Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day!    I hope you are all enjoying the day.  We're waiting for snow today.  The weather forecasters have promised us 2-4 inches by tomorrow morning.  We haven't had much snow this winter, so I'm kind of looking forward to this one.

I love this photo.   It was taken at my husband's family farm.  I've had the top made for a couple of years.  This year I bought the backing fabric.  I just bought batting the other day, so maybe by next Valentine's Day I can show you a photo of the finished and bound quilt.

The quilt is made from string blocks.  You can see my string block tutorial here.  

Here is the pattern drawn up in Electric Quilt.  If you don't care to make string blocks, you could just as easily use squares and half square triangles.  In that case you would need:
6 red squares
2 white squares
40 half square triangles (half red-half white)

My blocks measure 8 inches, but you could make it any size.  

Here is a smaller version using 3 inch (finished) blocks.  This is a table topper size and finishes at about 18 inches.  You can find my tutorial on how I made this table topper in my blog post here.  

Here is a close up of one of the string blocks.  I quilted this after watching Leah Day's Heart Paisley video.


Here is the same table mat using 3 1/2" unfinished squares and half square triangles.
For this you will need:
6 red squares
2 neutral squares
28 half square triangles

You can find more detail about this version of my table topper in my blog post here.



Here is the pattern for the table mat drawn in Electric Quilt.



I haven't posted here for awhile.  Whenever I land on a blog that goes into too much medical detail, I usually click and am gone pretty quickly.  So I'll make it quick.  I've had a flare up of Bruxism.  That is just a fancy word saying that I grind my teeth in my sleep.  I'm not sure what causes it, but the dentist says it's due to tension.  This isn't life threatening, but it's kind of painful.  For the past 2 weeks or so my head has ached like it has been squeezed in a vice, my jaws ache and feel like they're on fire, and my ears ache.  I've cracked a couple of teeth, but nothing that needs to be repaired just yet.   So.......I have a splint (it's kind of a mouth guard) that I wear at night, and it's helping.    I had the same problems years ago and thought that was the end of it.  But, I guess once you are a grinder, you're always a grinder.  As he put it, you are going to have to wear that every night as long as you're here.   I'm going to have a new mouth guard made so I've got a few more dentist visits ahead of me.  So what have I been doing for stress relief?  Sewing, what else?  I  am working my way through some of my UFOs and have several things to show you in my next few posts.

Another reason I haven't posted is that I have a new laptop.  I love it, and it's great.  But, it's taken me awhile to get used to where everything is.   With the help of my engineer husband, I think I have finally figured out where my photos go when I put the SD card into the slot on the side of the computer so I can hopefully post more often.

Thanks for stopping by for a visit.

I hope you are finding some time to stitch today.

Happy Valentine's Day!