Sisters: A Quilting Runner and a Running Quilter

I've been having a great time reading all of the great entries into my first giveaway.  Thank you for entering! If you haven't entered yet, you still have until 8:00 p.m. EST on Sunday, August 28th. Good luck!

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Just before we left on vacation, my sister and niece came up for a visit. They live about five hours away by car, but we manage a visit one way or another about five or six times a year. I miss them a lot, but it was so great to spend time with them again. My niece, who will be turning three soon, is such a card and makes me laugh, just like her mother!

This visit had an ulterior purpose -- to help my sister finish her second quilt. Like her first quilt, my sister hand pieced these blocks. They are made with Japanese indigos from Kallisti Quilts, but I don't know the pattern, I'm afraid. Since each of the blocks were already sandwiched and quilted, we decided to use a three-stitch zig zag stitch to get the blocks to form rows and then zig zag stitch the rows together. We then added a simple quilt-as-you-go border. I hadn't done this before, but it was surprisingly easy. For some pop, Dan chose and attached a complementary red binding. All my sis has to do now is finish the binding. Woo hoo! Congrats Dan, you did a wonderful job with it. I love how the blocks make the circle effect!

Cute story tangent: As we were starting to lay out the squares, Patrick came into the room. "Oooh, what are you doing? Is that a mug rug?" "A mug rug?" says Dan. "What the heck is a mug rug?" "Oh, you know, you put your coffee mug on it and there's space for maybe a pastry or spoon," replies Patrick. Out of the mouth of quilting babes!

Playing with the layout

Back:

 Front (binding is attached, but not finished):

For those who are curious about the title of the post, my sister loves to run. It's her passion, dare I say obsession? It's a family trait apparently. Dan has been running pretty much every day for years. I'm pretty sure she ran on her wedding day. :) Since she's learning how to quilt, I figure I should probably make some attempt at running. Up until this summer, I would say that my sister is a runner who quilts and I'm a quilter who runs for the bus. Alas (don't you think we should find more opportunities to use 'Alas'? It's such a great word!), I have to scratch out the 'for the bus' part now because I ran my first 5K race while I was away. Yay! And I actually finished it. And I finished about 13 minutes faster than I had been able to do at home on our treadmill! Woo hoo!

While I would have loved to have run the race with my sister (who I think probably would have won it, looking at the winning women's race time), I did have the awesome opportunity to run the race with my sister-in-law. She was fabulous, and kept my spirits up and my thoughts away from what I probably would have been thinking, "why the heck am I doing this?" A huge, huge, huge thank you goes to her (she reads my blog now and then so let's see if she sees this)! Now I just have to figure out what quilt design will hook her on quilting. ;)

I'm not sure how on earth I lucked into getting two great sisters, but I'm very grateful for both of them!