My friend Charmaine emailed me at the end of January and asked if I would be able to quilt for her a few baby quilts and a bigger quilt which she wanted to show in our guild show at the end of April.  I knew that my insane cookie life wouldn't take over for 5 weeks so I said yes.  Here are the baby quilts all finished.

These 2 quilts are the same except that the long blue strip is opposite.  The pattern is a cute one and suitable for featuring a number of fun prints while also using up leftover bits you might have stashed away. 

My quilt inspector had to check out my work before he was able to declare them acceptable.

Charmaine chose the Shooting Stars panto for the baby quilts and it suited them well. 

I used my favorite Glide thread in Cool Gray on the top and So Fine 503 in the bobbin. 

The Gray thread barely shows but there is nice texture all over.  It's surprising how often a pale Gray thread works when others don't.  Isn't the elephant print just adorable?

For the backing for all 3 quilts she brought me this cute elephant print fabric.  I honestly had never heard of piecing a backing diagonally before but I just might give it a try sometime.

Lots of pretty texture with the pale Gray thread.

The 3rd quilt is made with bright fabrics, which of course I love.

The same thread was used and it worked just as well to not overtake the piecing.

I love the feature fabric on this one.

Here they are all ready to be picked up. Charmaine was thrilled with the results and even brought me another top to quilt for her. 

Thanks Charmaine for letting me quilt these adorable baby quilts for her. I had fun.

Now that Girl Scout cookie season is over (except for waiting for the rewards to arrive, sorting them and then getting them to each troop) I've realized that once the cookies get here in mid-March that I'm going to pretty much disappear online until the season is over at the end of April.  Cookie season is just too over-the-top insanely busy.  Almost 16,000 boxes passed through my cookie cupboard ) aka garage) this year. 

Truth be told, once the last cookie box was out of my house (not counting our personal stock that's in our freezer), I needed some down time to relax and reboot so I wasn't ready to jump back into the quilting for a couple of weeks.  Now I'm rested and ready to get to work.

Next up on the frame is this pretty quilt which is a charity quilt for my guild.  I've got an idea of how I want to quilt it but I'll be a little testing of the vision before I begin.

I've also had not one but 5 customer quilts dropped off recently.  These should be fun to work on in the coming weeks.

It truly feels good to be getting back into the quilting groove.  I'm hoping that my quilting business picks up enough to keep me plenty busy.  My boss (at my regular job) is working towards closing the doors and retiring so I'm not working for him as much.  If I have enough quilting business coming in then I won't be returning to the working world once the accounting job is over.

Before the first of the cookies arrived, I was able to sneak in 4 quilts for a friend so stay tuned to see those all quilted up.

She's an Innova with a 22" throat on a 12 foot fame and I love her. 

There's a bar under the rollers where I can store 2 rolls of batting. My customers love that they can just get their batting from me and only buy the amount needed.  At this moment I have Quilters Dream 80/20 but I'll be adding more options in the future.  The 3 drawer unit on the left holds all the pantos and the 2 units on the right are filled with thread. 

I'm lucky that I don't have to turn any wheels to advance a quilt as I work on it because Tink has a power advance feature. 

This is the wall opposite Tink.  I permanently "borrowed" some shelves from other rooms. The old microwave cart works well  for when I'm writing up a customer order, the middle shelving unit holds the bobbin winder, all my books and my little tools chest.  My rulers used to be in the small basket but I've since found another place for those.  The ladybug hamper has larger pieces of batting, which I really need to sort and sew together to use up for charity quilts.

This shelf, which happens to have been hubby's when he was a teenager, was brought down from my son's room and now holds quilts in the queue waiting to be quilted.  All those on the shelves except the bottom one are for customers and my guild charity and the last pile are mine.  Yes I have a bunch of my own quilts that need to be finished.

Tink sports some pretty bling, which I got from Urban Elementz.  I originally bought the set for Penelope but could never decide which decal I wanted to place where so I'm glad that I had them available to dress up Tink.

The space in the room is a little tight and hubs wanted to not make it that much smaller by putting up studs and paneling on the walls with the insulation so I'll add some other decor bit by bit.  For now I hung the tote bags I received from MQX over they years on the right wall.  The pink rolling cart I recently got at Michaels (thanks to a gift card from my BIL) and it's perfect for holding all the things I need close by while I'm working.  The bottom shelf is loaded with all my rulers now.

So you're probably wondering why the name Tink.  This should answer that question.  No I'm not a fanatic but I do love Tinker Bell.  I love her attitude, her spunk and her determination.  These dolls were my daughter's when she was little and when she was ready to pass on all her princess dolls to someone else, I couldn't bear to give these away too so now they keep me company.

My assistant leader recently gave me this Tinker Bell sticker so she got added to bling up Tink just a little more.

I'm continuing to tweak things in the room as I go along but it's safe to say that I'll be spending a lot more time in the basement now.