sending these to Jackie who tells about the worthy cause here. I just have 3 more seams to sew and they will be in the mail.
I only did one tiny bit of sewing. I had this little paper pieced cat from years ago and I wanted to try a cover for a tiny notebook. I got this far and then decided to watch some missed TV shows on my computer and the next thing I knew it was bedtime.
Last night I did some more quilting on this piece. I finished piecing it May 29th, and started quilting it August 16th. I have all of the straight line quilting done so now I have to do some free motion in the outside border. I think I lost momentum on this one because I started it a week before my mother passed away and finished the top just before my family all arrived. 
I don't have any plans for today other than cleaning my house. It is something I almost always do on my birthday. It is the beginning of a new year and I need to start it with a clean house. I bought myself a new vacuum cleaner yesterday too so I will try it out today. I'm sure I'll sneak a little quilting in there somewhere too. 
I did sew the big blocks together. It always looks so much better sewn than just blocks on the design wall. I am putting a border on this one so that it fits a twin bed a little better. I haven't decided which color to emphasize with the border.
If you have been reading my blog for awhile you probably know that part of cleaning up the cutting table after making a project is gathering the little scraps and playing with them. I have 2 postcards started and a mini wallhanging. 
I am at 965 posts right now so I may use these for part of a give away for my 1000th post. Unlike some of the other blog give aways, mine will just be for my regular readers and not to be advertised to everyone else. Sitemeter tells me I have about 550 people a day that check on my blog. That means that in about 12 days I should have my 260,000th reader. Maybe the give away will be then instead. I am just thinking out loud here right now. I missed the 250,000th reader by about 4 hours. I knew it was coming up and then I was gone for part of the day and the sitemeter only tells me the last 100 readers and it was about 226 back.
Today I am going to lunch with my 3 sisters-in-law and a friend to celebrate 2 birthdays which will occur on Saturday. 
I decided to sort all of my Kaffe fabric into stacks of the same print in all the colors that I have. I also filled in a couple more index cards. That took all morning yesterday.
To unwind after I got home I started the small log cabin blocks. I need to cut some more light strips before I can finish them.
I worked some more on my card file. A couple people asked how I attached the fabric to the cards. I was ready to change the needle on my sewing machine, so I just went ahead and sewed the swatches onto the cards with the old needle. I bought the index cards at W*l-M*rt and they are really thin compared to others I have purchased so it wasn't hard to sew through.
I have a good start with all of the scraps that I had on my cutting table and in 2 small bags. I am going to do some more cutting for another quilt so I should be able to get most of them catalogued.
I did rearrange the blocks on the quilt but I'm still not done so I'll show the final arrangement soon. Today is the sewing circle at church again so I won't get much done until evening. 
The cutting took 2 days and the sewing 4 days, but not all day every day. I rarely get in more than 4 hours quilting time in a day and sometimes only 2 hours. 
For those who are wondering (and those who have asked), my daughter loved her birthday quilt and it looks great in her bedroom. 
I taught a finishing class yesterday with 6 students with a wide variety of projects. One lady brought the pieces below which we played with until we were happy with a design. She had started making 9 patches (top left and bottom right) but decided she didn't like them and changed to 4 patches. She had already cut some green rectangles to fill in but wasn't happy with any layout she tried. I think it turned out pretty neat and she was happy with it too.
I wasn't quick enough to get pictures of 3 others before they were taken off the design wall to sew together. They asked for a finishing class every month so we have set one up for the first week in Dec. 
These are a couple of the layouts in the whole quilt, the one above the center and this one below what the diagonal lines will look like in the barnraising.
I thought each block was rather ugly when I got them done, but once I saw them on the computer screen I didn't think they looked so bad.
I have a bunch more partial blocks made too but now I need to cut some more pieces before I can continue. 