Teatime

Happy Mother's Day to me! Val made that very cute tea caddy you can see among all those tea boxes. It's a Mother's Day gift that just got finished. I love it! I'll put several different tea bags in it and keep it in my purse. I wish I had had it this past week in Denver. The hotel I stayed in had only Earl Grey tea in the room, one of the few teas I just don't like. Rather an odd choice for a hotel, but I suspect that they used to have several varieties and this is just what was left. I don't think very many people are that fond of Earl Grey (nothing against the Earl himself, please, but the tea...).

'Tis a mystery!

Ah, yes, a nice boring square- in-a-square block. What's mysterious about that? It won't stay that way! I can't tell you more than that (it would spoil the surprise), but I will post the finished product. I promise. It's already getting close.

Not 1, not 2, not 3, but 4!

In this block for my Press for Success class, we had four centers to snip the threads in the seam and swirl around -- plus a fifth intersection where we simply snipped the seam to let the fabric fall in opposite directions. Pretty amazing. (Click on the photo to see the block in greater detail.) This block is called Shoo Fly, a new one for me. Again, my fabric choice obscures the design. I'm starting to regret that I chose such a big print. I knew it would be weird, but I wish I had kept the lines of the stitching cleaner.

Beautiful beyond words

Oh, I see, I think you think I think this block is beautiful. Well, I like it, but don't really want to waste my bragging rights on this. What I am referring to is the BACK of the block. While I did the stitching myself, the beauty is all from the wonderful method I learned in my Press for Success class. I can't believe how amazingly flat this block is. Right now it is next to my computer and I am patting it from time to time just because I can't believe it's real or that I had any part in its construction. Click on the photo to enlarge it if you want a better look at the way the block is put together.

Kudos for Myrna!

Here's my finished center block for Myrna Giesbrecht's Press for Success class at Quilt University. It went together so easily. I love putting blocks together this way! And check out the back:







What I really love about this (besides the flatness of the block) is that the blocks will join easily with butted seams. Take a look at the photo of the back. To join blocks, turn one a quarter turn and see how the seams butt up to each other so well! Hoorah!

Celtic Corners

Here's my Celtic tablerunner as it stands so far. Once you stitch down the bias on one side, you have to go back and stitch down the other. I think I'll do that all at the end, so right now it looks a little bumpy and curvy because the far side is coming up a bit. It's a neat project -- fun to learn how to put this together in a reasonable way rather than with one long piece of bias that you form appropriately. I worked on this in the car on the way back from Chicago, and had quite a headache by the time we got home. I hope it isn't a problem on airplanes!

Hovering Hawks

"Hovering Hawks" sounds so dramatic, like something is about to swoop down from the sky. It's the name of the first block for my sampler in the Press for Success class. (Did I hear you groan at the pun?) The angularity of the block and the half-square triangles (HST's) look like hovering hawks, I guess, but the impact of the line is somewhat diminished by my fabric choice (see photo below). That's ok, however, as I love my fabrics and couldn't stand a sampler of traditional blocks in traditional fabrics.

Anyhow, we started by making a grid and stitching 1/4" from the diagonal lines to form HST's. Very cool!



Then we cut along the lines and pressed (very important!) carefully, and trimmed the blocks to exactly the same size. It really is easy to work with blocks that are exact.
And this is what the block looks like!








And, very important, this is what the back looks like. Nice and flat, no?

My quilting buddy's convergence quilt

Great quilt, no? Glen, my good quilting friend, made this. It's a Ricky Tims convergence quilt that she made with hand-dyed fabric. Just gorgeous!

Consistency of taste & other news

I read somewhere once that if you buy only things you really love for your house, eventually you'll find that everything goes together, even though purchased independently. That's because your taste affects all your purchasing decisions. I seem to have very definite negative taste ("I don't like that"), but it's not clear to me that there is a cohesive style that captures what I do like. In any case, I laughed when Val gave me these great earrings on my birthday -- look at the quilt I was making at the time! I definitely like these!

And speaking of quilts I'm making, lesson 2 just went up yesterday for my QU classes. I have started stitching the celtic applique. I cheated and marked the design on my fabric with pencil. The instructor is afraid pencil won't wash out, but there are disadvantages to other marking methods, too. One student in our class marked hers, but the weather was humid, and when she picked it up to start stitching, all her markings had disappeared! Suzanne Marshall, who taught another applique class I took, marks everything in pencil, so I decided to do that. I marked well within the pattern lines to be sure the bias tape covers it up. Keep your fingers crossed!

Sampler done!

Yay! Here is the completed top for my first Press for Success sampler. I don't know what I'll do with it, but the pressing techniques will really help me with future projects.

Watch your back

My Press for Success class at QU is wonderful! Myrna Giesbrecht, the instructor, does a fabulous job. This is the back of our first sampler project. It's a simple 1-patch, no problem, but by the time all the rows get joined, there are always some seams going in the wrong direction and you get lumpy messes at the intersections. Myrna has a pressing plan for everything, so we pressed half the blocks one way, half another, and different rows different ways, etc., until by the last two rows that we joined, every seam on the row matched perfectly, each side butting nicely with the other. (Doubleclick on the photo to enlarge it so you can see how flat everything is.) The back looks great, and in front, the points are all perfect! This is all the more amazing because I did not use even one single pin during this whole project. I still have to put on the two borders. (She has one on the sampler, but I'm using two because my fabrics need them.) I can't wait until we do flying geese blocks!

Viva Italia!

Val has a blog! It's all set up for when she goes to Italy. She PROMISES to post photos so those of us on this side of the Atlantic can get vicarious pleasure from her sojourn. Check out the link to the right!
Disclaimer: Just so you know, I'm not the only one who suggested (over and over) that she become a blogger while abroad.

Good things come in EBay packages

Today's my birthday!! And I got three wonderful packages from EBay, each containing a fabric with a moose print. Thank you, Jocelyn & Valerie! As Val says, they all match since they all have moose(s), even though one is black with red mooses, one is green with batik mooses, and the other is blue and white one above. I need to don my Maine moose shirt and get a-quiltin'!

Am I biased? You bet!

And here's the proof! I just made 24 strips of bias tape for my Celtic tablerunner class. The instructor, Nancy Chong, gave directions for a simple way to make bias tape from any fabric using a Clovis bias tape maker (that's the little doohicky in the photo) -- but we don't follow the directions that come with the gadget. She has a very clever way to do it. She also has us pinning them on a paper towel tube to keep them from opening before we use them. Since they were so easy to make once I got the knack, I made them while Val and I watched an episode of Monk on TV. Guess what Val did:

And here I am, showing off:

Will the rightful owner please speak up?

Even I need to clean out the knitting basket every now and then, and yesterday had a "now and then" feeling to it. I knew there were two things in it, both needing to be finished, but I was delighted to find that one needed only to be cast off and the other just needed some ends woven in. Hoorah! But what was that fuzzy black thing at the bottom? Another scarf, presumably knit by one of my offspring, but I am not sure which one (sorry guys!). Could you let me know?
Here's a close-up of the yarn in case that will jog anyone's memory. Nice, I really like it!

The Little Man was in a modeling mood, so he agreed to show off the other two scarves. I have these, plus a lovely one Val made me, and so I shall have to be certain to wear them this winter. I think what I need now is a thinner, cotton scarf that I can wear indoors. No one sees the outdoor scarves, or if they do, they are too busy stomping their feet and rubbing their arms to keep warm to notice.

Our Little Man was given to us by Brian's mother when we moved into our previous house. She bought him at a crafts fair in Florida and asked the vendor to send him directly to us. When he saw the address, he told her that his sister and brother-in-law, a professor at the UI, lived in the same town. Seven or eight years later I went to a PTA committee meeting at someone's home only to discover all sorts of little men (and little dogs and little cats and not-so-little men) like ours all over the house. Turns out the woman's brother had made our little man.

Only in Illinois (or Nebraska or Iowa)

It's a beautiful summer morning here in Champaign. Browsing through the stands at the farmer's market when it first opened, I could just taste the lush peaches, the bursting kernals of sweet corn, the tomatoes dripping with sun-ripened flavor. Our soil is among the best in the world, and you can tell when you bite into those farm-fresh veggies. But what to my wandering eyes should appear but a craft booth selling potholders, aprons, clothing, and ... quilts! They were all crib-sized baby quilts. The featured quilt, draped over the table for all to admire, was a John Deere quilt. It showed what I just don't understand about the midwest, and I wish I had had my camera. A variety of John Deere fabrics (take a look at those ) were joined in 6" blocks, but between each block and each row were ruffles of white lace! Lace and tractors, an archetypical combination of rural midwestern upbringing. It reminds me of one of the students in my office who grew up on a farm in Indiana. She seemed in some ways almost a girly girl, but on her sixteenth birthday, her parents said they would buy her a car or a cow, and she chose the cow.

Lotto star & QU classes

Back to quilting! It's been awhile since I've done any quilting (although, ahem, I have managed to purchase a little fabric ...). I did some cutting and layout for Project Linus, but this star block is the first machine work I've done in a month. It's for block lotto at guild, and that's always a quick project. Background fabric is provided, and you supply your own contrast fabric. I used fabric left from a reversible table runner that I never finished because I didn't like it, but I do like the fabric. These blocks always go together smoothly until near the end, when I find I have bulky seams and don't know what to do with them. I hope to figure that out soon, because I'm taking Myrna Giesbrecht's Press for Success class at Quilt University. Click here to read about the class -- I'm really excited.

I'm also starting Nancy Chong's Celtic Tablerunner class. I love Celtic knotwork, and I've been wanting a project I could take with me when I travel. This may be it. The techniques will work for stained glass quilts, too. Isn't this beautiful fabric? The yellow-gold will be the background, and the patterned fabric (totally scrumptious) will be made into bias strips for the Celtic design.

Traveling, but ...

What's a vacation without a stop or two at quilt shops, eh? We've been in Beautiful British Columbia for a week and a half and been in three quilt shops, one of them twice. Batiks and Asian fabrics seem to be the rage up here, at least in the three shops I visited. But wow, is fabric pricey north of the border! I did splurge a little in one shop, but not in the others. Can't wait to get home and use the fabric! Wish I'd taken a photo so I could post it now, but I'll do that when I return.

My traveling craft project has been a counted cross stitch I started maybe 5 or 6 years ago. I hadn't gotten beyond the roots of the carrots, but it's almost done now. I photographed it a week ago, before I added any black. See if you can figure out what else might be done to this, and I'll post the finished project when I get home. It was fun to have this on the trip, but quilting beats cross stitch any day!

Jocelyn has a knitting blog!

At last, the secret is out! :)

Jocelyn started a knitting blog last week but I couldn't post the link because she didn't want Laurel to find the photo of Julia's birthday present before she gave her the gift. I'd post the link here, but my cheat sheet on how to do that is at home and I am not. So for now, the link at right will have to suffice (at least I remembered how to do that!).

We're having a great time in Vancouver. I went to The Thread Bare quilt shop, well, actually, I went there twice. Got some great fabrics and had a wonderful time. They were so sweet -- since I'm away from home without my sewing machine, they invited me to come sew there.

A pillow for PMac and an inspirational painting

We leave tomorrow for Vancouver and, since we need to get up early, I am of course staying up late. I decided to browse through old photos, always a rewarding experience. I came across two photos that seemed worth blogging.

It amazes me sometimes how undaunted my daughters are by doing something they don't know how to do -- and it seems that just by doing it they learn how to do it. That was the case with PMac's pillow, which Val made for her friend when they went off to different colleges. She'd never made a pillow before (never sewn before), but before long it was designed, appliqued, stitched, stuffed, and finally much appreciated by the recipient. How cool is that?

I took this photo at MOMA last November, Ellsworth Kelly's Colors for a Large Wall. It's the painting that inspired Jocelyn to make her first quilt -- again, undaunted by never having quilted before. You can see the quilt on an earlier post, here.

Blurry photo day

I spent an hour or so (but time flies when I'm looking at quilting magazines) looking for ideas for a quilt for Frances, Brian's mother. I narrowed it down to 3, with a fairly strong preference for one of them -- fortunately, Brian chose my favorite! I scanned the picture in, the first scan of our new machine, and it's not a great copy. (Oddly, I see it is in sharper focus here than on iPhoto.)

The quilt, designed by Laura Franchini, is in the January/February2006 issue of Quiltmaker magazine. She used Asian fabrics and quilted koi on it in metallic thread. The pattern is simple, the results -- at least hers! -- are stunning. I plan to use silvery greys and rosy pinks, the colors Frances has in her home.



Pondering the blurriness of the quilt scan, I was reminded of a blurry photo I took last Thursday on a bouncy little airplane from Chicago to the cornfields I call home. The sun had only just set, so the sky and lake still shimmered blue rather than black, and the city lights were on. It was a fairyland, but I wasn't able to capture it through the window. Still, the photo reminds me of how spectacular it was; I hope you can get an inkling of the beauty of night falling over the Windy City.

New Quilting Blog!

Check it out! My niece Laurel has started her own quilting blog, Laurel's Quilts and Such -- really nice stuff! Now if only Jocelyn will start a knitting blog ...

Yellow I Spy top

Done! Well, all done but the borders, but the hard part is done! I really, really like it. What fun to see all those cute fabrics. The piecing was a real bear, and the directions give no help at all -- "stitch blocks together, stitch blocks into rows." Geesh! Matching hexagon points is a lot trickier than stitching up squares. I futzed, tore out, marked, pinned, restitched, over and over, and it came out okay (not great, but okay). Many points are right on, a few are as much as 1/8 inch off, and the rest are somewhere in between. I am less concerned than I normally would have been because the quilt has so much going on that you really don't notice those not-quite-right points. And what kid will care?

Help with my quilting

We could all use a little help, and Whitney was there for me. Jocelyn had her tonsils out and my niece Laurel, who was away for the week, lent us her house and her cats. I brought my quilting stuff with me and used her machine while Jocelyn recuperated. It was the machine I learned on, since Laurel had lent it to me when we were in California in 2005. It's funny, at first I forgot how to use it, but it all came back. My current machine is a Janome and hers is a Baby Lock, and I find there are things I like and don't like about each. What I truly love about the Baby Lock is how quiet it is! Wouldn't it be nice to design your own machine?

Here's the tonsillectomy girl herself. The surgery was more painful and she felt worse for longer than we had anticipated. Painkillers and ice packs helped, and knitting a "Heartbreakingly Cute Kimono" for her new 3-week-old cousin Hannah took her mind off her throat.

I Spy preview

All laid out! Now I'm ready to stitch the hexagons into rows and the rows into a quilt top. Often people just do it randomly, but I like to make sure I don't have several squares with a black background together, or all the animals in a little cluster. Laying the quilt out before sewing gives me the opportunity to move the blocks around. I would like a design wall, and will probably make one soon, but for now I use a flannel-backed vinyl tablecloth on the floor. The pieces stick, so I can move the whole thing, or roll it up and take it somewhere. It would be a lot easier to stand up and do this on a wall than to crawl around on the floor!

Stippling!

Today I took a class from Cynthia Schmitz, award-winning machine quilter. I learned so much! Until now, I have done only stitch-in-the-ditch or a little straight-line quilting, but have been terrified to try free motion quilting (FMQ). Cynthia was a good teacher, and did a lot to improve my confidence. I practiced on larger stippling, then moved to filling in the circle with small stippling, as you can see in the photo. I call it small stippling, but she does teensy-tiny stippling, making this look huge. I'm not there yet -- and frankly, I'm not really wild about the tiny stippling. Just a matter of personal preference. I admire it, I just don't really care for the look.

Everyone else went on to learn trapunto in the afternoon, but I decided to opt out of that and continue practicing free motion quilting. (Again, I like trapunto, but I don't see myself doing it -- maybe in awhile I'll change my mind.) I tried to stipple outside a circle this time, and partway through decided it looked like hair around a face. I put in a curl right in the middle of her forehead, then finished off the face. Not that hard -- and so much fun!

And I went on from there to try non-stippling FMQ. There was a book with some ideas, and I gave it a try. How cute would these things be in sashing, or on a border?

I Spy quilts

Part of me has always wanted to be a kindergarten teacher, and this quilt seems to satisfy my desire to cut up lots and lots of cute kiddy fabrics. And when I say "lots and lots" I mean a bazillion! The plan is to make one for each of my nieces' and nephew's families, plus for my own kids when they start having children. That's potentially 8 I Spy quilts, with 147 hexagons each. You do the math -- bazillion is a close enough answer for me!

What is an I Spy quilt you ask? It has hexagons of many different fabrics -- in fact, there should not be a repeat in the quilt. (Sometimes one fabric has many designs that can each be used, however.) Like this:



The idea is to be able to play the game "I Spy" with the quilts. "I Spy with my little eye ..." an umbrella, a horse, a lemon, a duck playing a clarinet, etc. I'm trying to have something for each letter of the alphabet, and with lots of colors. (I spy something blue.) They are also great for stories. Pick a hexagon and tell a story about it. Or move from hexagon to hexagon and incorporate each new item into the story. Lots of fun! One very kindly member of the guild, Sue K., has made 6 I Spy quilts and she let me cut up her leftover stash, plus I added my own collection. I'm so grateful to her, as it takes a loooong time to get so many fabrics!


Once the hexagons are cut, you need to sew triangles of the background fabric onto two opposite sides of each hexagon, as in this photo. I'm trying to make mine directional, rather than some facing each way, so I have to pay attention. But thank goodness for chain piecing!

Here the pieces are laid together. You first join them in rows, then stitch the rows, but I only have a few pieces with the triangles on so I haven't joined the rows. They are just laid out here so you can see that ultimately you get a 6-pointed star. Really fun!

Block of the Month

I like to have a plan when I start a project. I may change the plan as I go (I always seem to!), but I do have a general idea of what the quilt will be about. Mystery quilts are not for me! However, I decided to try the guild's block of the month to help me get away from that. I knew they would all be stars, and I bought a background fabric that I liked and that would coordinate with lots of fabric I have leftover from other projects. Each month we get a new star pattern and make one block of it, along with two smaller star blocks in the same fabrics. At the end we'll get some instructions for assembling them all into a quilt. This is the first month's block.


Here is the second month's star with the two baby stars. I was less sure about the fabric choice here -- not all batiks, like the other block. Still not sure what I think!


And here's block 3. I decided I wanted some warmer and brighter colors, and I love the design in the middle of the block (oops -- haven't posted Brian's quilt yet -- these are the same fabrics). Alas, despite careful measuring, I somehow did not cut the centers correctly for the two baby stars. I centered the design in one direction, but not the other. I was so annoyed that I didn't iron the finished blocks, as I think you can tell from the photo! I may well redo them with correct centers, but I wasn't in the mood right then.

I won!

Every month I make a block for the guild's block lotto. We all use the same background fabric and then use our own fabric for the rest of the block. When you turn in your block, you get a chance to win all the blocks for that month. This block lotto was my favorite -- and I won the drawing! Hoorah! What a cute quilt this will make. Here are two blocks. They are all log-cabin-like pieced hearts made of coordinating dark and medium fabrics. Just so cute! And I won!

Fractured autumn bargello

The guild had a mini-retreat a couple weeks ago for those of us who didn't go on the big retreat, and I took advantage of the day to finish piecing this quilt. I had the tubes sewn and the strips cut, but I was terrified of sewing them together. The fracture strips are only 1/4" finished, and a few of the bargello strips are also only 1/4" finished, so it was a bit tricky. I am very pleased with the result! Now, how do I quilt it? On June 24 I'm taking a machine quilting class with an expert, so I'll take it in for ideas and help.

Great design

I have vowed to keep up my posts, but suddenly realized that Brian has the camera in New York! So I can't photograph what I'm working on. Instead, here's a photo I took when we were in NY last Thanksgiving. It's a representation of the Empire State Building that's in the Empire State Building. I love the look and thought it would make a great quilt design. I hope it posts right side up -- I rotated it in IPhoto but sometimes it doesn't load in rotated fashion (but sometimes it does -- wish I knew why).