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I spent 4 fabulous days in San Antonio Texas at the annual Studio Art Quilt Associates Conference. I always find it difficult to describe why I make it a point to go as often as I can. One of the best things is the people: You find yourself hanging out with the most amazing people! And everyone there gets you-they’re all artists too after all. I met so many people and learned so much about…everything from teaching to travel to food and of course art. I met people from Portugal, Canada, Australia, Norway. And you would too if you attended.…
Last week’s visit to the Santa Clara Valley Quilt Association in the San Jose area was memorable with a very enthusiastic response, a fun workshop and an eventful trip to the Central Coast of California. This was a car trip for me and it is nice to be able to bring every single thing I want. My trunk was full of quilts, teaching materials and goodies. The drive down was spectacular with the wide horizon filled with verdant hills, puffy clouds and landscapes ranging from hills to coast, ocean and farm land. I arrived to claim my hotel room with…
I had a most wonderful and magical visit to the Southwest Florida Quilter’s Guild in Ft. Meyers last week. It was quite the eventful week. Read on. Yup, it started with an uneventful flight save a few noisy young passengers but all the while Southwest was plotting to divert my luggage. Actually it was the luggage for all through passengers from Chicago Midway to Philidelphia to Ft. Meyers. As a result, there was a line of unfortunate passengers. According to my observation, it takes 15 minutes to process one claim–there were about 10 0f us. It was a wait made…
This was the 35th anniversary of the founding of the Yuba City Quilt Guild and they chose Red and White as their theme. It was a spectacular display of red and white quilts and hands-down, their best show ever. Get ready for some red and white! I had to save some time this week-I will post the quilt’s name, maker and quilter largely without comment. I think these quilts speak for themselves! Enjoy: What a feeling when you walked in! It truly reminded me of the Houston Quilt Festival Show for their 35th anniversary. It was dramatic! Just a portion…
It’s been a busy quilty week here but nothing to show here. The biggest news of the week is hair! It seems like such a vapid subject but I am increasingly convinced that it has more of an impact on how others perceive us than we realize. Here’s my take: Here’s my BC look-Before Color. I liked that look just fine. But as I aged, I became more invisible. Frequent occurrence: standing in the front of a line of people and they look over me at the person behind me and hail them forward. I would say something like “But…
I have a knack for somehow starting with a simple project and making it difficult. This time I came up with a doozie. Start with a black whole cloth quilt. That doesn’t sound that difficult does it? Well let’s choose a design with a lot of marking. And add trapunto. And probably some metallic thread. And probably not just plain ole metallic thread-I can do that one. Let’s make it a silk core with a metallic wrap. Oops, just crossed that difficult line! I’m just going to cover The Great Search for The Perfect Marking System today. Spoiler alert: There…
Last year was The Year of Writing. Like any huge undertaking it had its trade-offs. It was all consuming, the equivalent of making several successful competition level quilts in one year as far as I could tell. It filled my brain and my days. It was isolating. It will be all worth it and I’m really happy I did it. But lots of things went fallow during that time, part of that whole trade-off thing. So once I turned the corner at the beginning of this year and normal life returned, I realized there had been a long dry spell…
This is the final post for this year’s show, the Large Quilt Room. You will see a lot of variety and genres here: We do pack in the crowds! This is not even near the height of traffic. Our show goes 3 full days, each with a Fashion Show. It’s the first show of the year for most of us. An art quilt won Best of Show! This magnificent quilt, 24 Floors by Cindy Gangler, was based on Cindy’s trip to the Houston Quilt Festival. She took a photo from the 24th floor of the Hyatt as her inspiration. “I…
This is my local guild’s show, the Folsom Quilt and Fiber Guild-I LOVE show! We are rich with talent in every genre of quilting. I spent only one day at show this year and I was so thrilled with the variety and quality. I love my guild! This is a long and photo heavy post: Paper Pineapple, Shireen Hatten. This is a mini with “teeny tiny pieces”, part of a guild challenge. Such perfect teeeeeeny points! Faulty Reasoning/Green Fusion, Lynn Daly. Beautiful quilting, color and composition. Poly Fusion, Nancy Holinkski. Stellar quilting for such a tiny quilt and I especially…
I’ll be in Long Beach this week so this will be a shorter post. I want to share my fix for rounded corners when free motion quilting. Here’s what I mean: It’s common to get these kinds of rounded corners or angles. Even though you absolutely stitched that corner, your machine rounds that corner off. What happens is that that one single stitch was not strong enough to lock that sharp corner or curve in place. There’s a simple solution: stitch two or three stitches in that corner before moving on. That will secure the direction change and will not…