Gratuitous Blue Moon Post

In honor of tonight's blue moon, I am posting for the second time this month. I know--get the smelling salts out!

The "finish it Friday" item that brought me here for the second time this month--started AND finished in the same week, actually--is a large table runner for fall. I used the Spicy Spiral pattern by Patty Latourell. I bought the pattern and 10 degree ruler at my new favorite LQS (local quilt shop), The Other Quilt Shop, and a few days later, voila!


So here's where I started, my fabric selection and tools, and that spirally table runner is the result. Yay, me!


Now what to pick up and finish in September.  Hmmm...

And in honor of a new school year, a little lesson:

A blue moon, being the second of two full moons within any given month, is an infrequent occurrence; hence the phrase "once in a blue moon" indicating the rarity of an event. "Blue moon" doesn't refer to the color, so I'm not sure why it got that name, though since it was originally defined as the fourth full moon in a season maybe weather conditions caused a blue appearance often enough to be remembered.

This month there was a full moon on August 1, there will be another tonight, August 31.

Blue moons happen about every 2.7 years on average. The last blue moon was on Dec. 31, 2009. The next blue moon will happen on July 31, 2015. Another truly rare event is a year with two blue moons. The last time a single year had two months with two full moons was in 1999. The next time double blue moons will be seen will be in 2018.

Okay, putting down the teacher's chalk now... See you next month!

A Finish to Report

Hello again! I have a finish to report!

I made a quilt for the birth of my grandgirl who is now almost 8 years old. It was a simple quilt based on Kaye Wood's 6-hour quilt and was complete in plenty of time for her birth. But I wanted to add hand quilting to make it special. Once I started, I was committed. Since I had never hand quilted before, I had no idea how long it would take me to finish. Turns out it was not going to be done by the time she was born. So I tucked it away and  gave her other things, including a leopard print flannel blanket named "Sheba" (as in Queen of....) that she still uses to this day.

Sheba is a bit small for my GG these days, and she has requested a new blanket for around the house. She has a quilt I made for her full-sized bed, but it's a bit big and heavy to use while watching TV in the living room. So I pulled out her baby quilt again and began stitching on it almost every evening for several weeks.

I put the last quilting stitch in it this week. I removed all the markings, washed, dried, and packed it up, and it is now on it's merry way across several state lines to it's new home with GG. Yay!

Reverse side

My own little quilting design for the center.