eclipse

Hello,

These are my nine blocks for the eclipse swap.  Since I won the last swap I would like to donate the nine for this month. 

Happy Sewing, Debra

Last year's string hearts

While I did not win last year, I did at least have my 2 bonus hearts... they sat and sat, until this year, when I decided to make two more string hearts and their bonus hearts. Then, I laid them out, played with scrap pieces of black, and came up with this!
Which then sat on my ironing board for another 2 weeks until I finally quilted it last night- nothing fancy, just in the ditch around the hearts (well, mostly- I had taken my contacts out!). It now hangs in our kitchen. I have small wallhangings for almost the whole year now!

Transition Update and a Photo Challenge

Unfortunately, during the last week or so, while I wasn't on top of the Block Lotto Blog, I ALSO wasn't working on our new site ...

I'm a little embarrassed to admit that I'm still fighting with the template and the Home page format.  I'm currently impatiently waiting for "support."   I'd like to pull it together in the next few days, but I don't think it's going to happen.  There has been a lot of "one step forward, two steps back;" I'm sure there will be more of the same; and, at the moment, I'm stuck ;-)

One of the view things that is sort-of working is a photo-slider feature on the home page, in which I'd like to feature photos of the quilts and other projects made from lotto blocks OR inspired by lotto blocks.  At the moment it's having problems auto-magically resizing the images on posts imported from here.  So, I was thinking that some of you might be interested in creating "beauty shots" of your beautiful quilts in the preferred dimensions:

960 pixels wide x 368 pixels tall

I know that a lot of our quilts have been gifted or donated.  If that's the case, another option could be to crop one of your existing photos (or create a collage of photos) which is approximately 2 1/2 times as wide as it is tall.  Otherwise, after I manually tweak your posts with photos so that they WILL be cropped/ re-sized automatically, we'll have no artistic input into HOW they will be changed to fit.

If you have the time and inclination to re-photograph a quilt or crop/collage exisitng photos to create something with the ideal proportions for the "slider," you can email them to me and I'll glue it all together ;-)

UPDATE

I cropped a couple photos to see if that slider would work as expected. (Andrew, I hope it's OK with you that I took some liberties with yours).

They are both close to the 1: 2.5 ratio.  They look the same size here. but the detail photo of Andrew's quilt is actually much smaller than the ideal size of 960 pixels wide x 368 pixels tall. The other photo is slightly larger.   If you click over to our future home page, and wait for them to "slide" by, you can see what happens.  I also created a "beauty crop" of a detail of Julie's wonderful quilt made from the combination of string hearts and violet blocks and a couple of other recent "show and tell" posts.

IF you follow the home page link and go check out the current sad state of the construction project going on in our new home, PLEASE DO NOT attempt to post or add comments . .   YET. 

What are we talking about?

I couldn't resist creating our own word cloud, after seeing this on a couple of YOUR blogs ;-)

Interesting, huh?  You can play with your own words, shapes, fonts and other options at Taxedo.

My second eclipse

I saw this fabric and decided that I had to make another block this month. The bright purple was just too pretty. My sewing machine broke (why do I have such bad luck) so this is it until it gets repaired. Hoping I can participate in February!

Helen W

Nashville, TN

 

 

One for January!

I made two but one is wonky so I'm submitting just this one.  I liked the Blue paisley and had to use it.  I'm so glad to be back sewing it has been a long Month.  For those who don't read my BLOG regularly-- I had my Tonsil's out in December. As an "older" person it was the worst pain I've ever had to go through.  Not the surgery, but the recovery. It's been a very 5 weeks.  Nothing tasted good and I was soooo Hungry, but couldn't swallow.  Here's to a much better year!

Catching Up ... and the February Sneak Peek email

If you have made and posted Eclipse blocks, you should have a (late) sneak peek email message from me about February's block.  Your name and blocks should also appear in one of the lists in the left side bar, either blocks entered for the drawing or blocks "donated" to the pot.

I'm sorry for being an absent blog mom for the past week or so.  I would appreciate if everyone who has made blocks would check to see that their name is on the appropriate list with the right number of blocks.

I'm so proud of everyone who faced their fear of curved seams and/or working with templates and tried the January block. Even if you have decided you still don't like curves, the next time WILL be easier.

For those that haven't (YET?) made the January block, but are curious about what might be in store next month, you could look through your stash for fabrics in these colors:

Pink
Orange
Gray
Cream

The inspiration for the colorway next month comes from Winter sunsets.

One Eclipse Block Done!

Susan at desertsky.livejournal.com - my one block turned out easier to piece than I thought it would be!  I'm donating the chance, please.

Eclipse 2012 photos

Here are nine eclipse blocks for January. Good luck to everyone who has
made blocks this month.

Coralie in Canada

Five Eclipse Blocks from Kathy S. in Ohio

Here are five more eclipse blocks for the January Block Lotto from Kathy S. in Ohio:

Four Eclipse Blocks for Kathy S. in Ohio

Here are four eclipse blocks from Kathy S. in Ohio.  I love these blocks.  They are fun!

3-patch table topper

I finished assembling about half of the three-patches I won last summer into this table topper, with the addition of the wine-based fabrics in the center. The backing is 3 colors of grape bunches. My long-arm quilter did a nice job of quilting with vine and grape motifs in the blocks. This will go out to my friend who is a wine fancier, I hope this week; just need to add a label.

Here are 8 blocks from me for this month.  Sophie, I'd like to donate these blocks.  The hardest part for me was cutting out all the parts by hand since I don't have a small rotary cutter.

One eclipse for me

One eclipse from Kasey P.  It took forever for me to find fabric that I liked for this one, but digging through my stash is almost always half the fun!

Final scrappy trip blocks

Thanks Gwen, your blocks arrived today, so now I can get on with arranging them all.  Thank you everyone!