New projects are in the works – hopefully pictures soon!

I also have been preparing for a lecture on curved piecing to give at the Flying Needles Quilt Guild in Niceville, Florida. My daughter is going to come along for the day. Mark and I have been working at a feverish pace in order to get four patterns ready to take. Scott, at Digital Now in Pensacola, was a huge help to me today and got all of the large patterns printed on their special printers. There was a little problem because the iron-on paper wanted to stick to the press. (Opps!) But despite the problems, he got them all printed for me. I was also able to make several kits for each pattern with fabric form the Quilting Station in Pace, Florida. Ellen was so sweet in helping me get the fabrics pulled and ready. I will pack the quilts tonight. The Fear-less Curves program is one of my favorites to give because I love piecing curves.

Here are pictures of the quilts that we got patterns ready for. Hopefully very soon in the future we will have the on-line store ready for the patterns and other fun stuff.

I also am getting quilts ready to send to the GSQA Quilt Show this weekend. I picked up my wholecloth quilt that had been hanging at Derrell’s in Pensacola and decided that the binding MUST be fixed. It is a large quilt! Last night Emilie and I got it all ripped off. I trimmed it and sewed it back on- now just the hand sewing part. At least have most of the day on Friday to get it done.

Sorry, such a long post. So much more to say- but so much more to do!!!

I also have had the distraction of a wonderful camping trip with the family. I was afraid that I would not be able to sit still for 2 days – I did not take any projects with me – but I did it!

We also have a new addition to the family – a velveteen rabbit named Rabiseuraus Rex – Rex for short.

Baby Aaron’s quilt is finally ready to be shipped off. (He is my newest nephew.) Of course, he is already smiling and cooing – but late is better than never.

I also have been working on a new lecture on color. I will be presenting it to the Pensacola Quilter’s Guild in June and then again in July to the Santa Rosa Quilt Guild. I challenged myself to make a small quilt from each of the main color groupings. I was going to try to make the same quilt in at least 4 color ways but discovered I really only like the Analagous color way and had to change up the design for some of the others. I will post some pictures of them when they are done. I probably will only have the tops done for the first program but hopefully will have them all quilted later this summer.

I am busy preparing for my new “adventure”. I have decided to start a summer sewing program for 8-11 year olds. I am really excited about this and the class is filling up. I think I may need to buy 3 instead of 2 sewing machines. (Oh bummer!) Can one really have too many machines?

My sewing goal the next month is to finish up some projects that have been sitting in my incomplete pile. Today I quilted small quilt, made the binding for it and got one side sewed on. I also put binding on 3 other quilts that have been waiting for some time. (One of the quilts, I had to replace the binding on that my son had worn out.)

(The white and blue ribbon in the background is from a different show.)

My Lily (In the Garden I) got a 1st and a Judges Recognition for machine quilting.

“In Her Arms” got a 2nd place. (It is hard competing against yourself. Both of my large curved pieced quilts ended up in the same category.)

“Serenity” – my fairy quilt got a 3rd in the art quilt category.

“Hummingbirds in my Garden” – the whole cloth quilt got a 3rd place.

The show set-up is just beautiful and it is so much fun to look at all the fabulous quilts. I will try to post pictures of the show soon. Tomorrow we start teaching classes!

I am hoping to be part of the judging process on Monday. We start setting up on Wednesday. We are going to have an official “ribbon-cutting” Thursday night at the preview. I will enjoy seeing the quilts that night – the rest of the show I will be in the classroom. Emilie has the last part of the week off school so she can help and enjoy being part of the madness. (That is one of the many joys of home-schooling.)

Here are pictures of the quilts that I entered.

“In Her Arms” 2009

“Serenity” 2009

“In the Garden I” 2010

“Hummingbirds in my Garden” (whole cloth) 2010

My next project is putting together a lecture on color – one of my favorite topics. I am hoping to get several small sample quilts made for it. I will post pictures of my progress.

I am also brain-storming for my next big quilt. I am thinking it will be of a butterfly but am having a hard time with what technique to use – curved piecing or fibers. Maybe I will have to do one of each!

I have been feeling the need to touch some new fabric and have the perfect excuse for it – my newest nephew was born today. This is idea for a quilt for him. I am still working on color placement.

I have the backing and batting ready for my next project. I will be starting the quilting on my curve-pieced lily hopefully this weekend. I am a little tentative about it because I bought a batik for the backing and a black polyester batting. I am following , “you never know until you try”, but this is really hard to do this on a contest quilt.

This is the gift we made for teachers and other close friends for Christmas. They each got a hot pad or two and a canister of hot cocoa and Russian tea. The kids helped me fold and press all the points. I found a couple of these blocks that were made by my Grandmother. She was planning on making a quilt with them and had several pieced together. Her colors were baby-poop brown and green.

I have been making good progress on my whole cloth quilt. I have this one and another quilt to get done by February! Very scary!

I also have been working on quilts for the 2010 PQG quilt show. I am happily working on another quilter’s quilt. She gave me such a great “canvas” to work with. She was kind enough to let me post pictures of my progress, as long as I did not mention her name.

Since this time of year is often so busy, it is easy to overlook the true meaning of the season – which is the birth of our Savior Jesus Christ. I am so thankful for the life and family that He has given me, but most of all for my salvation.

My dear friend Sandy, was my opening act. She brought several of her quilts that were more traditional – such as the fan and wedding ring patterns as well as her newer curved designs. She is such an encouragement to me and helps me to get over my nerves.

Thank you to my friend Cena for inviting me to speak. I had such a good time.

Dinner Friday night looking out at the water.

This great tree was at a roadside park along the lake.

I have made some progress on my whole-cloth quilt. I am trying to get an hour of quilting in a day or at least 1 bobbins worth. I am also trying to get 7 kids quilts made for a family by Christmas. I will post pics as I get them done.

Emilie shot this video for me. A lot of people ask me how I fit a large quilt sandwich in the throat of my domestic machine – Bernina 150. I hope this helps. The quilt I am working on in the video is about 80×80.

So much other stuff has been going on around here also. I took an awesome class last weekend on hand-dye techniques. I did marbling, painting with thickened dye, discharging, mono-printing and BATIKING! It was such a fun day and my friend Angie is such an awesome teacher.

A lot of other things have been happening around here as well. The kids are all home-schooling this year. We are all having a great time and the kids are all doing so well. My youngest is going to a “Dame” school 3 x a week and then home with me the other two. It is a one room schoolhouse setting with 3-4 grades. He is loving it!

I also am going to be a Aunt again in the next few weeks. My youngest brother is having a baby. I can’t wait until they are old enough to send drums and other noise making toys! Here is a pic of the diaper bag I made. I haven’t made any bags for quite some time, so it was fun to work on one.

A friend sent me a picture when she was at the Knoxville show. Even though it did not win anything, it is nice to see it hanging.

I also got the verse quilt completed. I am really happy how it turned out. I used the scripture verses form Numbers 6:24-26. The quilting was done in a variegated thread that blended nicely with the fabrics so the script does not show up very much.

I also have been working on a new paper-pieced design. This is 4 blocks put together. The single block finishes at 4 inches. The only thing that I did not think about with the design is the number of points that meet when the blocks are joined together. Wow-what a lump. I certainly will be quilting around it instead of thought it!

My quilt, “In Her Arms” did not place this week at Knoxville. I was very disappointed but it will help me think about trying in shows that feature more artistic quilts instead of traditional. Part of the challenge is finding the right venue to show your quilts.

This is the newest member of our family. How a girly-girly like me got stuck with sooooo many pets is a mystery. (1 bunny, 2 dogs, 3 lizards) His name is Calvin.

Not much quilting done this week, but I have several days off next week. I am not going to be able to attend the Knoxville AQS show, so I hope all who do can enjoy if enough for me as well.

I am also shipping out my quilt, “In Her Arms” to spend a month away from home. Hopefully when she comes back there will a pretty decoration hanging on her. =) I am hopefully going to be able to attend the show in Knoxville so I will be able to see it hanging.

We are safely in Indianapolis for the week. The trip (13+ hours) was fairly uneventful except for having to buy 2 new tires. The pictures of the stop in Alabama will be a good memory for us and the people that helped us were so nice.

The scenery at my Mom’s house is so great. She has a view of her back garden from her sewing room and the back screened-in porch. The weather is so nice that it is hard to leave the porch.

The second image – I mixed the blue and the yellow dyes together and got a wonderful multi-colored fabric with yellow, green and blue.

First you start with a work surface. We covered the table with craft paper and then used the shiny side of a large piece of freezer paper. The foam shaving cream is sprayed onto the freezer paper – a little larger than the size of your piece of fabric.

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This is the start of my Challenge quilt for the Pensacola Quilter’s Guild. The challenge is that the quilt must be a circle (12-40 inches in diameter) and it must contain at least 3 things that were in a grab bag. The items in the grab bag ranges from fabric, netting, organza, sequins, beads , etc.

The technique for this quilt was presented at one of the guild meetings last year. All of the accent fabrics have bugs in them. This quilt was made entirely from fabrics in my stash – all I had to buy was the batting. It was fun to use all of the bug fabrics.

Craig’s Rooster

Suzette’s Beach Scene

I am so glad that it is finally spring in Florida. I am really enjoying the flowers.

When I was new to quilting, each pattern/block was new to me and challenged me. Not to say that I have tried it all, but I realized about 2 years ago that I really dislike piecing the same thing over-and-over again (even if the end result is going to be spectacular). This became very evident to me as I worked on my New York Beauty quilt – “Evening in Times Square”. I could feel myself tensing up every time I sat down to work on all of those paper-pieced points. My lack of passion and interest in piecing that quilt shows itself in some “precision” piecing areas. My last quilt show judge noted some of these problems and I couldn’t agree more. Yes, I loved the design process and enjoyed the quilting, but the piecing took away the “joy”.

I rediscovered the “joy” of piecing while working on “In Her Arms”. I haven’t had so much fun working on a project in some time. I found that piecing the curves is challenging and interesting as each shape has it’s own challenges. It is also a more serendipitous method, as you are not completely sure how it will look until it is completely done.

This is the biggest project that I have designed on my own. The idea was a drawing I did about a year ago. Thanks to Mark and his technical genius, I got an enlarged pattern which was wonderful to work from. He even let me pin it to the living room wall for 3 months while I was constructing it. The family all thinks the wall looks bare now that it is down. I really liked that I was not exactly sure what the quilt would look like when it was done. I had planned out the color scheme and had a color drawing to work from but in each shape there are multiple smaller shapes which were drawn in as I came to each unit. I only had to tear out one piece and replace it! The quilting really changed the look of the quilt for me. I used one color for each major section – which seamed to pull all of the pieces back into one unit. I used about 10 different colors of threads for the quilting. The backing is a dark black/blue hand-dyed fabric. I matched the top and the bobbin thread, so there is “back art”. I like this technique because it helps prevent tension issues and it looks cool.

I tried a new technique for squaring up the quilt top. (after quilting and before putting on the binding) I laid the quilt on the tile floor in the dining room and taped the straight top edge along the straight line of the tiles. Mark helped me set up the T-square and the laser level. I cut along the edge – the red light of the laser guiding my scissors. After the binding was on, I put a large sheet on the carpet and sprayed the quilt top with a squirt bottle. I pinned the corners after measuring across the diagonal of the quilt to make sure it is square. This should help the quilt hang square and flat.

I am having the appraisal this week and then I hope to be able to submit it to the AQS Knoxville quilt show. I so hope it gets accepted.

I also have been making good progress quilting my “secret” quilt. I have over 20 hours in quilting done and hopefully only about 5-6 more. I get asked a lot about the time it takes to quilt a project, so I have been logging my time. I figured it took about 120 hours to piece it.

I moved my small sewing machine into the house in the corner of the living room so that I can spend time with the family will I am doing the piecing. It will be out to the studio and my special table for the quilting.

I spent a little time working on my latest project.

I learned a valuable lesson in doing this project. You really should use diluted liquid starch instead of the concentrate. Full strength is like wall paper paste and does all kinds of yucky things to your iron, ironing board and dryer. So next time I will use it diluted!!!!!

I was going to have Emilie help me with this project but—Nana and Papa were visiting for Thanksgiving and on top of that they got the kids a Wii for Christmas. Needless to say, all interaction with me by the kids since then is only in relation to games on the Wii.

New pics of my gang and Jasper.

Mark put up a 4 foot light for me today. It is mounted under the shelf right above my sewing table. I couldn’t believe what a difference it made. I guess my eyes were working really hard, especially with all the pinning for the curves.

Here are some pics. The one with Emilie will help give some perspective of the size of the new quilt.

The program lasted bout 1 1/2 hours but about 20 minutes or so was answering questions. It was great having the program so interactive. I also had with me about 20 quilts that I have done over the last 5-7 years. Two of the quilts have been juried into AQS shows (2007, 2008).

Mark helped me with the power point presentation and we ended up with about 40 slides. He does such a good job and it sure makes me look good!

I also got to show my completed fairy quilt which I named “Serenity”.

Also an updated picture of Jasper (and Logan during Logan’s science class).

This is a small quilt I made after reading and getting some design instruction. The first image is a photograph Mark and Logan took on their recent camping trip. Aren’t the trees neat. The other images are my interpretation of the photo in a quilt.

My best find were some beautiful hand-dyed fabrics that had been rusted. I spent a long time looking through all of their fabrics. I am really looking forward to using these special fabrics in an art quilt project.

My favorite quilts were, mine of course, and the art quilts. There was a special display of art quilts that all had to represent currency ($) in some form. Wow!! They were great.

My quilt did not win any awards this time – but there is always next year. I was really excited to have my quilt hanging. I was fun for me to have some of my friends “offended” that I had not won. I sure seem to need an ego boost every now and then.

It was also the first day of school yesterday. On the way to school, I noticed a grey hair. Emilie’s comment was’ “Pull it out quick before it spreads!” Not nice!

Here are the first day pictures. Logan was not in the mood, so I will try to catch the front of him sometime soon. :)

I wanted to have a freebe for the presentation at the Santa Rosa Quilter’s Guild. So we worked up this block. You can download it here.

I tried something different to make the lizard shape stand out. I used organza on the top and cut away the extra around the shape before doing the thread work for the leaves and the tree trunk.

The pictures are the rough sketch that Mark helped me with, a close up and the completed quilt top.

I have finished the last minute details for my Nashville show quilt and will be sending it off tomorrow. I was unsure if I was going to be able to make the trip, but everything seems to be working out so that I can go up the last day. My daughter Emilie is also going to go to the show with me and is looking forward to this new experience.

I also finished quilting a really large project. It is a extra long twin sized quilt with a curved pieced sea turtle in the center and a really cool border. I hope to include pictures soon.

Here are a few of my other fun art quilt projects. I am hanging them in groups under the shelves in my dining room. I brings me joy to see them hanging there.

This was made from acrylic felt and organza. I got the idea from a “Quilting Arts” magazine and came up with my own design for the flower. You use a heat tool to melt away the excess organza and felt to leave the fun design. The edges are couched with yarns.

A friend of mine knitted the background of this piece for me. The organza and the yarn were needle felted into a background cotton fabric with batting. The hummingbird base is angelina fibers and secured with thread painting. It was then meander quilted with a mono-filament thread.

This image is a close up of a thread painted piece that features several areas of dense bead work. It makes me think of a flower that has gone to seed and how beautiful even the end of things can be.

Here is the completed flower piece.

I had so much fun at the show. I spent one of the days machine quilting a community quilt. It was so much fun talking with quilters from all over.

HOPE

POPPY

CURVES I

EVENING IN TIMES SQUARE

It was a beautiful Easter morning. Here is a picture of Garrett (my youngest) and me before church.

Now it is time to buckle down and get my show quilts completed. I am entering 4 into the Pensacola Quilter’s Guild show in March. I am hoping to get one of them into the AQS Nashville show.

Hopefully next time I will have some pics to put up.

Monday evening I presented a machine quilting program to the Pensacola Quilter’s Guild. I think I talked for about 1 1/2 hours but could have gone much longer. I have so much fun talking about quilting and showing some of the fun things I have been able to do with it. My mom was able to come with me to the meeting.

Mom and I had fun trying some non-traditional things this week. She made a really cool piece of fabric using muslin for the base, then elmers white glue to adhere tissue paper and a few vinca flowers from the garden. The end result was very cool and flexible enough to stitch through. I discovered that you can stamp and emboss directly on fabric – a very cool effect. The embossing heat tool can also be used to burn organza!

We also made a very non-traditional dinner on Thanksgiving day. With an abundance of fresh seafood from the Gulf, we had shrimp, fish and crab claws. We are making the Turkey this week. :)

I also have been working on the PQG Quilt show ribbons for this next March. I know it sounds like a long time away, but not when there are 120 to do and I pick a really time consuming design. On the positive side, I have needed and have recaived a lot of help. It has been so much fun getting together in small groups and talking – I mean working ion getting them done. If I ever get volunteered for this again, I will either advise buying them or I will design something that does not require hours of paper-piecing.

I sure had fun designing and making the samples. Here are some pictures of the quilts that went with the lecture.

This is a small quilt in which the 4 center squares are the same and have been machine pieced. I really enjoyed the quilting and embellishing with the crystals. I named it my “Bling” quilt.

This quilt features a more complex center using 4 similar blocks with a complex pieced border. I discovered while piecing this that I do not enjoy having to piece several difficult curves more than once!

This is a free-form drawing I used for one of the other samples. I really enjoyed piecing it.

This last picture is the work in progress.

I have made great progress on several projects including my entry for the 2008 Pensacola Quilters Guild show. Their theme this year is a New York Beauty block. I think I have gotten my fill of paper piecing for awhile. My husband helped me with the geometry needed for designing this original quilt. Now comes the fun part, planning the quilting.

I also have been trying out some thread painting. I guess that is a natural progression when you like doing heavy machine quilting. I saw some really neat pieces @ the AQS Nashville show and will enjoy sitting and trying it.

Hopefully this week after all the laundry is caught up and the family is into the school routine, I can get back to some serious sewing. There is nothing like a quilt show to get the creative juices flowing. The problem is that there are so many unfinished projects lurking about. My goal for the next few weeks is to finish piecing my New York Beauty design that needs to pieced by October.

I am also really enjoying doing some bead work. It is something I can do while Mark is working. I will say that my other 2 attempts with different ideas but the same sized base failed miserably!

Next time I will echo around the hummingbird shape a little more and not fill it in as much so the hummingbird will pop out like the flowers do. Overall I really like it.

I also enjoyed working with the different colors in the quilt and tried to give it a color wheel effect. I think the change in color helps move your eye around the quilt as well as the hummingbird.

It was so much fun trying some new quilting ideas. I have been reading some of Diane Gaudynski’s books and am so impressed with her creativeness. My favorite right now is Quilt Savvy by AQS, Gaudynski’s Machine Quilting Guidebook.