Category Archives: UFO

purse-a-licious

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Once again I left my camera at home when I went to my guild meeting, so you’ll have to go to Karen Cunagin’s website to taste the eye candy we got to enjoy. I did manage to get my wallet (with the $$ inside) into my tote bag so I was able to purchase these marvelous purse handles.
Handles like these could rescue even the most dreadfully dull handbag, but luckily I have something better in mind…
This is a purse I started some years back, made from silk dupioni with cotton batik folded flowers (from Rebecca Wat’s book, Fantastic Fabric Folding) and beaded and hand-quilted accents. I made up my own pattern as I went along so I wasn’t sure how I should finish it off and besides that, I didn’t have any handles inspiring enough to move me forward to completion.

I’m not crazy enough to add this project to my holiday to-do list, but I believe it would be a perfect new year’s project with a goal of finishing it by spring. It would make a great spring bag if I do say so myself. (^_^)

what was I thinking?

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Tonight at CBQ‘s Moonlighters quilt guild meeting Cathy Brown gave a wonderful trunk show. Unfortunately I left my camera at home so I can’t share any of Cathy’s quilts with you. However, she did show a couple of Convergence quilts, one she made and one by her husband. This inspired me to bring out my Convergence UFO from 2003 or 2004 when I bought the Ricky Tims Convergence Quilts book.

What was I thinking when I picked out those fabrics? I can only guess that since my stash was not as voluminous back then as it is now, I probably didn’t want to use any of my few hand-dyes until I tested the technique out first. I’m showing it to you here tilted on its side because when it’s turned horizonally half the clouds are upside down. Now none of the clouds are facing the right direction. Maybe it could be some kind of surreal Magritte-type thing.

long time no blog

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hello everyone!

No, I haven’t disappeared completely from the face of the blogosphere. I’ve just been busy on my book, and that project is a real diva! As far as creative in-progress projects go for me, there can be only one diva on the stage at a time. She won’t share the spotlight (aka my time and attention in the studio) with anything else like say the 3 tenors do, and that includes my blog! I have been working on random small stuff the past month and a half though, so I’m going to get my digital camera out and share them with you here in the next several weeks, and get out there and visit you at your blogs as well, find out what you’ve been up to.

The first thing I have to show you is the final block that’s going into my basket sampler. I made this one only 2 days ago and will probably assemble the center panel this weekend. If you’ve been following along, I used this block in a wall hanging in February (see it here).

I can’t wait to share my book with you! I’ve had a fantastic time playing with my beads and making all the different samples and projects, so it hasn’t been all that bad abandoning my quilting and blogging for awhile. It feels strange, sitting at my sewing machine again and here on the Blogger dashboard as well. It is good to be back though. I’m finally going to participate in the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge next week, which I have not done since February 2007. Wow! Has it really been that long?

happy summer quilting! ^_^

quilt every day

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the time of your life
At CBQ today Julie Hocker presented the lecture, “The Time of Your Life!” where she gave tips on how to make more time for quilting and other things you want to do. So, for all of March I am going to quilt every day for 10 minutes and see how much I accomplish by the end of the month. Each day I will be sewing my rail fence blocks together for 10 minutes and should have a quilt top or two come April.
I challenge you to join me in March for just 10 minutes a day on any UFO you have in your stash (or a new quilt project if you wish). That leaves you 1430 minutes each day to do all your other “stuff”.

So, if you would like to participate just leave me a comment saying so on this post. After March is over, post the photos of what you accomplished on your blog and email the link to me by April 7. I will post the complete list of links on my blog by April 10 so you can see what everyone did. Even if you don’t participate, be sure to return in April to check out the list!

tack room to tea room
Yesterday I attended a fun workshop with Julie Hocker called “Tack Room to Tea Room” which is a wearable art vest. It’s her newest design, check it out on the link above. You can use the different techniques to make a vest or put them in a quilt. I started the vest but just have a baggie of pieces so I’ll wait to show you until I have a unit or two completed.

happy quilting!

adventures of a quilting diva

quilting in roswell

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In my studio, aka Roswell, I try out interesting techniques and practice new skills. I usually either master the skill and leave my practice piece behind, or I discover that said technique is not nearly as appealing (for me) to do as it is to look at it. Either way, I now have a sizable (and growing) collection of UFOs. I have learned to live with that. If I gain a new skill (hand quilting, redwork, etc.) I want to use in my latest inspiration, it’s served its purpose. Same thing if it turns out I don’t enjoy the technique quite as much as I thought I would.

Take for example the fabric “grass skirt” hanging from my pin cushion at right. I recently borrowed a book on woven quilts from the library and decided to give it a try. (I’m not sure why I did, usually looking at the eye candy is enough for me.) It was interesting to tear the fabric into strips, although not exhilarating as many have described it. Tearing the black print did bad things to the fabric though, as the threads got pulled out of place and you could see little white pin pricks where the thread came out from underneath the thread above it. I briefly considered coloring in all the little dots with a pigment pen, that is until I came to my senses. I have satisfied my curiosity where woven quilts are concerned.

At the last Moonlighters meeting, Jessica Cook gave an interesting talk on UFOs (unfinished fabric objects) and OPPs (other people’s projects). It was great to see the way she could take other quilters’ orphan blocks and unfinished projects and complete them, sometimes in the intended way and sometimes in her own way. One tip she had along the lines of “just do it” helps reduce anxiety about less than perfect free-motion machine quilting:

When quilting around shapes such as leaves and flowers, if you happen to go around twice, it looks like a mistake; if you go around three times, it’s embroidery!

At any rate here are four 6-inch blocks that I made some years back when I was teaching myself piecing. The plan was to make a sampler quilt in pink and green. I can’t remember why I stopped at only four blocks, but I still like them at any rate.

My plan was to wow you with a complete list of all the UFOs in my studio, but I changed my mind. If I make a list, I would have to search for them all, because I could not stand having an incomplete list, and a list would probably induce guilt for not finishing them. As it stands, it’s comforting to know that they’re out there, and whenever my mind is mush, but my hands want something to stitch, I can pull a UFO from the shelf and get straight to work.

BTW the full size pattern and instructions for Crazy for Baskets are all now available on the Citrus Belt Quilters’ website.

happy quilting!

adventures of a quilting diva

ufo alert

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Last Thursday I attended a CBQ (Citrus Belt Quilters) workshop: Christine’s Collage Vest with Christine Barnes. I’d never had the nerve to tackle collage before. I’d done collage-like quilt techniques before, for example my threads quilt below, except those were always pictorial, whether from an actual photograph or from my head, never abstract. There was just some sort of mental block there, which as you can see is now gone! It was a fun play day and it will be interesting to see everyone’s finished vests.

It took one day to lay out, pin, and start to stitch down the vest back. Now I have another mammoth of a UFO to complete, but I also have one more UFO completed: I found out that I didn’t need to make sleeves for the CBQ mini quilt show quilts after all, so I took the time set aside to make sleeves for the other two miniatures for the show (it’s not easy being green and mimsical) to “bind” my penny for a spool of thread wallhanging. Actually I glued yarn around the edges and called it a day. (Usually I do a blanket stitch or something around the yarn, but this time I couldn’t find a thread color that worked with both the black border on the front and the white border on the back.)

Friday Christine Barnes presented a wonderful lecture on color and a great trunk show (enjoy a virtual trunk show here). As you have probably noticed, I am a fan of bright colors. After pondering the color wheel, I went grocery shopping and came home with a color wheel of produce! I should have set up and taken a photo, but now the blueberries are already gone and that was my only blue. Hopefully the rest won’t turn into a rotting UFO! Those bright fruits and veggies are so much more appealing than all that processed corruption passing for food these days. The only trouble is that natural is a lot more work than processed, so I’ll have to make it a point to cook every day, or at least prepare a few really grand salads since it’s getting so hot.

I’ve been doing more thinking about the manuscript than actual writing this week, but I did sketch out a design for one of the quilts for the book that had previously been only a vague notion.

happy quilting!

adventures of a quilting diva

i’m still here, stitching away!

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Hello everyone,

No, I haven’t dropped off the planet, but I had a deadline sneak up on me … my first quilting article, actually will be a regular column in Cotton Spice magazine (subscribe here) … and class preparations as well.

I’ve been working on other things too:

On the right is a UFO, a jacket actually from some years ago, which was originally a “muslin” to test out a pattern before I cut into my silk tweed. Well, I didn’t quite have enough fabric, so the sleeves became 3/4 (which was actually allright with me), halfway through I stopped looking at the directions and started doing my own thing so by the time I got down to the end I didn’t know how to finish it. Then I decided I didn’t like the pattern, or at least it wasn’t quite what I wanted for the silk. Wanting something to wear I recently decided on how to finish it off. I folded up the serged edges and wrapped them with novelty yarn. I’m nearly done and should have a new jacket by the time it gets really hot here.

On the left is another cell phone caddy I made for my mother’s birthday. It fit her phone, but just barely. I love how when you cut this fabric you get such a variety of different-looking pieces.

I’m still quilting on the March 12x12x12, which is about to become 12x12x4. I suspected at the beginning that I was biting off more than I could chew, and it didn’t take too long for me to realize my suspicion was correct. It came down to the question: Do I want to make 12 quilts that are pared down or would I rather embellish to my heart’s content and make fewer?

Finally is my aborted attempt at the 2007 Hoffmann Challenge. I love the colors and feel of the challenge fabric. I just wish it was a larger scale. I wanted to make a whole bunch of these flowers and connect them together, but it became so tedious, well you can see how far I got. Maybe I’ll get inspired and pick it up later. I don’t think I’ve completely given up on it yet, but almost.


happy quilting!

adventures of a quilting diva

wip wednesday #9

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Wow! It’s been a busy week. Here’s what I’ve been working on:

1. February 12x12x12 quilt is coming along. It’s been fused, appliquéd, beaded, and basted. I’m going to try hand quilting with YLI Jean Stitch in hot pink. Here’s a sneak peek (right).

btw: I haven’t given up on the January 12x12x12 sashiko quilt. I’m not quite ready to start that one yet, and didn’t want to be perpetually behind the whole year.

2. January FFFC quilt center panel is fused (left). The red spool looks odd in the photo. My heart sunk when I noticed that, but when I checked the real thing it looked fine. :-) It was hanging on my design “curtain” and must not have been flat against the wall.

I’m not going to appliqué the pieces down, just machine free-motion quilt over the whole thing (any suggestions for type of thread to use?). I’m also choosing the border fabrics. I really like the way this one turned out and might make another one larger with needle-turn appliqué. This one is 8 inches square. (That’s an easy size to do when I use my computer because I can print it all out on one page.)

3. CBQ miniature challenge (no I didn’t make all of these blocks in one week, but I did do some!) is made from a UFO I started in 2004. It’s Housepitality from Fons & Porter’s Love of Quilting Jan/Feb 2004 issue, except really, really small. The original house blocks are supposed to be 10 inches. I’m not sure what size mine will be (right) since they’re not finished yet. The square-in-a-square blocks you see there will finish at 1/2 inch.

4. Hand quilting practice almost every day. I’m working on making the stitches even. They’re generally about 10 stitches to the inch.

5. Bling Bling scarf is up to 27 inches long. I’ve finished one ball of yarn and am hesitant to start the new one (it’s a different dye lot and looks really different) for fear it won’t look right. Maybe I’ll go back to the store with the scarf and see if there’s some that looks more like my scarf than the one I have.

6. Studio cleaning because with this many projects going on you can’t work in a messy place!

7. New blogger is adding line breaks when I upload photos and in general is misbehaving, making this post take entirely way too long. At least there were no problems to fix when my blog migrated. I like that I can add labels.

happy quilting!

the mother of all UFOs

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Here it is: the Mother of all UFOs. I started this mosaic-applique quilt in January 2005 and worked on it for a few months before abandoning it for two not-quite-so-ambitious quilts I finished last year. You probably cannot tell what it is going to be. It is actually from a photo of my daughter on the carousel at Disneyland when she was probably 3 years old. (You can see her clothes-the shirt is red, the pants a print, socks and shoes in yellow and light blue. Around her in various colors are saddle, harness, etc. The rolling green stripes are part of the background. The column on the right is the center of the carousel.)

The background is 48″ square and the mosaics average 1/2 inch, some a little smaller, some larger. They are fused on, then zig-zagged down in two shades of decorative thread with the machine. I used one of those blue washout pens to mark the background, which has for the most part disappeared, so I basically will have to go by sketches and a blown-up print of the original photo. Because of all the handling it gets, I can’t fuse too many mosaics down at once or they will start to lift off before they are sewn in place. That’s OK though, because it makes them easier to remove if I want to change some of them around. Last year I kept a notebook of the running total of mosaics used and even calculated an estimate of how many pieces the finished quilt would have (I think it was in the thousands). If I want to know in the end, I’d better find it or count them over again before I start adding more again.

Since I would like to finish the carousel quilt before my daughter graduates from college (she starts kindergarten in July) I am going public with my declaration to work on this quilt each and every Monday–Mondays are now officially to be known as “Mosaic Monday.” I will keep you updated monthly with my progress, large or small. And sometimes the progress is very small indeed. I would often work on it for hours at a stretch, and in the end, the quilt did not look much different than when I started. I can imagine how much less would be done if I had decided to hand applique the mosaics down.

In the April 2005 issue of QNM on page 10 there is a mosaic-applique quilt “Pussy Cat, Pussy Cat, Where Have You Been” by Lorraine Carthew, which won the viewers’ choice award for wall quilts at the 2004 AQS show in Paducah. I heard somewhere later that she did her mosaics by hand. It is simply amazing, and the fact that it is hand appliqued makes it all the more!

I, on the other hand, made a conscious decision from the start to not try to hide my stitches, rather to integrate them into the design (You can see the light and dark thread on the yellow and lavender pieces on the detail above). Although I have since learned to do hand applique quite well, I definitely do not regret my choice of machine applique for this one. I know my own patience level, and do not fool myself on whether or not I will actually ever finish a project. It may take years, but someday I will finish this one!

adventures of a quilting diva