adventures of a quilting diva

Santa Fe, New Mexico is certainly an inspiring place to visit. Here are a few highlights from my recent trip.

I love the soft, organic shapes of the adobe style buildings. The reddish tones contrast nicely with the blue-gray of the approaching storm.

Don’t miss the Georgia O’Keefe Museum if you’re visiting Santa Fe. There’s mega-inspiration inside these doors!

And there’s wonderful art out-of-doors too! Here’s Patricia Wyatt and her fantastic mixed media paintings. I love the way she paints the frame to go with the picture. Find out more about Patricia at PatricaWyatt.com.

Spring Moon is my favorite. The mountains look like stacks of fabric.

Don’t forget to stop and eat in Santa Fe. Enjoy creative southwest cooking at The Shed. Feast on fabulous food and eye candy too!

Christmas time is often a busy time, but it is a beautiful time as well. It’s probably too late to start a Christmas quilt (at least for Christmas 2009), but you can still take in the sights and get some inspiration from the season’s festive color palettes.

Stroll through a few Christmassy shops and see what colors the trees are decked out in this year. Maybe you’ll discover just the right color palette for your first quilt of 2010.

Or maybe there’s a red & green quilt in your near future. Check out my “box of ornaments” above. 3 reds + 3 greens = 9 different red & green combinations. Not all of them are what we think of as traditional for Christmas, or even for red & green quilts, but it’s interesting to consider which patterns you might choose for each one and why.

I think it would be fun to make a Christmas tree quilt out of the bottom left combo. Which combo do you like best and what kind of quilt would you make from it?

Blue quilts!!! It is surely a quilting rite of passage to make a blue and white quilt, or at least a blue and yellow quilt. I must admit, though that I’ve never, ever made one, not even a UFO. Sure, my Quilt of Dreams quilts (see March 2006 archive) have cheery blue skies, but neither is what I’d consider a blue quilt. Occasionally my inner critic accuses me of not being a genuine quilter; after all, don’t they all have scores of blue quilts in their cupboards, and stacks of blue tops just waiting to be quilted?

Fabric manufacturers produce tons of the most enticing cottons in endless shades of blue, my stash attests to that. It is easy to buy blue fabric—blue seems to be the most plentiful shade in the stores. Maybe someday I’ll put them all together in a blue charm quilt.

The blue quilt I’d like most to make however, would be real indigo. Here are two indigo samples I scanned from garments I bought in Dali, China (top right: tie dye, left: batik). I taught English-as-a-second-language in China from 1992-94 and Dali was one of my favorite places I visited. The Bai women there had cottage industries, both dying the fabric and stitching it together into many different articles for sale to tourists. If only I’d been a quilter then I would have certainly come home with bolts and bolts of indigo (and trust me this indigo is the real thing—it took oodles and oodles of washings before you could wear these things and not become dyed indigo yourself). If you ever travel to China, don’t miss Dali. Besides the great shopping, the people are friendly and charming and there are amazing historical and scenic sites to visit.

happy quilting!

I know you are supposed to create new projects for this, but I am up to my ears in UFOs, so I have changed the rules for myself: think about how I usually use the month’s color, look for things I have made in that color, and imagine new ways to use the color that I am not currently taking advantage of.

I love green and have the most green of any color in my stash, but I rarely make anything that is just green, or mostly green. Here is a little pillow (7.5 in) I made when I was just starting out in quilting. It is foundation pieced and not a beginner’s pattern—hence the little elephant button in the center to conceal the not-quite-meeting-like-they-should points. All in all though I like my little green pillow and perhaps one day I will attempt this quilt block again just to see how I’ve improved.

Although this is the only monochromatic green project I have ever made, most things have at least a touch of green, often more. I love mixing green with pink, red, turquoise blue, or purple. There’s a lot of green in nature, the other colors seem to shine in front of cool, calm colors like that. My Quilt Studio 2006 Spring ARTImage challenge piece is like that, it has a lot of green, but you notice the splashes of pink first. Did you know that time seems to pass faster in green (and blue) rooms?

happy quilting!

Hello Sunshine! is my project spectrum for April. I loved working with yellow and orange on this page. It made me feel sunny and happy even when it was cloudy outside. There is still some room for journaling when I can properly date the photos.

I resisted scrapbooking for many years. It seemed expensive and time-consuming, and I already had more than enough trouble simply getting photos into regular albums. Then I compromised by starting a birthday book for my daughter, with the reasoning I could certainly handle scrapbooking one event a year. After that it was all over. I was hooked and am now working my way back through all my photos.

I just love scrapbooking! It’s almost like quilting with photos, paper and tape. Maybe someday I’ll try a scrapbook quilt or a quilt scrapbook!

happy scrapbooking!

Completely on the spur-of-the-moment I decided to take part in Project Spectrum today. March is the month for red and pink, so with less than one day remaining, I scanned in some of my pink and red dear diary blocks and photoshopped them together into a mini digital quilt.

Actually, much of my effort this month went into the boucle jacket I am working on. I have made quite a lot of progress; alas I am too mortified to show it under construction. As you can see from the fabric scraps above, it is VERY pink!

happy quilting!