"+" and wonky squares quilt for breast cancer recovery

My mom was diagnosed with breast cancer a few weeks ago.  The schedule for doctor and hospital visits has been (thankfully) rapid, and she just had surgery yesterday.  I wanted to make her a lap quilt for the surgery recovery and chemotherapy, but did not have a lot of time (major understatement!) to finish something.

I knew I wanted to use some sort of cheery fabric, but not too fluorescent as is the trend at the moment, because neither of us likes the early 90's look for home decor.
So, I tried pre-cuts for the first time.  I got 2 charm packs of Glimma and 2 of Bella from Missouri Star Quilt Company - these had like 42 squares in each of them.  Both fabric lines are by Lotta Jansdotter.
I also picked up a jelly roll and charm pack of white fabric as well.  Then I started brainstorming, which looked something like this:

I was going to use the jelly roll strips to surround the solid squares and use the patterned fabrics to make a plus-sign grid around these squares.
It seemed like everything was working ok... until I realized I was 0.5" too short for the solid-white squares because I forgot about seam allowances when I sewed the jelly rolls to the squares. Soo... I decided to go wonky and log-cabined extra jelly roll strips around two sides of each square, then cut the square down to the correct size to produce randomly non-centered color squares:

 

And I ended up with something that I found more pleasing than my original design.

 I wanted to do something special for the back.  I liked the pink I used on the front, and how it went with the gray/brown patterns from the Lotta Jansdotter collections.  So after messing around a bit, I put together a breast cancer ribbon combined with a heart.  I had to commandeer some light pink fabric from my stepdaughter's project, but there was extra and hey, I paid for it anyway :)

 Once again, the cat "helped" a great deal.  She and I managed to completely break this cheapo Singer machine trying to finish the binding the morning my mom went to the hospital for surgery.

 And here it is!  I am very happy with the results, especially since I was able to get the quilt sandwich to work so that I didn't have any wrinkles in the back.  I basically have to tape everything down to the carpet in the living room, which is not convenient for anyone but is the only way this seems to work for me.
Front:

 Back:

Best of all, my mom loved it and they already used it to cover her up and prop her up in the car on the way home after surgery. 

Half Square Triangle Quilt

 I finally, FINALLY finished my version of the Half-Square Triangle Block of the Month Quilt for 2012 by Jeni Baker.  It only took me a little more than a year to complete.

 For one thing, I had a lot of unwanted help.  For example:

 I would say that my cat Sushi is not so much a Quilt Inspector as a Quilt Inhibitor and overall Highly Effective Cat Blocker at any activity that prevents her from sitting on my lap or putting her face in my face.  She knows very well that her tail is interfering with the one thing I am trying to concentrate on.  In this case, cutting 3.5" strips for the back of the quilt.

 Here is Sushi holding down the cut strips for the back of the quilt for me, in case a sudden gust of wind finds its way through our house.  Or another cat gets close and tries to claim the fabric.

 Here we are sewing/preventing sewing the strips together.  There wasn't too much of a plan for the back of the quilt except to use up as much of the leftover material from the HSTs on the front of the quilt. 

 

Excuse me for trying to use the sewing machine.  

 Here we are quilting the HST quilt.  This is the first time I used my old-timey Singer to quilt and bind.  It was the next-to-last time I used the white new Singer to piece, as I busted it on the next project.

And here is the quilt, made for my husband and just in time for Father's Day 2012 2013!  But wait...  something is not quite right...

 There are 16 squares for a 12-month block-of-the-month quilt...
Long story short, I started this tutorial in early 2012 but ended up having some significant surgery and recovery starting in May.  At some point, I just decided to try to do what I could, as fast as I could.  So, I started doubling up blocks - I did two of the same block.  I still didn't finish in the summer, and so I just ended up picking my favorite blocks from the whole year and doing two of each to make 16 total.  Seems fitting that I am missing some months' blocks as I felt like I missed some months from last year myself!

 This is the strippy back.  I ended up organizing three sets of strips in an intentionally imperfect tone gradient and then flipping the middle set to create some contrast.

A raised bed garden

It's been a while since I updating the garden status.  After the grassy mess of last fall, I decided to go nuclear and cover the garden with cardboard, build raised beds, and fill them with new dirt.
Stupid Bermuda Grass!

This photo was taken in May as the peas finally started to take off.