Here are some highlights from Houston, hopefully some wonderful things you wouldn’t get to see otherwise unless you also attended yourself. First is one of Annika’s (and my) favorite 2007 journal quilts, Forgotten Flowers by Frances Holliday Alford.
And this is Nostalgia for Japan by Tokiko Kashiwagi. These very large appliquéd flowers are outlined in sashiko. See the detail below for a better view.
I love the way it looks like a little ribbon of white polka dots.
Here is Sheri Wood and her prize-winning Night Blooming Dahlia. She started dying fabrics because it was hard to find the colors she wanted where she lived. Now she dyes all her fabric herself. Sheri hand-dyed each petal individually on this quilt.
You just have to see the back of the quilt. It’s as lovely as the front!
Saradean Hallman made Summer Dreams for her granddaughter. Can you tell that I love bright colored flowers on black?
I also love yellow quilts. This is Carnival Calliope by Kathy Kelley.
Taupe quilts are charming too. Mayumi Ueda made My Sweet Town oh so sweet.
Here is another cute storybook quilt from the 2007 Hoffman Challenge exhibit, Costa Rica: Our Beloved Home by the East Mountain Quilters of Costa Rica. I love the 2008 Hoffman Challenge fabric. I forgot to take a photo, but thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can see it here. What you can’t tell from the image is that it’s a larger scale print than the 2007 fabric was. I liked the pattern and the colors for 2007 but wished the pattern had been printed about five times larger. I also got to see Debra Spincic‘s wonderful (and prize winning!) crazy quilt, Little Flower Urchins in person.
I brought my favorite Alex Anderson book, Fabric Shopping, to The Quilt Show booth for Alex to sign. It’s a really fun book, not just about how to buy fabric, but also about color, value, and how to best use the different kinds of fabric you find in a quilt shop. It has a great selection of quilt patterns to make. I LOVE the Hearts quilt at the back of the book. That pattern alone is worth purchasing the book for.
And the shopping of course! I bought some vintage Japanese fabrics, sashiko thread and needles, and hand-painted Tussah silk fiber, among assorted other things. I hope to do some experimenting with the Tussah silk and my Clover hand needle-felting tool to see if I’d like to really get into felting and buy one of those needle-felting machines. As you can see, Annika enjoyed the shopping as well.
Can you tell what I’m going to be doing? I went crazy for beads this time. Most of these are from Beyond Beadery. I’ve never seen so many seed beads in one place before. (I know, I’ve lived a sheltered life!) I felt like a kid in a candy store, but frankly these beads are so much more delicious (even better than Chocovic or Scharffen Berger I must admit), and they’re calorie-free to boot.
happy quilting! Next post I’ll tell you about Houston, day 2.

Here is a beautiful detail from Gloria McKeehan’s miniature quilt which took first place at the recent Miniature Quilt Lovers Guild show. She brought a lovely selection of her own miniature quilts as well as those of her fellow guild members to the October Moonlighters‘ meeting for a miniature quilt trunk show. I love how the sashiko sets off the appliqué just perfectly.

For those of you attending the IQA Quilt Festival this week, be sure to look for Gloria’s prize winning (and very large, not miniature at all) quilt in the World of Beauty exhibit.
The Freehand Quilting workshop with Joe Cunningham was a blast. Redlands Unified School District was out for the week because of the wildfires, so Annika joined in the fun. Here she is with Joe and the kitty she worked on.
And a closer view of her and her fine work. She really enjoyed being a part of the class.
Finally my practice sandwich. This is a sampling of designs you can quilt freehand by hand (no marking!). There is an excess of hanging threads because we had to keep moving on to the next pattern so we could try them all in one day. We also used a thread twice as long as usual so you can start quilting from one end to the middle and then quilt from the other end when you’re done. GREAT TIP! That way you don’t have to knot at the beginning. We learned a great technique for ending the thread without knots as well.

I enjoyed doing the feather most of all. I’m imagining all sorts of fanciful feathers I’d love to try my hand at quilting. Perhaps I’ll bring a sketchbook along on the flight to Houston and see what they look like out of my head and onto the paper so I can see what sort of spaces they might fill.

The next day Joe gave a wonderfully amusing lecture and trunk show. Go to Joe’s website for links to some video highlights of his presentation at our guild. Check out the gallery as well to see photos of his latest quilts (they’re great in person, but nice in pictures as well).

Stay tuned for Houston highlights this weekend!

Ta-da! Here is the (full size) result of My Stars, the Sally Collins workshop I took at CBQ last month. I learned that there is so much to pay attention to in piecing, from cutting to sewing to pressing to pinning to sewing to pressing and so on, that if you do each step carefully and correctly, you will come out with a better block in the end. Wow! Now I feel comfortable and even excited to mix a little bit of piecing when I design my appliqué quilts (and this coming from the one who for nearly a year did not even piece borders for my work. Instead I was cutting a hole in the middle of the fabric like a mat board rather than piecing together four strips for my borders.) More proof comes from the latest installment in my basket series, Blue Christmas (below).
When you compare it to the last basket quilt I pieced, the triangle corners, especially the basket feet and that bottom background triangle, there is a world of difference, coming out not only much better, but also more easily.

At the regular guild meeting Sally did a trunk show of amazing really large miniatures, including the ones from her latest book, Mastering Precision Piecing. When you look at the photos of these quilts, you would never know how small they really are. In the photos they look like they could easily be king size bed quilts, not 40 inch wall hangings. Many pieces are as tiny as 1/4 inch. I think some may have even been 1/8. This is just piecing, not paper piecing or anything. The detail is astounding!

Here is the view of the San Bernardino Mountains from my studio window tonight.
It’s not very impressive except for the fact that yesterday night, the mountains were outlined in red indicating where the wildfires were burning. The lights you see are city lights in the foothills, not fire. They’re hazy looking because since the winds died down all the smoke and ash has simply settled in the air. At least that’s good for slowing the spread of the wildfires. Please continue to remember in your prayers the people who have already lost their homes and those whose homes are still in danger, including the firefighters.

Tomorrow I’m off to a workshop to learn Freehand Hand Quilting from Joe Cunningham, AKA Joe the Quilter. I’m imagining it’s something like doodling with your quilting needle. Sounds like it should be fun!

I’ve been too busy doing quilty stuff to blog much lately, but here’s something interesting (and quick): The Right Brain vs. Left Brain Test. Which way do you see the dancer spinning? I came out completely right-brained (no surprise there). I tried every eye trick I could think of to see it the other way around, but I just couldn’t do it.

If I showed it to my DH he would come out left-brained, I am certain of that. We really do look at things from completely different perspectives, and we complement each other perfectly in that respect. I think what makes it work for us is that we accept each other and our differences just the way we are. Usually we have a sense of humor about how different we are, and can laugh together about it rather than fret about the other not understanding.

I’m not sure about my DD. She probably has one of those elastic brains that can switch between the right and left faster than a TV remote. She’s into math big time, the harder it is, the more it interests her, but she has a huge imagination as well.

I’ll get my camera going soon and show you what I’ve been doing quilt-wise for the past few weeks. Hopefully by this weekend.

happy quilting!

Artist Laurel Burch passed away Thursday, September 13, 2007, from a lifelong battle with osteoporosis. Her art has touched the heart of many collectors and fans for it’s magical beauty. I never knew of her years of pain and suffering because her artwork was always so joyful. Often you see artists expressing their pain with dark and depressing imagery, sometimes as therapy to get through it, and other times simply to simmer in it. Laurel used her imagination and her art to create a joyful, colorful, wonderful place where she and all who view her art could enjoy a brief respite from stress, pain, and sorrow. She was truly someone who, as the quote goes, lit a candle instead of cursing the darkness. My prayers and condolences go out for her family and friends.

The angel cat above is from a Laurel Burch Holiday Collection fabric from Clothworks, I’m not sure which year. You can read more about Laurel Burch at: her website, www.laurelburch.com and at the Marin Independent Journal Online, www.marinij.com/marin/ci_6923487.

Today at 10:15 a.m. my IQA World of Beauty entry packet arrived in Houston (Zephirine Drouhin). It took me most of last Friday to get it all ready. First were the forms to fill out, then I had to retake the photos because I couldn’t find the hi-res ones I took for Road to California, and I didn’t like the ones I took last week. I actually ended up doing not one, but three separate photo shoots for Houston because the camera angle made my quilt un-square, one of the edges was curling up, etc. Eventually though, I had a CD worthy for jurors’ eyes.

Next came getting a suitable 4×6 print to include with the entry. I had to go back, count em, five times to three different photo processing shops. The first one I e-mailed, actually ahead of time. My DH had the membership card so he had to pick it up from the counter for me. Two of the quilt’s edges were cut off. The rules state “full view” so I couldn’t send that one in, and I couldn’t send my DH back in anyway to have it redone, so the next day I brought my memory stick to photo processor #2 to use the photo maker kiosk. Of course it was broken.

The next day (Friday) after finishing the rest of my submission package, I took my memory stick to processor #3. The photo maker couldn’t read it because the jpeg was in a folder, or so I thought. I brought it home and took it out of the folder. Back at processor #3, the machine still couldn’t read it. By now, time was really running out, but I was determined to finish it off that day, so I went back home and got online to e-mail the image in, only I couldn’t download the uploading software. Waiting on hold for tech support, I figured out on my own that the site was incompatible with Firefox, but it worked just fine with IE.

One hour later, back at processor #3 I go to pick up my photo. Ice cream girl comes over but can’t find my order anywhere, so she calls photo girl over. Photo girl looks in all the same places ice cream girl looked, but no photo anywhere. Finally she looks in the e-mail and there it was, still not printed. So she burns a CD and takes it over to the photo maker and prints it out there. Well, I could have certainly done that myself and saved an hour. I thought at least they would use the real photo printing machine. It was oversaturated to say the least, so not as “color correct” as I would have liked, but at least there was no color shift and all the quilt’s edges were there.

It’s funny, as the entry process became increasingly troublesome, I became more determined to finish the job. I made it to the post office at 4:20 p.m. with a complete package, ten minutes before closing time. Wow! Did it ever feel good to get that entry off my hands. I certainly could have waited until Monday to mail it, but I probably would have ruined my weekend with worry. As it was I had a great weekend, lots of fun, and lots of quilt designing too! Stay tuned because I’m going to finally have stuff to show you later this week, as well as an update on the manuscript.

This weekend we went on a spiritual retreat up at Pine Springs Ranch (near Idylwild, CA) and were graced with 4 inches of snow! The kids were ecstatic, needless to say, and a wonderful time was had by all. The mountains were gorgeous, but alas, I was so wrapped up with the sledding adventures that I forgot to take some photos of the scenery. I’m sure you will forgive me that small oversight when you watch my video clip. This was Annika’s first time sledding and she was unstoppable.

This week I’m working on the raggy quilts. The plaid one is finished, except for the washing cycle. The snowman one is still in progress, but coming along nicely, 3 out of 8 rows completed (the other 5 rows are actually done too, they’re just not connected to each other yet).

The snowman quilt is the one with the December 1 deadline, but I wanted the plaid one for testing techniques. I learned quite a bit, and the snowman quilt will be all the better for it. I learned how to minimize shifting, to watch out for tucks and how to make the chunky corners line up better. The homespun plaids are not as stiff as the quilting cottons, so the mistakes are better hidden in the plaid. I am quite pleased with how it turned out even before the wash cycle.

Rian, you were right, it is a bit much to complete by December 1, but only a little much. It will be close. If I don’t get them to a laundromat before my guild meeting, it won’t matter all that much. As you can see by the detail below, the fleece fringe is more prominent than the cotton, and the fleece is not going to fray in the wash anyway. There may not be a whole lot of difference in the before and after wash/dry.

I’m also working on my FFFC challenge piece, which is to be a non-traditional shape (not a rectangle or square). I’ve drafted a snowflake pattern and will start working on it December 1 after my guild meeting. It’s due December 2, so I’ll have to be late with this one. I’m looking forward to working on this. It should be a real challenge! Check out some of the early birds here. They’ve done a great job!

happy quilting!

The night before Thanksgiving I so wanted some pumpkin bread for Thanksgiving. It’s been years and years (at least a decade actually) since I’d had the really good homemade kind, like my mother makes each holiday season. So I set out to make some, not pumpkin muffins, the real soft, moist delicious pumpkin bread that you have to bake for an hour or more.

To make a long story short, I don’t know what kind of recipe I used, but two hours later it was still not cooked through even though it was in mini bread tins. Although it looked yummy, about the only thing it was good for was making my garbage can smell fresh. Every time I opened the lid, holiday scents wafted through the kitchen. In the end my DD and I made some pumpkin brownies Thanksgiving morning, that while not my momma’s pumpkin bread, were pretty darn good.

I’ll have to ask my mother to send me her recipe so I can have pumpkin bread for Christmas dinner. If anyone has a great pumpkin bread recipe you’d like to share, I’ll try making yours too. Hope your Thanksgiving was wonderful!