Quilting, Spinning, Knitting, and Painting

It's only Saturday afternoon of a three-day weekend but I'm tired, so I'm not feeling creative in the clever blog post title department.

We're working on paining Ryan's room, including the ceiling, and I am out of shape. Drastically. My hand hurts from attempting to work the ceiling paint into the popcorn around the edges of the room. My wonderful hubby did the roller work and it looks great! This evening we'll get the walls painted with a nice blue that will bring out the blue in his Cars quilt. What, me decorate around a quilt? LOL! Last weekend (or so--it's all running together) Greg put new doors in our room and Ryan's room so we have more painting to do, but it's going to be SO nice when it's done!

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On the quilting front, here's what I'm trying to get finished before the quilt show in two weeks:


It's a crappy picture, but that's my Sparkling Star Chains quilt. My friend Gale made the original quilt on the cover of the pattern and I took that picture long enough ago that it's not looking so good when I have it printed again. Plus, for selling patterns it's always fun to have "the" quilt hanging in my booth next to the pattern.

I have a little less than two weeks to get this finished (it needs the border), quilting, and bound. Plus I have two other paying quilts to get quilted, so I'm gonna be busy!

I also finished a version of Crazy for Curves that my Mom made a while back, but I haven't gotten a chance to photograph it yet. Soon! (I hope!)

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The other night I had to take a little time out from other things and do some spinning.

First I fulled the last third of these purple Ashland Bay singles, and I think this batch is around 750 yards. I should have around 2,000 yards now, so I should be able to do a nice big lace project with it. If I could choose a pattern, that is....


This next picture is about 1/3 of some fleece I bought from Lowder Colors Farms at the sheep shearing a few months ago. I still have the other 2/3 as singles on a bobbin, so once I get that plied it should match this hank.



I was going for a 2-ply fingering weight and I think I got pretty close! I wanted it fairly loosely spun for another Victorian Shoulderette and I should have plenty.

I've been procrastinating about finishing the fleece I bought at the shearing, which has been just silly. I did get the first half of the fleece washed again and I'm thrilled with it! Now I just need to finish the other half and I'll have a lot of fleece to spin up. It was 7.75 lbs unwashed and I'm curious to see how much I'll have after cleaning it.

I spun up a little bit of fleece that my Mom and I carded, and while it's not the best spinning job here's Eva's fleece mini-skein:

and Eva's fleece detail:

You can see the wonderful bits of silver in her fleece in this picture.

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I finally got a picture of the Beginning Lace class samples I was working on.

Here's the horse shoe lace version:

And the Vine Lace version:


I think for the class we'll do the shorter simple eyelet lace bottom like in the second picture, with the horse shoe lace body from the first pic, and the border from the second pic.

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Happy Memorial Day weekend to my U.S. readers, and a HUGE "thank you" to all of the people who have served or are serving in our military forces.