Pajama quilting

Where does a week go? I mean, I know where mine went...I heard the flushing sound at the end of last week that cued the slow but inevitable drain of this week down the proverbial toilet. Sunday was the Superbowl, so I was at the shop in the afternoon and then watched the game that night. Monday went okay until my husband and I both came down with the stomach flu, which put me out of commission through Wednesday. Thursday.... that was just yesterday... let's see, what did I do... oh yes, scrambled to catch up from everything that doesn't get done when you're sick. Oh, and I got a mini-makeover! A quilter friend of mine sells Mary Kay, so we went to an "eyes-cream social" and ate ice cream and got eye make-up done...fun! I ordered a facial highlighting pen and a brow definer pencil. These are two items that are currently missing from my makeup repertoire (which is a very fancy word for the 4 or 5 make-up items that I actually use), but I'm very excited to get them. What a difference they make!

Sorry, that was starting to sound a lot like whining until I got to the makeover part, so let's move on to quilting. I've been using any spare moment I've had at the shop lately to longarm quilt. I'm really getting excited about longarm quilting lately. Quilting is just a fact of quilt-making that I never really considered much before. But now that I've been quilting for almost a year (eek!), I'm starting to spread my wings and experiment a bit more. I ordered Dawn Ramirez's new Pajama Quilter Reloaded DVD, and here's what I've done with it so far.


Cindy pieced this top the last time she was in the shop...before she broke her ankle. (Did I forget to mention that? Well, she did - slipped on the ice. I'm afraid I've been a bit self-absorbed lately =)
One of Dawn's basic flowers...
A flower, a ribbon, and some loops....
And more of the same. This is really just part of the basic stuff on her DVD. I really recommend this DVD if you've been wanting to learn some good freehand quilting designs. You don't need to have a longarm machine.. in fact, in the DVD she demos here designs on a whiteboard. Very easily translated to quilting on a domestic sewing machine.

I've got so much more to learn. As Dawn would say, practice and chocolate will get me there eventually. Sounds like a good plan for this evening, actually....