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It’s that time of year where I am in the final countdown to Houston. I literally walk around the house muttering to myself. I might be packing supplies for my ruler work class and suddenly remember I need to bring the “odd charger” for my speaker and Square thingy. I will run and get that while I remember it, and then go back to the original task. On and on it goes. Each year holds a prep surprise. You never know where it’s gonna come from, how long it will take to resolve and when it will show up.…
I have written about this fairly diminutive piece in no less than SIX previous posts , here, here, here, here, here, and here! Three of those posts were about that dog gone border. I began this piece in a Barbara Blanton Appliquick class with my guild. It is a fairly complicated block for a 6 hr workshop and quite frankly, I doubted I would ever finish; it was just too much work. But life intervened and I NEEDED some hand work, so I idly began to work it bit by bit. Then I got into it and LOVED the block.…
NOTE: There will be no blog post next week as I will be traveling. See you on Oct 17th! After that, one more post before Houston and another break. Will you miss me? This will be a short post – I am going to be out of town for a few days and I just have not had time to do much. Maybe all my readers have figured out that I am never going to finish my applique/trapunto piece. I think this is my fifth post on my little ole 33″ square piece. Oy. Last week I showed all my…
The applique/trapunto project continues to grow and ask me for more, not letting the simple or “git er done” to prevail. So here’s what she asked me to do this week: I wanted to feather that border, it needed something that justified the central block: Ah, she asked for feathers, but not just regular feathers. She asked for something a little different. I thought it might be cool to do those feathers in red: Meh. How about if I put a vein in each feather? That was a hard “no”! How about a lighter blue? Hmm, maybe a little…
I completed nothing this week except creating and editing teaching videos to support my 3 hour Straight Line Ruler Work class. Ruler work on a domestic is pretty difficult to show live. You kinda need 3 hands and it’s hard to not block the camera with your hands. Other teachers will not be surprised with this statistic: it took 10 hrs to tape and edit 7 videos with a total play time of 31 minutes. They will debut this Saturday at an online class and I suspect I will skip some of what I’ve recorded. One of the great…
This was a fun one! My Grandson is learning his alphabet and one of my students, Traci, practiced her free motion quilting by making quilted letters for her Grandson. I totally, 100% got the idea from Traci; thank you! I started out by just using batting between two layers of fabric, but I thought that might be a little floppy. I grabbed some Fast2Fuse from my stash for the middle layer instead. Fast2Fuse was designed for mailable postcards and is a 2-sided stiff fusible, perfect for the letters! This is a documentary, not a tutorial! There are probably better…
It’s been a super busy week but there are not that many photos to share. My son prefers that no photos of children be posted online; you know how people can do bad things with them. But I do have a few photos to share. We had the most wonderful get together; it was a short 2 days, but oh so fun! This was baby M’s first longer car trip, 2 hours. She did well in the car and seemed to thrive here at the house too. She truly is an adorable girl, wish I could show you! Baby hands…
What a faaaaaantastic week I’ve had (if you go Th to Th)! I had 18 talented, eager, prepared, well equipped and enthusiastic students for a 2-day Seminar at Meissner Sewing‘s main location in Sacramento. I billed it as a beginner’s class, but about half of the students had experience, several of them quite talented already. That was a challenge and it all worked out beautifully. It is such a joy to teach a class like this, when everyone is excited! I hope you can see that joy on their faces. I seem to always forget to take as many…
NOTE: I won’t have a newsletter this week; I just realized there is no way I can do it; I will be teaching all day Fri and Sat. Sorry! I had a chance to work on my applique/trapunto piece this week and all I want to do is quilt it! I chose a luscious navy blue dupioni for the border, a striped silk for the insert and a traditional ecru fabric for the half square triangles. It came together beautifully: I chose to do a “bouncing banana” fill around the applique. My other choices were micro stipple or bubble.…
It has been a week of variety: a guild visit, hand applique/trapunto and beginning to prep student kits for Houston. My visit to the Amador Valley Quilters was so much fun! I stayed with my friend Jeanne and we solved all of the world’s problems over the kitchen table. The guild meets in Pleasanton, CA and what a beautiful city! They are in a unique location that delivers cool and breezy nights; such a delight! I walked Jeanne’s neighborhood in the wee hours so I don’t have any photos of the beauty but I did enjoy the fresh flowers…