Ingrid Whitcher

I had such a wonderful time at the GSQA Seminar. The ladies in my classes were delightful! I love seeing my patterns put to use with each quilter’s own color scheme. I was so inspired that I came home and made a new color way for my Abstract Floral quilt.

The fabrics made me think of chocolate and raspberries. I still need to find border fabrics, and then the quilting!

This is the old color-way.

With the leftovers, I made a journal cover for a friend’s birthday gift.

Mark worked hard this last week and got everything set up to sell our patterns on-line. We are hoping to add a new pattern every few months. We’ll see how it goes.

The past few weeks I have been working on “finishing”. I have had several quilts in many stages in drawers, bins and project boxes. The applique quilt was started about 5 years ago. I was going to make a large quilt with several appliqued blocks, but I have moved on. I only had the vase and a few flower petals to finish, so I decided to just “finish” this block and make it into a small quilts. The pieced half-square inner border came from a baggie full of scraps. I had enough fabric in my stash for the borders and backing, and even had a piece of batting large enough. This is not the usual style for me but it is nice to do a traditional quilt now and then.

I finally got the binding put on this small quilt. The center fabrics are bits left over from some of my curve pieced projects. I hate to throw away even the smallest pieces of my hand-dyed fabrics.

The Pensacola Quilter’s Guild challenge this year was definitely a challenge for me. The rules were that we had to match our quilt colors to the colors on our fabric swatch, it was to be about 36 inches square and it had to have at least one square in a square block. I was having problems coming up with an idea that included the very traditional square in a square block but then decided that I would make 5 separate quilts and then attach them to create the look of a square in a square block.

The center of the quilt was done in a free-form piecing manner. I other words, I took fabrics that I had that matched my swatch and just started putting them together with minimal cutting. Once the background was large enough for the base, I started cutting it up and sewing in small pink strips. It was again cut apart, shuffled and sewn back together again.

The 4 corner pieces were painted with gold fabric paint and then heavy beaded.

I am really happy with the finished product. I was surprised how dark the piece turned out though.

Fabric Swatch

Several months ago I was contacted by “Quilter’s Home” magazine to give some information about Thread Sketching. Of course I was delighted! I knew that several quilt artists were going to be interviewed and their work compiled in the article. I was so delighted to see the article and one of my quilts featured in the December/January 2011 issue. The quilt from the article hangs in my entry.