City Quilter

Yesterday I visited Manhattan's only quilt shop. Wow! Not a calico or
Civil War repro in sight. The very friendly clerk told me they saw
their fabric choices as an antidote to the grey city streets. It's an
awesome shop. Tomorrow I hope to see the Paula Nadelstern exhibit at
the American Folk Art Museum. (sorry I can't make a link when posting
from my phone).

Quilt in use

I finally got a photo of my MIL with the quilt I made her. This was
the first quilt I made where I had to control value very carefully and
I love the way it turned out. You can't see it well in this photo but
I will post more photos from my real camera when I get home. This was
the best I could do on my phone. I may not have computer access until
the weekend. Have a wonderful week!

City girl

On my way to New York! Flying out of Indianapolis, faster and easier
than Chicago. Great new terminal here, a pleasure to use. But this t-
shirt in an airport store reminds me that Indy is not NY. At a recent
Linus worknight I got called "city girl" when I couldn't identify
( and didn't own!) any of the cows in a farm animal fabric.

Testing mobile posting

Mary at Mary Quilts kindly sent me info on how to make a post from a
mobile phone and I'm trying it out. These are raspberries in my yard.

From inspiration to quilts

I've been meaning to post this link all week and keep forgetting! I really enjoy Laura West Kong's blog, Adventures of a Quilting Diva. Last Monday she had a wonderful post that shows her moving from inspiration (donuts!) to several possible quilts, some artsy, some traditional. You can read it and get inspired here.

Sunshine strings top done!

Thank you everyone for your extremely helpful comments on my last post! The Liberated Quilters group had a virtual retreat today, so I took advantage of that to make more strip sets for the border and to use in the second top (more on that later).
I trimmed all the blocks to make them fit perfectly so I would be less tempted to stretch a bias edge, and of course I overtrimmed one of them. Took me a bit to deal with that complication, but otherwise it went pretty smoothly. Better than that, it was fun!
And for the second top -- I'm going to use the hourglass blocks I showed yesterday in a column down the left side, a row of 3" blocks like the ones above across the bottom, and the rest of the quilt will have sets of Chinese coins using these strings. I should be able to use all the waste pieces from this quilt plus all the animal strings I've cut. I'm excited about it!

Sunshine strings

Susan at Hanging On by a Needle and Thread just took a class from Ami Simms -- the same class Ami gave when she visited my guild a year ago. It inspired me to pull out my almost finished project from that class and finish it. As Ami says, the babies are cold.
I used strings from animal fabrics donated for Project Linus quilts (and this quilt will be donated), but decided to make the blocks bigger than Ami suggested so the strips could be wide enough to see the animals a little better. Because I didn't think it through carefully, I thought a 9" yellow strip would give me 9" block. But duh, it gives me a 12" block! That's a lot of blank yellow space.
I sought to liven up the quilt a bit by using the waste pieces (my miscalculation gave me lots!) to make an interesting border. I was also hoping that the quilter might practice some clever quilting in the yellow, or I thought I might cut some animals out of fabric and do a little brodie perse in the blank spaces.
But it occurred to me I could cut each block in half on the diagonal (I have more blocks than are on the design wall) and reassemble them as shown above to chop up the yellow space. But since I hadn't planned on doing that, I would now end up with bias edges on all sides, eek! I could stay stitch the edges and sew carefully. Would that be ok? Any thoughts on what I should do would be welcome!
Also sewed some blocks using pieces from a fabric exchange. These are for Bonnie Hunter's Sticks and Stones quilt. I have been getting my sewing area cleaned up by folding, stacking, organizing, and stitching UFO's. It has gotten my creative juices flowing and I have lots of ideas. Finishing up these projects so I can move on will feel great!