The ever popular giveaway

is in order today as this is my 50th post(!) and it seems customary in blogland to celebrate by thanking those of you who stop by to see what's up at the tall house. While it's pretty amazing that I am up to 50, the even more amazing thing is how high the counter thingie has climbed. Seems like it took forever to get to 1000 and now it's over 12,000! (Probably broken...)



So, what will you win? First, I have to apologize for the picture. You already know what a bad photographer I am, and this picture is so bad that you might not even want the prize. I didn't realize how bad it was until it was already uploaded and since I had packed everything up ready for shipment, I will have to supplement with a description.



So, what is it? In honour of fall it is fall decorating in a box. It includes beaded fall veggies including a fairly large pumpkin. (I guess the beads and the flash were incompatible.) It also has two large leaf and berry branches, and a bunch of little pumpkins and extra leaves. It is actually quite nice and it is new, not thrifted. Along with being photography challenged I am garland and branch challenged and although I tried, I just could not make it look good anywhere in my house. So it needs to go to a better home than I can provide.



In addition I am adding a Halloween book that has some pretty cool ideas in it.



So, if you manage to get past the picture and decide you would like to give this a good home, here's what you need to do. Leave a comment. As simple as that. I see lots of folks offer extra entries for linking on their blog but I am just not up for anything that complicated these days. Next Friday, September 25th, I will choose a comment at random. Oh, and US only please. This is a pretty good sized box and postage is spendy and getting spendier.Geez, looking at this again, I couldn't even pose it nicely for the pic. Sheesh!



Now, how about a regular post about what I have been up to while you were looking at all those quilt show pics the last few weeks.



Here is my first September finish. Hope you will accept that it is cross stitch and not quilting. I used to do tons of cross stitch and recently have gotten back into it. Mr THQ made the frame for me and I laced it over batting covered cardboard. I had read about lacing on cross stitch blogs and it sure is neater than using duct tape!

Okay, back to quilting, well, sort of.

As you know, thrifting is one of my favourite things to do and not long ago I found this big comforter bag full of scraps. I recognized a couple of the fabrics and for 4 bucks (less 20% for my senior discount) it came home with me. This is what I saw when I opened it. Wow, look at all that! Unfortunately, along with the huge pile of fabric that burst forth so did a totally lethal dose of fabric softener smell. I just can't handle the smell from those dryer sheets and we never use them but the previous owner of this stash must have adored them. So, first up, everything had to go into the washing machine. Twice.

While not everything in the pile was quilting fabric, I managed to get 26 fat quarters out of it. Here they are and some of them are super cute. A little out of my normal fabric rut but those birds on top are the definition of super cute. I have been doing some sewing, but I since I was having a hard time trying to figure out what to work on I decided to pull out a kit I had gotten from Fons & Porter a few years ago. Talk about outside my normal fabric rut, just look at these colours.

Circles and dots appeal to me as you know, and I decided (even though it was really hard) to only use the fabrics from the kit and not replace any I didn't like much or thought didn't go with the others. I love to do fusible blanket stitch applique and this was lots of fun.

Here is the finished top. I then spent way too much time online looking for the perfect backing fabric. Have you used the quiltshops.com search? You put in what kind of fabric you are looking for, in my case, green circles, and it brings up tons of thumbnails from shops all over the country. What fun! A bit dangerous though. I ended up buying several possible backings and after dithering back and forth today I finally decided what to use. But you don't get to see it until I get this quilted. Now I just have to decide how to quilt it. I feel another round of dithering coming on..

Then I decided to pull out a jelly roll of Bound to the Prairie 2 that I have been aging for a year or two. I think I have mentioned in the past that I don't buy many kits or precuts. This is the first jelly roll I have ever used. I was really shocked to see how un perfect the cuts were. I can manage to get the bends at the fold line like this all by myself.

And look, not even really 2 1/2". I had to do lots of trimming.

So, what did I make? An elongated 9 patch. Here is the back. Yes, I confess, I am an open seam presser whenever there are lots of seams crossing each other. A friend of mine a few years ago said she was going to press every seam open on every quilt she made for a whole year. She did and the quilting police never visited her even once. So I think it is okay to do and use this technique whenever I think it will make the seams lie flatter.

And, here is the front. Why is it that when you lay out blocks everything seems perfect but once you have them sewn together you see the boo boo instantly? Look at the two blocks right next to each other that are mirror positive/negatives of the same fabric. I only had to take apart a couple of blocks to get it fixed. Sometimes I would have to take so much apart that I spend probably as much time trying to convince myself that it doesn't matter and only I will notice.

Now this one is all together, the back and binding ready to go. I have quite a few small quilts that are ready to be quilted. Have to motivate myself to have a Saturday morning pinning party. The pinning is always the hardest part for me. I will just have to visualize all the fun I will have quilting them. That should work, shouldn't it?