The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Wow! Wordpress gave me the best kudos on my blog as a New Year’s Gift… pretty awesome, I think, for someone who started halfway in the year. What a neat present to receive, and I owe it all to you, the readers. Thank you for checking in on my blog!
Have you heard of the website called “Quilter Blogs”? With all the web surfing I do, looking for good quilting scoop, I don’t know how I missed them before, but I did. Head on over to their website to see what quilters are talking about at http://www.quilterblogs.com/. Their sister site, Quilter’s Daily Special, offers special deals and codes for deals that quilters want. You can find them at http://www.quiltersdailyspecial.com/daily-deal/. This site is also where I found out about a fabric website that finds fabric for you via links to other websites. If you are making something and are down to the wire and then find that you are short on a fabric, you can go here and do a search for it – http://www.findmyfabric.com/. If you are a quilter or a fabricaholic, you will love each of these sites. Have fun!
Whew! The final customer quilt before Christmas is done! I had SO much fun working on this quilt. Barbara chose hot pink thread, and it looks so stunning on this quilt. I hope the person who receives it as a Christmas gift will be as excited as Barbara and I were when we looked at the finished product.
Close-ups of “Christmas 2012” written at the bottom of the quilt. The rest may look like scribbles, but they are actually loops and leaves.
See how the hot pink pops on the variegated blue backing? I think she made a good choice with the hot pink thread. But then, I think all her colors work very well together.
If you know anything at all about me, by now you have figured out that I like to sneak little surprises into my quilting. Leaves need bugs, so I added a couple of them on the leaves. This is a “regular” old bug, but I put a lucky ladybug by Barbara’s name. You can also see where I put the family members’ names into the quilting.
Fun, fun, fun! I love to draw with thread! If you haven’t tried drawing with thread yet, ya gotta try it! Now I’d better get to work on decorating the house for Christmas and all the other stuff that goes with it. 😦
So, imagine this chair in your quilting studio and all the threads that it would collect.
I got this chair as a Christmas present last year. It was one of the best gifts I received. I love it to this day. For whatever reason, it makes me feel important, like I am an artist. However, the fabric seems to catch all my lose threads. I’m okay with that, and it really doesn’t bother me, but I’ve had this French Country damask fabric that has been patiently waiting to be glorified in something. Originally I was going to make a purse from it, and I might still do that. But, I really do love it as a decorating fabric, so I chose to add a feminine touch to my studio by covering this chair with it. And, here is what it looks like now.
This is just a slip cover over the seat and back. Here’s one of the back. Can you see the fabric tie with the black’s sister fabric that matches the front of the seat back and the seat ruffle?
And, here’s a better look at the black fabric on the seat.
New decorations make me feel like I have a new studio. I love that feeling!
P.S. The fabric is Olde World Style by Monique Dillard for Maywood Studio
Finally got this customer quilt finished after a dryer crisis and being sick 2 days last week… Beth made this Stack ‘n Whack quilt and is giving it to her brother for Christmas. She wanted feathers (for those of you who are not quilters, they are the paisley/heart/half-heart shaped designs stitched into the quilt) all over it with the background filled in with stippling, which is a tight meander. What do you think?
This is the “before.”
And, this is after I turned the quilt on the frame and did some quilting.
Here’s another angle so you can see more.
And, a close-up of one of the Stack ‘n Whack blocks… Stack ‘n Whack is basically fussy cutting fabric so that those triangles all look the same. You stack the fabric so that the copies are all on top of one another and then whack (cut) it. Or… you can do it other ways which I will let you research on your own…
Quilting between the “stacks”
I think Beth did a superb job of picking out the color of thread. You can’t tell it here, but she chose a sage green to “pop” off the background sueded blue fabric, and it also went well with her stacks, borders, and backing fabric. I was really impressed that she knew exactly what she wanted when we first discussed this quilt. I think she did a great job on it and hope she likes the quilting I’ve done for her.
So, “the reveal” of the raffle quilt was today. That means I can share pictures of the finished product. I’ve given you a couple of tastes of it before, but here is the whole thing.
And, here are a few close ups. The fans at the top in the pillow topper are hand appliqued with embroidery added. There is taupe piping along the edge of the big kimono block/medallion in the center to go along with the thinner taupe colored inside border. I learned from quilter Cathy Wiggins that you should repeat your colors or fabrics elsewhere within your quilt, so you should have them 2 or more times. I was trying to pick up the taupe in the outer border fabric, so that’s how I wound up with the inner border and then the piping. You might notice several different fabrics for a scrappy look. I saw that outer border and knew it would be the basis of the quilt, so I pulled as many indigo fabrics as I could find that would go with it. And, of course I needed to pull that rose color in from the border fabric as well, so that’s how I wound up with the fabric for the Kanji and sleeves of a couple of kimonos (cream background with cherry blossoms). A lot of these fabrics are Kona Bay fabrics (http://konabay.com) that I bought from the a local quilt store, Quilter’s Haven (www.quiltershaven.com), in Olathe, Kansas. They have quite the variety of Asian fabrics.
The appliqued Kanji symbols say “Health, Weath, & Happiness.” So, that is what the quilt is named. Putting this quilt together was quick. What seemed to take forever was the quilting. In an earlier post I demonstrated a couple of strategies I used for marking designs onto it. There are lots of ways to mark for quilting. Quilters like to say, “If you can draw it, you can quilt it.” Of course, I like to say, “If you can trace a design from a Dover copyright-free book, you have a quilting design.” I got the designs for the motifs on the kimonos from a couple of Dover clip art books. If you know anything at all about me, you know I like to sneak fun stuff into my quilting, so I have lots of Dover books in my stash to use for ideas.
Hope you enjoyed the “quilt” show!
Cowtown Quilts 