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It was a beautiful weekend for quilt shows-I hit two in one day! I started at the Pine Tree Quilt Guild‘s show in Grass Valley and then drove 115 miles to the Vallejo Piecemakers show. Yes, I know that was a little insane, but I had one day and two shows-what’s a girl to do? It was a fabulous day for me, filled with lots of quilts and quilting friends. The Pine Tree show was perhaps their best show I recall: Pine Tree holds their show on the Nevada County Fairgrounds. The show is spread out over two buildings with a short walk…
Sometimes you just have to do the stuff youdon’t want to do. After a month with an abundance of travel, I’m just beginning to catch up. I need professional photos taken of some of my work, so I’ll need to wash and then block them beforehand. My quilts are touched by many hands at the guilds and shops I visit and that does make for some very grungy quilts after while! I have refined my blocking technique over time so I want to share it with you here. Since I seem to be skilled at making wonky quilts, blocking is something I have gotten…
April has been an event filled month and I’ve been gone or at all day events for 14 days since mid-March. It’s all been great but it gives me comfort to know that in the next month I will teach just a few times locally and travel just once. I truly enjoy traveling and meeting other quilters yet I am itching to play with my neglected machine and get creative! I was one of 30 that presented at the Northern California Quilt Council‘s Meet the Teacher event which drew about 200 decision makers from guilds and shops. NCQC is a blessing…
Teaching at the Chicago International Quilt Festival was a first-time-through for me. I was excited to be able to teach and to be able to visit with friends and relatives after the show closed. It’s always a challenge just to get there with all my stuff intact. I shipped two huge boxes ahead since I made kits for every student in all my classes. It was tricky to fit in all my quilts, items for sale and personal items in the allowed luggage limits. It was no small task to move all this around by myself! My classes started out with a bang.…
NoI’m on my way to Chicago today to teach at the International Quilt Festival. After the show I’ll head out with my oldest son to visit my Aunt and a few cousins as well as 2 high school friends-I’m excited about all of that! I’m randomly inserting photos of spring at the remodel. It’s going well and I just won’t show you the huge swaths of robust weeds at the house! I do want to clarify what I wrote last week about my QuiltCon quilt-QBI-The Quiet Beauty of the Imperfect. One of the challenges I gave myself with that piece was to quilt all those…
I completed this quilt months ago and it juried into QuiltCon 2016 in Pasadena in February. This is one of my all-time favorite quilts. Its beauty may not come off well in my photos but it is a quiet quilt. Quiet quilts do not tend to do well at shows or in competition. This is probably my favorite quilt to hold in my hands. It is feather light and very drapey. The quilting gives it a texture that is delightful against the skin or to rub your fingers over. As I hold it in my hands it just simply delights me.…
I actually went to two quilt shows on Sunday: Voices in Cloth (VIC), the East Bay Heritage Quilt Guild‘s show in Richmond, and the Sisters Quilting Collective show in Sacramento. Both guilds put on shows biennially and dang, they were both on the same day! I was dead tired after a fabulous trip to teach at the Afro-American Quilters of Los Angles, but I really wanted to see at least one show. VIC was a great show, very artsy with an amazing group of vendors. They do not allow any photography of their quilts to be posted at all without specific permission of…
I’m thrilled that my article made the cover of April/May issue of Quilter’s Newsletter! Oooo-lookie that-my article title is on the cover! QNM contacted me last fall about the article and I was thrilled to write about cutwork. Cutwork is a great place to start for newer quilters that want to start making projects but are not ready to commit to a big project. To create a cutwork piece, transfer a design onto your “canvas” and then quilt each line twice. Then cut out the negative space. Well there’s a little more to it than that, but there you’ve got…
We moved out of our home about 2 months ago so that a whole-house remodel could commence. This move has had a more dramatic effect than I anticipated. On paper, it all seemed so perfect: we moved to a lovely home 3 minutes away from our current home. We didn’t have to change our address and I could drive over each day to check on the progress and pick up the mail. The rental is smaller than our home but even that is no big deal since we dramatically pared down what we brought over. But there was an undercurrent that bothered me…
Most of the quilts in today’s QuiltCon 2016 post were in the smaller room. It contained Special Exhibits by Molly Upton and Gwen Marston and various categories including Improv, Handwork, Applique, Negative Space, Group Quilt and probably some I missed. I found the work in this room more interesting. I also discovered 2 quilts that would have competed for The Jenny K. Lyon Judge’s Choice Award, a highly coveted ribbon. And I did accidentally delete a whole group of quilts-sheeesh. The room was fabulous: The smaller room-great venue! It just felt good to be in that room with an abundance of natural…