Stars!

Otto's top is pieced! Well, the main part, anyhow. I plan to add a couple borders.
And I made some stars for the back.
And here it will have to wait for a couple weeks. We leave tomorrow for my niece's wedding and a vacation. We decided today to bring my husband's old laptop, so I may have internet access, but I don't know whether it will be available everywhere we go, or how much time I'll have to use it. But if I can, I'll post a photo or two. I hope you all have an enjoyable couple weeks!

Also, I want to thank Jill at Life with Nature Girl. She gave me an Arte y Pico award for having helped her when she was a new blogger. Her kindness and appreciation really touched me. I need to pass the award on to other bloggers, but it will have to wait until I return. In the meantime, let me say that it is a great pleasure reading Jill's lively blog, and any tips and advice I shared with her are no more than what so many other bloggers have shared with me. I really enjoy the online friendships I've made. Thank you all!

Talking stash

I'm making my first quilt ever totally from my stash! I pulled half the fabrics I own, and ended up chosing these.
I love them! And they play so well together.

Choosing, discarding, putting back, arranging, rearranging -- the whole process was really fun and got me to thinking about the concept of a stash. When I first started quilting, I had no idea why anyone would have a stash. Don't you just decide on a quilt and buy fabric for it? Ha! I totally misunderstood the process. Having a stash is like having a mini-quilt store right in your own house and stocked only with fabrics you love. How much better could it get? It lets you design a quilt as you go, lets you make it your own. It's taken me awhile to get enough fabric to have any sort of stash (and mine is still pretty small). But I now know that if I absolutely love a fabric, I need to buy enough to really use. I have lots of fat quarters that are great, but it has become clear to me that I need several yards of certain types of fabric at the ready because they are what I always come back to.

So what will my stash quilt be? It's a twofer. The front will be a baby quilt for some friends whose baby is now overdue (talk about waiting till the last minute to make the quilt!). I'm making a Trip Around the World using Bonnie's pattern at Quiltville (I didn't have much yellow, and it's just a baby quilt, so I played around with the measurements and cut everything at 2-3/4"). Here's one panel.
I'm using the leftover segments and fabric on the back to do some free-pieced zigzags and stuff (not sure what yet). Backs are great for practicing -- and who knows, the kid may like that side better!

Wanda at Exuberant Color made a wonderful TATW and I'm going to use her quilting idea. Thanks, Wanda!

Two Kinds of Trips

Appropriately enough for a quilting blog, a trip-around-the-world quilt is the first kind of trip I'm writing about today. I was inspired to post this photo since I've seen so many blogs where people joined Bonnie's Super Bowl and made scrappy bargello quilts on Super Bowl Sunday.

I made this Trip Around the World top in 2005, one of the first tops I pieced. I had gone to a Project Linus work day and noticed that there were lots of strips in the Linus stash and I determined to use them up. I did an internet search and found Bonnie's Quiltville website with directions for using up strips to make very simply constructed, scrappy bargello or Trip Around the World quilts. Hers was the first quilting website I bookmarked -- if you haven't been there, go! She has lots of ideas and shares them freely. Bonnie's a real boon to the online quilting community.

I tried to use a red fabric (or purple, when I ran out of red) in the same place in each block to provide some visual organization (I have a hard time with total randomness), but it never seemed like a Linus quilt to me. About two weeks ago I stitched the blocks together and decided I'd border it to make it big enough to back a Linus quilt. Some child will have lots of fun looking at all those fabrics!

The second trip I'll mention here is the one I took to San Diego last November to walk with my daughter Jocelyn in the 60-mile, 3 Day Walk to raise money for the Susan G. Komen Foundation for breast cancer research. Jocelyn is quite taken with pirates, so we named our team the Pink Pirates. Toni at the Quilting Pirate had posted some wonderful pink quilting pirate fabric (the crossbones are made of scissors), so I ordered it to make scarves for us to wear. Turns out the store also had knitting pirate fabric (with knitting needles for crossbones), and since Jocelyn is a knitter, I got that for her.
Here we are in our scarves, posing with a pink-shirted San Jose policeman. A bunch of cops from San Jose volunteers to help patrol the San Diego walk every year, and they are terrific! They wear pink shirts (and often lots of other bling) and ride decorated bikes all along the walking route. They were there for our safety, but provided lots of moral support and were really funny, joking and singing and laughing with the walkers.
Decorated vans also drove the route to pick up any walkers that were having trouble. Here's one of my favorite vans, decorated with pink bras!
At one of the rest areas I saw this quilt, which I think must have been used as a fundraiser. (The hardest part of the walk for me was raising money!) If you click for a closer look, you can see that the quilt squares are signed by donors.

The walk was an amazing experience, and if it weren't for the annoying plantar fasciitis I have in my right foot, I would have recovered right away. I'm still in the process of stretching out my achilles tendon and strengthening various parts of my foot to ease the pressure. Here's a photo of my feet in yoga toe stretchers. Looks odd, but I'm starting to like how they feel!