Courtside With Caitlyn Quilt

 So, I had the Caitlyn Clark fabric from the Shop Hop and it was crying to be sewn! So I was browsing my patterns and saw this one from Villa Rosa and thought it might work pretty well. 

These Villa Rosa Patterns are just one post card size of instructions, so they are pretty easy.  I had 2 of the Clark prints and a blender and a stripe. I think I talked about these fabrics earlier, they're a weird color.

Anyway, they sewed up pretty easy. 

Except for those half square triangles that make the little jog in the design! I had to unsew a few of them to get the triangle to go the right way. 

The layout is pretty easy, but it's a good thing I could lay it out on the bed because you do really need to see where you're going with the design!

So, I got the quilt top done and thought it would be great to quilt a basketball design on it. A long hunt on line didn't turn up any nice looking basketballs. I did find this cool  design of a tiger hawk inside an outline of the state. Here's the link to go see it. Oh Sew Kute Hawkeye Panto 

SO I bought the download and figured out the way to get it onto Freddie and stitched it out on a sample piece of fabric. Can you see it? Yeah, that's the lesson here. It's a busy little design and it gets lost on the busy hawkeye fabric, so I'm glad a did a little sample first because it would not look good on the Clark quilt at all. 

SO Instead, I chose a circle design that is a bonus design that came loaded on Freddie. 

I like the way it looks, kind of gives the impression of a ball, don't you think?

Freddie did a great job on the quilt. I used a gold colored thread, 40wt Glide, and wound matching bobbins. Here it is fresh off the machine.

This was the 2nd time I tried out fleece on the back. I tested with the blue fleece earlier and had no trouble at all with it so I was confident it would be great and it was! No tension issues or anything bad at all. 

I thought it would be pretty cool if I could find Indiana Fever fabric for the back (that's who Caitlyn plays for now in the WNBA), but no luck with that! SO I went with the Hawkeye fleece form Joann. 

And then outside to hang it up. 

Here's the back...

And a little close up-It's about 50"X60" so just a throw size, but it fit on the 60" fleece backing nicely.

And doesn't it look great! I'm so happy with the way this came out! 

A Little Hawkeye Project

 DD asked if I could replace the paper letters that spell Iowa on her door wreath with fabric letters.  Sure, why not? I don't have any black fabric, except lightweight Kona cotton-that's why not.

 So I pulled out some leather scraps! Smart! I used a stick on stabilizer, and made a little pattern to cut the pennant shapes from after I embroidered them. Then I sewed them all together on a little twill tape to tie to the wreath.

 

She sent me this picture-CUTE!
The leather worked great-it holds the letter up really well! Go Hawks!

Hawkeye Pillow Cases

 I got this hawkeye fabric awhile back, I think I got it at Expressions in Thread in Le Claire, Iowa. At any rate I sewed it up into a pair of Hawkeye pillow cases.

It's a fast easy way to make a pretty fancy pillow case. There ar4 a ton of tutorials out there, here's one I looked at to get the correct method. Magic Pillow Case
Kinda looks like I should get some fluffier pillows, but I really like my flat old feather pillows.

Chocolate Raspberry Twist or Chocolate Vanilla Twist?

So our church is pretty poor, so we do different fundraisers and one of them is to run the ice cream stand at sporting events at Carver Hawkeye Arena on the University of Iowa Campus.The place is pretty empty when we are required to arrive and have the ice cream stand manned -or womanned--- and ready to go.

All  this nice empty space will be filled with folks wanting ice cream in just a little while. And I don't mean a few people, I mean stuffed with people!

A few hundred ice cream cones and waffle bowls later, the arena is filled with fans for the basketball game-Indiana vs the Iowa Hawkeyes. We have one machine that does chocolate vanilla twist and one that does chocolate raspberry twist. I think we should get paid extra for saying those words over and over again!!

$5 for a waffle bowl and $3.50 for a cone. We stack the cones as tall as possible-the company that runs the concessions only counts cones and bowls not ice cream. SO theoretically you could bring your bowl back and get more ice cream...we'd probably think you were crazy though.

A few thousand dollars-yes I said thousand- and we're done, Iowa WON!  Too bad we don't get to keep all the profits! We just get a percentage. And we are ready to go home!