Joy to the world! These quilts are done!

A local quilt shop, Wish Upon A Quilt, donated fabrics to our guild for our annual February month of quilting for charity.  As the chairperson of the Outreach Committee, I decided to audition some patterns to be used during that month's marathon quilting endeavor.  This fabric line is called Jungle Fever, by Free Spirit, and it is truly wild!  I had a hard time figuring out what I could do with it that might appeal to a child or teen, but I found the right venue from Hoffman, which put out a free pattern called Trade Winds using one constant color ( I used a bright batik in yellow) in the basic block, seen below.  It's a great pattern to use up your 2 1/2" strips!

The basic block is NOT the windmill.  It's the square around the windmill.  The quilting is a Baptist Fan pattern.  There wasn't any sense in doing anything fancy -- too much motion in the fabrics to make any but the simplest quilting choice.  Nonetheless, the curves of the fan smooth out all the topsy turvy angles of the Trade Winds pattern and make it not so jarring, don't you think?

And then, after piecing it all together, I needed a coordinating backing.  Well, the donated fabric was just in sample swatches -- not enough for even one piece borders, much less backing.  So I happened to have this swirly, bright fabric in my stash and decided to use it -- just right!

This quilt will join others in being donated to Hannah's Place in Roanoke Rapids, NC, a shelter for women and children.

Then, on the opposite pole of color saturation and design, there was this sedate, muted log cabin quilt that had been sitting in my unfinished basket for a year or so.

Since I wanted this one to go to the VA Hospital in Durham, NC, I thought I would quilt it in an Americana motif, with symbols of our country in a pantograph.

If you click on the picture, you will see the White House, the Washington Monument, Jefferson Memorial, Statue of Liberty, George Washington, the American Eagle, the Declaration of Independence and other reminders of our great country's heritage.  Hopefully the veteran that gets this quilt will enjoy having this tribute to his or her service.

And now, off to my lurkim.  Phyllis McK handed me another of her darling quilts at the guild meeting yesterday, and I am eager to get it done quickly for her.

We wish you a Merry Quiltmas

One of the nice things about having the IntelliQuilter on my Nolting 24 Pro is that it can be working while I am sewing something else.  This adorable winter wallhanging designed by Pat Sloan was my project this week.  I wanted to finish it before the Christmas guild meeting, so I had something for show and tell.

So, I cut out, pieced, appliqued and assembled this little beauty over the four days of quilting I needed to do to finish my customer quilts.  Above is a close up of snowflakes in the background of the holly applique center.  In the triangles around the center, I put a sweet feathered triangle in the white areas and holly in the red ones.

The only way you can really see the holly is to click on this picture and magnify it.

The outer setting blocks consist of several rectangle bricks sewn together.  I quilted a luscious large feathered triangle over this.  You can barely see it -- too much variation in the colors of the bricks, I guess.  But now I have my Christmas wallhanging quilted, bound, and after tomorrow, hung!

As long as I needed more time to finish assembling the Pat Sloan wallhanging, I quilted one of my works that has been sitting around for years.  It is also bound, and ready to be displayed come July 4th.  The quilting can't be seen, even up close. I used an Independence Day pantograph on these interlocking loops.

And this is another small quilt that had been packed away and pretty much unloved until I quilted it yesterday and put the binding on it today.  It is nondescript, as quilts go, because of the autumn coloring and blah pattern, but I quilted it with a pantograph depicting Noah's Ark, and now it has its own little personality.  The back of the quilt is fabric with Noah's Ark on it, and that's what gave me the idea to use that motif for the quilting.

So this past week I quilted three customer quilts, four of my own (one doesn't have binding on it yet -- I'll show you that one when I finish it), and put together a charity quilt that is now ready to be quilted.  It's from a Hoffman pattern called Trade Winds.  But more about that another day.

Hi ho, hi ho! It's off to work we go!

Margaret A made two pretty little quilts and asked me to quilt them for her.  This one she is giving away as a Christmas gift.  Won't the recipient love it?

This one is for her personal use. She asked me to fancy it up with feathers.  That was like asking me to eat chocolate ice cream!  I love feathers!  And doing them with my IntelliQuilter is a breeze.

This is a close up of the borders, body and corner.  I used the same square feathered wreath in the blocks of the quilt and the corners.  The inner border was a squiggly zigzag, and the outer borders were this luscious undulating feather garland.

The back was as pretty as the front with its quilting more visible.  Don't forget that you can click directly on a picture to see it magnified.

Today I'm going to finish a Pat Sloan Christmas wall hanging and hopefully get another of my UFO's quilted.  More pictures tomorrow.  For now, fa la la la la, la la la la!

Deck the garage with lots of shelving...

To continue the saga of the weekend garage cleaning, today I made another storage cabinet.  Now there are three very professional looking cabinets (from Lowe's) residing under the largest of the four work benches DH has constructed in the garage.  This number of workspaces would be untenable in the average garage, but we built a four stall structure with the intent of having a generous area for DH's welding and airbrush painting and body work, etc.  Little did I know that he would take over the whole thing.  As we reorganize the mess from moving, I am ekeing out my own area to use to actually park my car -- at last.  But for now, it's still baby steps.

Here's another small victory.  This cabinet was moved from the very center of the most congested part of the garage storage  mass to the only wall left that had space for it.  It took over an hour and a half to get to it and to create a path from its former location to the new one!  The shelving above was reorganized to allow for convenient access to cleaning (hand, floor, car) chemicals and solutions and safe storage for bug sprays and weed killers.

And last, the piece de resistance, this marvelous rolling 4 1/2 foot high shelving unit carrying the myriads of screws, bolts, nuts, and manly must-haves, carefully sorted and arranged by DH in a fit of uncharacteristic anality.  Don't you just love when that happens?!

Working class

Working.  Labor.  I'm lucky to be doing something that I enjoy so thoroughly and that lets the right side of my brain take a turn.  For over 55 years of my life, I functioned with the left side very dominant, and that's a good thing.  People want their docs to be left brained/exacting/knowledgeable/pragmatic.  So I happily worked with women in their labors for over 20 years and loved every minute of it.

However, people want their longarm quilters to be just the opposite: artistic/tuned in/appreciative of the appeal in each quilt and able to enhance the quilter's often lengthy labor of piecing it all together.  They want someone who can see beyond the blocks and bring something unique to the quilting.  And that's where "class" comes in.  I get to be the person who brings the quilt to life, complementing the piecer's efforts and color scheme and patterns.  I get to have a go at giving each quilt something special, so that it's in a class by itself -- if not to the world, then to the quilter. 

This quilt was a labor of love.  Every day that I went to my lurkim and worked on it, I felt happy to see it.  Phyllis McK did me the honor of asking me to quilt this beauty for her.  I loved the color scheme!  I never think to use black in my quilts, which is a serious shortcoming on my part, because it makes the palette stunning!

So I did continuous curve in the cream spaces of the blocks and a wonderful orange skin pattern for the solid blocks.  Click on this picture to see it magnified for greater detail.

The borders were just at the top and bottom of the quilt -- a nice touch.  I put in tailored piano keys there, and voila!  The quilt just sang!  And my customer was very happy with the end result.  Me too.

Honey-do

I have a honey-do list a mile long.  That's because for six months out of the year, honey isn't home on weekends -- at least, not so as you'd notice.  He races go carts, an expensive avocation in terms of time.  In terms of money, too, come to think of it.  But that's not the issue.

When we moved here three years ago, alot of junk was "stored" in our garage.  You know what I mean -- all the stuff that I didn't instantly KNOW where it was supposed to go.  Add to that all the stuff that DH believes he needs to accumulate "just in case...", and you have an overwhelming pile of extraneous material that couldn't possibly be necessary for life on Earth.  Everyone said that we would NEVER get it cleaned out, but this fall DH admitted that he was unmotivated unless I was riding herd on him, so I decided to dedicate every single weekend to this task once the races were over.

Silly me!  The blasted races are NEVER over!!!  However, DH's participation in them is -- until the garage is clean.  At the rate we're going, he'll be 70 before he can go racing again...  No, don't feel sorry for him.  It's his choice:  clean it up and go back to racing -- or NOT.

After working all day one weekend, this was the sum total of the clearing out process.  There were eight mounts all told that found their way up on one of the walls in the garage, and I have to say that they look pretty neat up there.

Today I built two cabinets for tools and supplies.  They go under a huge, 16 foot long workbench that DH built a few weekends ago.  We also now have a four foot path from the bench to the door of the house -- a major undertaking!  Meanwhile, DH built some shelves of his own, put up long fluorescent lights above workspaces and attached cords with multiple outlets to the fronts of two more work benches. 

I also found the time this week to finish a quilt for one of my guild friends.  Vanessa G brought me a crispy clean looking springlike quilt made from 30's fabric, and I quilted it with a pantograph of feathers and flowers in the middle and put stippling around the applique in the borders.  To enlarge this picture, just click on it, and you will see the details better.  I can just see this pretty thing in a light filled room with white wicker and pastel hooked rugs.

And now off to the showers.  What a productive day!

Catching up

 Do you remember wearing corduroy when you were little?  How it seemed just the right amount of warmth on those crispy fall days?  Well, I came across some corduroy pants in a catalog the other day, and they were in all sorts of colors!  So I bought my favorite -- teal.  However, I have a problem with my measurements.  Besides being queen size, I am also relatively tall, and the 29" inseam measurements of most "store-bought'n" pants are just a scant bit too short.  So I bought the tall size.  They sat on my dresser for weeks, waiting for the sewing bug to hit, but I was taking a hiatus that lasted almost two months. 

Then, finally, last weekend, I dug them out and hemmed them -- just in time for a visit with my inlaws!  And, of course, if you are wearing teal pants, you must have a coordinating top, so I dug out the catalog and got a light teal top to go with them.  Woo hoo!  I'm beginning to feel like I'm in the fashion throes of adult Garanimals! 

On the other hand, this little bit of sewing finally got me spurred on to finishing some of my longstanding and longsuffering projects.  This quilt is called Americana by me, but is called Betsy Ross Sampler by McCall's Quilting (August, 2003).  It was waiting for its outer border, which is now on! 

Although it's hard to see, the beige border is muted writing of the words to the Declaration of Independence.  I have four customer quilts to finish, and then I can quilt this little beauty.