Working Overtime

I've had a busy few days, so thought I'd take a moment to catch up...

The beautiful fabric is a personal project I finished late last night, but more on that in a little while!

In one of my last posts I shared about the gift of giving, as in so many people giving Quilts of Hope, Blankets of Love this past year for Hurricane Ike survivors....

Well, here's a hurricane story with a different twist!

Last summer, through the wonders of internet, I was able to connect with my long lost best friend from high school, Holly. We discovered that we were only 60-70+ miles from each other, her being north of Houston and me being south....of course each of us have families and busy lives so we corresponded through email as a "catch up" and planned a day to make that journey through Houston to the other side to get together and see each other face to face.

For whatever reason, I kid you not, each date that we were able to set aside from our busy schedules last summer ended up being a hurricane evacuation! We tried at least three times, all three resulted in a hurricane - the final one being Ike. We decided that if we tried again that we needed to alert the news media and weather forecasters to just go ahead and declare a hurricane was in the gulf....

Such is life if you try to plan things. Sometimes the best things are just spontaneous! Just recently I joined the ranks of FaceBook, which has provided yet another way for my dear friend and I to try to 'catch up' or at least be current with each others lives....enter in a quick post from Holly that she and her daughter are on MY side of Houston looking for a car...I post back, 'keep driving south you're almost at my house' and the next thing I know the phone rings and I'm giving her directions!!


Here we are, 30 years post high school, 20+ years since seeing each other. And guess what? No hurricane! Even though we could use some rain (grin).

While she was here I of course shared my studio and one of the quilts I'd just finished. Here's a sneak peak - photos will be posted on webshots this weekend after the customer has picked it up - I never want my customer to see their quilt before they get here, I love the ah-ha moment when they see their quilt top turned in to a quilt.


As I said, I've been working overtime this week....Here's another close up of a quilt that will be picked up later today that I just finished last night...


And a close up of another one that I actually did between the two above. So lots of company coming this weekend to pick up quilts.


I have big plans for my weekend ( actually my customers are having to work around it to pick up their quilts) ....my church, Calvary Chapel Houston, is hosting a women's conference this weekend and I decided that I wanted a cover for my Bible....so after hours last night, this is what I made!



I do not understand the uploading process of blogger. It has turned the photo and I don't know how to right-side-up-it-again. But for what it's worth, this is the pattern that I used, It's called Wrap it to Go by Terry Albers I purchased the pattern last year at the Houston International Quilt Festival and knew it would be perfect for this project.


I loaded the fabric on my longarm (thankfully at 6 PM yesterday evening I had just finished the mariner's compass customer quilt and was able to slip on something of mine!). Since the fabric is a busy print I could have gotten away with any quilting, meandering, loops, even cross-hatching, but I decided to do little feathers to give it some texture (see the close up at the top of the post). The quilting took longer than the project I think, but it was enjoyable. As my hubby keeps telling me, enjoy the process, so I did.


This is the exterior of my Bible wrap. I decided to do a button closure instead of Velcro and was blessed to find just the right button in my small little baggie of button stash. (I'm not telling a fib, I really don't have a big button stash...now thread or fabric, that's another story!)


The pattern called for a pen holder, which is very important to me. I do take a lot of notes at church and am always searching for a pen. I added the tissue holder, which is just under the large flap that wraps the Bible. I did this because, again, I'm always searching for one. We have the most awesome praise and worship team at our church, they just lift us up to the throne in worship and more times than not there's cause for tears of joy, so a hankie is appreciated (grin) and then of course there's those convicting sermons .... anyway, I thought it would be nice to keep tissues in my Bible and used this "Almost Free" Tissue Holder Pattern from Ami Simms.
I only put in a few tissues instead of an entire travel size package because it was too bulky.

So that's my workin' overtime story. I have several other quilts to do today and in the morning before heading out to Women's Conference on Friday night. I'm hoping I can steal away a couple of hours this evening and make a tote bag or something...we'll see. So many ideas, so few hours!