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September’s Free Motion Quilting Challenge over at SewCalGal’s site was provided by Paula Reid. Paula came to my local guild several years back and made a lasting impression on me. Gotta love the hair for one thing! The girl knows how to quilt and has so many practical ideas on how to make quilting easier-I’ve followed her since. September’s Challenge was to quilt this stencil motif of a Feathered Wreath. I despise marking, have I mentioned that before?! I decided to up the challenge by using metallic thread. I have learned, the hard way of course, that you HAVE to use…
I recently found this silk pillow gem at Home Goods for a steal. I loved the artful print-it looks like it may even be a printed photo of an art piece-I’m not sure. The colors are fabulous and the pillow is very well made. But once I got it home, the colors were way too bold for my Living Room-bummer. I had been playing around with some Radiance and my new Sharpies collection, and that made me wonder-could the Sharpies somehow be involved in resurrecting the pillow? The colors originally looked like this-loved it! By the way, I am not a pro…
I love living in Northern California, but sometimes the weather really tests me. Even though we have already experienced 15 consecutive days of daytime temps over 90 degrees, it’s officially fall. And this week shows five more consecutive days in the 90’s. At least some of my plantings know better, especially my grasses, succulents, cacti and drought tolerants.Of course “Autumn Sedum” knows it’s fall! I have no idea what is the name of this guy, I call him “Elephant Trunk”. Love how he goes to seed.All my grasses are going to seed too. I love my grasses-beautiful in the morning, backlit…
What a week-I actually completed 2 t-shirts in just a few days! One was a “remodel” of an existing t-shirt and the other I started from scratch. Considering that I have Fear Of Knits, that is quite an accomplishment. My church is going to have an area-wide service day where we all go out to various projects in the community and work at whatever needs to be done. We are going to wear t-shirts to identify ourselves. I decided I am just too cool to wear a plain unisex t-shirt, so I made mine over using the “T-Shirt Makeover” by Pamela’s Patterns.…
This is another case of “I make all the mistakes so you don’t have to”! I learned so many things the hard way on my Lily quilt. I’ll be passing along my mistakes and remedies. First, marking. You know I don’t like to mark and I only mark when I have to. I put grids all over this quilt, so that required marking. I marked 3/8″ grids on the Radiance fabric in the center and 1/2″ grids on the border of raw silk-all of this on wool batting. So we have challenges from the get go: I was marking on…
I thought I was done with “Mom’s Lily Bed”, formerly known as “Lily Quilt“. Just for grins, I thought I might add beads to the outer border, since I already had put them in one of the inner borders. I’ve been following Kathy Schmidt’s blog and she does some really nice beading on her art quilts. I guess her beading got stuck in my head and I thought what the heck, let’s see if this does anything for this quilt. So here we are without beads. Pretty. I’m a little leary of the whole embellishing thing because IMHO the quilting world…
I’ve been working my larger Lily quilt-once I catch up, I’ll pass on what I’ve learned while making this quilt. I think my new tag line should be: “I make all the mistakes so you don’t have to”! I’ll post more about Lily later -enjoy!
You don’t always win. And, you have to make lots of mediocre art to make great art. This I know to be true. Case in point:This month’s FMQ Challenge over at SewCalGal’s blog gave us a choice-either learn one particular motif or do a challenge provided by Susan Brubaker Knapp that uses environmental objects to create your own motifs. That was a no brainer for me-I’ve long been interested in creating my own motifs from what I see around me. It all started out so well. Susan asked us to just take 5-10 minutes with our digital cameras on macro lens and just…
I just got back from a week at Huntington Beach, Ca. It was one of the best vacations ever! It started out slowly with a day of just DH. Then Son #2 and girlfriend joined us, followed by Son #1 from Maine and his girlfriend, as well as a Dear Friend of 35+ years and her DH. We filled our incredible house rental with family and friends. My Mommy heart runneth over. We rode bikes and ate well, walked the pier to watch surf and surfers and ate well, walked to downtown to hang out and ate well, hung out on the…