Leader Blocks

© Kathy Duncan, 2016

At the end of each "year," my small quilt group presents blocks to our co-leaders to thank them for their year of service. These blocks are a secret until our end of year picnic, which happened on the third Thursday of the month. Fabrics were determined for each leader. The pattern came from Bonnie Hunter's blog.

This star block  is hot pink with a white on white background for one co-leader.

This one is in batiks with a cream batik background for the other co-leader.

This ends my summer opportunity for quilting since school is under way. I'm hoping to do a little next weekend...if I accomplish enough for school and home today and the rest of the week. It's rained two or three times since I mowed last weekend....so it looks like I have to tackle it again right away. Grrr.

Back To School Supplies For The Teacher

© Kathy Duncan, 2016

This is not a quilt. Obviously. This Slow Stitching Sunday finds me getting ready for school, which starts in one week, so I am prepping a few things. No stitching happening today. 

Years ago, my district, like most, supplied us with lesson plan books. Then everything went digital - in theory. When all the lesson plan books in the warehouse were gone, my district liberated us to supply our own. Yikes! 

Since I did not want to give up a paper lesson plan book, I designed my own. First, I thought about what would be in my ideal lesson book and designed my own planning pages accordingly. Then I decided to add all things that   I'd like to have  at my fingertips. My lesson plan book includes an identification page so my book can be returned to me if I leave it some place, a district calendar, a bell schedule, tardy policy, planning pages, Cornell Note pages for note taking in meetings, and a cheat sheet for using our new online attendance and gradebook.

For the covers, I used an old album cover. The key was to look for one with great graphics. This one is Bill Hinkley and Judy Larson's album "Out in Our Meadow." I don't know anything about their music, but this cover makes me smile. We buy fabric because it makes us happy; lesson plan book books need to have the same element. I'll be living with it on a daily basis for a year, so it needs to have that feel good factor.

The front of the album cover:

 

The inside of the album cover:

I took a piece of paper and used it to block out the area that would become the cover and taped it down with blue painter's masking tape: 

Then I used my trusty quilter's ruler and an small utility knife to cut away the excess. This will be the front of the lesson plan book:

I repeated the process with the inside of the album cover:

This will be the back cover of the lesson plan book:

I took the two covers and the interior pages to my local office supply store, where they added clear, protective covers to the front and back before spiral binding it for me. The clear covers were 49 cents, and the spiral binding was $2.99.

And I'm good to go for another year!

Summer Block 2016

© Kathy Duncan, 2016

This summer has flown by. Family obligations and lawn mowing have kept me busy.  Now that summer is almost over for this teacher, I have finally managed to get a quilt block made!

This is Bonnie Hunter's strip-pieced String X, and it is my contribution to my quilting group's summer block drawing. 

This was my first time to use a phone book page for a paper pieced foundation, and I really liked it. The paper is thin and tears away easily.  I'm sort of regretting all of the phone books I've recycled. In the future, I will be keeping them because I don't think phone books will be around much longer. Hmm...one more thing to hoard. 

We will draw for the blocks at our summer picnic on the third Thursday in August. Meanwhile, I am working on two very hush, hush blocks, one of which is finished. They will be revealed after the picnic. Maybe I am on a roll?

You can find the basic pattern one Bonnie's webpage: String X