The last Teacher Quilt top went together the fastest of all! I started it Friday afternoon and I finished it right before dinner last night. I started with 2 charm packs of Flora by Lauren & Jessi Jung for Moda and 6 - 1/4 yards of coordinating solids.
The blocks were arranged into rows, the rows were sewn together and a finished top resulted. Here is your sneak peak.

All I have left to do is to piece the backing together. On Tuesday morning I'll run it over to my LQS to hand off to my long arm quilter Dianne and I'll pick up teacher quilt #3 which is finished. Then I'll spend the rest of the day while the kidlets are at school in another binding/Harry Potter movie marathon.

I have just under 3 weeks to get all 4 quilts bound and labeled. The final push is on. Though I love sewing so much I am looking forward to some down time soon.

I love receiving emails like this one.

"Congratulations Michele! You are one of my weekly winners for the pack of Aurifil Threads."

That great news came from Christa of Christa Quilts Wednesday afternoon as part of her Year of Weekly Giveaways. My package arrived yesterday afternoon. Look what was inside.

Can you believe this? It is insane!

Amongst all the other things going on here lately...work, a special day trip, a recent upheaval for us and 20+ other kindergarten families at my kids' school and the normal life things such as dishes and laundry, it took me just under a week to start and complete the 3rd teacher quilt top.
This one uses one charm pack, one jelly roll (half of it actually) and some solid yardage. I started by pairing up 2 different charms and trimming one of them to 4" for the center of the blocks.

This is another simple block pattern so they went together fast. Step 1 was to frame the center square. I so love chain piecing for this type of quick sewing.
The next step was to add a sold strip to each of the remaining 5" charms and then cutting them in half, resulting in 2 - 2 1/2 x 6" pieces.
After working on the layout until I was pleased with the overall placement of colors and prints I added the sashing strips between the blocks.

Do you remember when I was interviewed by the Curator of Exhibits of the International Quilt Study Center and Museum in Lincoln, Nebraska in early March? It was a great interview, we had so much to talk about, and in the end I will get a copy of her research project on the 100 Good Wishes Quilt tradition.

During the interview I was surprised to learn that I was the only person she had interviewed that had actually become a quilter because of the tradition. If you haven't read that story, you can find it here and if you are new here and don't know yet what a 100 Good Wishes Quilt is, you can learn all about it here. I thought that fact, that I was the only one that can attribute my discovery of and love of quilting to this ancient Chinese tradition is pretty cool. The added knowledge that I have made and will be making more of these quilts for other Chinese-American children was also very interesting to Marin.

The curator, while doing her research, had found numerous references to 100 Good Wishes Quilts (Bai Jai Bie) in the adoptive community but she had yet to find definitive proof that the tradition actually existed in the past or does exist today in China. She had found proof of a Bai Ais Pao, a robe which was referred to in the book "Imperial Women" by Pearl S Buck (a big name in the adoption community). The book is about the final Empress of the Qing dynasty. At this point in the book, she is a concubine in the Imperial household, but has birthed the only make child of the Emperor. She has to leave her baby alone for a while and is thinking of ways to protect him, as well as obligate the other powerful Manchu families to back her son's claims to the throne.

The book reads " She must offer the child as an adopted son, by symbol, to other powerful families in her clan. Yet what friends had she? She thought and she pondered and she devised this pan. From the head of each of the highest one hundred families in the Empire, she required a bolt of the finest silk. From the silks she commanded the palace tailors to cut one hundred small pieces and from these make a robe for her child. Thus he belonged, by symbol, to one hundred strong and noble families, and under their shelter the gods would fear harm to him."
 I thought you would enjoy this bit of the back story. Anyway, the curator and a couple of her colleagues are in China now doing the actual research and they are blogging about it. The blog is Pieced in China. Yesterday's post is titled Demos and in the post Marin confirms that Yes the tradition is real, it did exist in the past and still exists today but in a bit of a different form.

Go ahead and pop on over there to read the rest of the post yourself. To say that I am beyond excited about this news is putting it mildly. I truly believe that a 100 Good Wishes Quilt is a wonderful thing to make for any new baby but to find out that our belief that this truly is an ancient Chinese tradition and therefore something my children will treasure even more, makes it all that more special to me.

I look forward to following along on the rest of this groups' travels, to eventually read the research paper that comes from all of this and to visit the International Quilt Study Center and Museum myself one day.

The box of fabrics collected by Kris from Joey's friends arrive a few days ago and with the ones sent by all my quilty friends, I have 121 squares. As soon as I got the chance I laid them all out on my great room floor to get an overall sense of the colors I have to work with.

Kris originally wanted black sashing and border; she had seen one with that color online, but after seeing this picture we both agreed that while it would look very sharp it would also look a bit dark overall. The one she had seen online was a girl's quilt so the majority of those squares were pastels or brights. Charcoal gray was the next option, Kris was fine with that choice, but for some reason I wasn't in love with it.

On Friday I had gone to my LQS to drop off teacher quilt #2 to my long arm quilter and while there I took a good look around to see if I could come up with another idea. Two other options practically smacked me in the face....Red (a darker shade, not fire engine red) and deep Gold! I don't know why those colors hadn't occurred to me before. Red and Gold are obvious possibilities since both colors are important in the Asian community, they would both look great with these squares and would keep the quilt from looking so dark.

Kris and I emailed back and forth, I made up a sample visual to help her see the effect, she liked them both and in the end she left it up to me to choose. I kept looking at the picture and I couldn't decide either. So the following morning I tried again, opening up the picture on my screen and see which one was the first my eye envisioned. 

Red it will be! I had found a great backing choice, an Chinese calligraphy print in white and gray with back and red characters, but Kris preferred a print without Chinese callighraphy. She did love the Asian backing idea though. After combing through a ton of websites and emailing her a few choices, we narrowed it down and again she left the final decision to me. Let me tell you...finding an appropriate Asian print suitable for a 9 year old boy wasn't easy. The vast majority of Asian prints are very feminine, with lots of flowers, fans, etc or they are Japanese in nature and have things such as Geisha on them, certainly not right for a Chinese person. I really wish they'd come up with some other ideas. Forget about finding fabrics indicative of other Asian countries like Vietnam. Anyway this is the fabric I ultimately chose for the backing.

Ta Da! My long arm machine now has a name.
Here and forever more she shall be known as

Penelope!

I just knew that the perfect name would come along for my new-to-me long arm machine and last night it did. While surfing through my blog reading, low and behold on someone's blog she posted about her new puppy Penelope. I tried to go back and find who's blog it was but I couldn't. Anyway the instant I saw that name I knew that my search was over.

According to babycenter.com it means "Weaver". Pretty appropriate I think. I'm using the more modern definition here, not the old one according to Wikipedia. I wanted a name that was a bit older in origin but still works for to today, a girly name that wasn't too weak or wimpy; she is a work horse of a machine after all.

It suits her perfectly. Now I don't think of the color White when I think about the word Penelope and although I'd love to paint her a better color that matches her new name, I'm not going to do that. I'll just know that in my eyes she is a as colorful as any Penelope can ever be.

Yes it makes me happy to finally have found the name for her. I wasn't stressing over it but it was a tad bit annoying that something just right hadn't popped into my head before now. My machines have to have names. They are an important part of my life, my partners in everything quilting related.

The switch from Google Reader to a new reader hasn't happened for me yet. I'm not the type to rush into things like this and when the announcement came out and a ton of people moved in the first couple of weeks, I sat back, watched and listened to what others were saying about their experiences with their choice.

I've done research into the 2 biggest and most popular options

Feedly

and Bloglovin

It doesn't seem that either option is perfect. While from what I read, both platforms are fairly easy to import your reader list into but they both also have cons that make it hard to choose which way to go.

Feedly sounds like the perfect option for me but with one big issue...it doesn't work with Internet Explorer. I've used IE forever and while I do use Safari on my IPhone I've tried Firefox and don't really care for it. And I won't touch Google Chrome for anything.

The biggest issue that I have with Bloglovin is that only the most recent 3 unread posts on a blog show up. That is a real pain in the *&%$. Life with young kids means that I don't always get to check in and reader others' blogs.  And what happens when say we go on vacation? I "lose" all those older unread posts in my reader? Not acceptable.

Most of the options available besides these two sound to be seriously lacking in features from what I've read.

Do I'd love to hear from you....which one did you choose and why? Do you like it so far?

I need to get switched over soon, hopefully by the end of the month at the latest, and hearing what you have to say so far will really help me make up my mind.
Thanks bunches!

 The top of the 2nd of the 4 teacher quilts for this year's end of school year thank you gifts is done. This one only took me 4 days to sew together, working in the evenings and finishing up today.

Friday evening I started piecing the blocks.  These were really easy and went together fast.

The big bi-annual day Giveaway Day hosted by Sew Mama Sew is here!

I don't know about you but I love winning giveaways and hosting some is fun too. "Meeting" lots of new quilting bloggers is always a good thing.

So what am I offering up today?

The first bundle includes a Water Garden charm pack and a silicone iron rest. I had asked for an iron rest for Christmas but what I meant was the extension that attaches to the end of my ironing board. Hubby oopsed and got me this instead (he really needs to learn to buy from the shops I put on my wish list since they sell what I want instead of trying to get it from someplace else and buying the wrong thing). Anyway his boo-boo is your gain.

What do you have to do to have a chance at winning one of these two goody packages?

Since this weekend is Mother's Day, what 1 gift are you wishing to receive, other than the love from your family of course? - one entry per person

My followers get a 2nd entry - remind me that you do follow.

Hubby does like it when I "buy" my own gifts for these types of holidays so he doesn't have to wrack his brain to come up with an idea. My favorite gift for Mother's Day that I chose in the past is my Keurig coffee maker. I can't live without it!

What am I choosing this year? I have one specific want need.

I need a bobbin winder to use for my long arm bobbins so this one from K Kraft is going to be this year's Mother's Day gift to me. My new baby doesn't come with a built in winder.

Because I was buried getting the Crimson Diamonds quilt and the Friends Together Together-Little Artists' quilt done for the school's silent auction fundraiser done, the 1st teacher quilt that I worked on, though started in early March, wasn't finished until Wednesday night. Yesterday I rushed it over to my long arm quilter. Here is a sneak peak.