Finished is Relative

Here are the last four blocks for the Pineapple. It took some time to get these done. I started out normally, but when I got to the last few rounds, I paid special attention to the fabrics I was choosing, so they would be perfect. Perfect is, of course, relative, because of the fabrics they will be placed near, but I just wanted to put some of the dots that I really liked in the last blocks.

I counted several times to make sure that these were the last four blocks and that I had counted correctly initially to make sure I had calculated the number I needed properly, but I fully expect that will have to make more.

As I said, Finished is Relative. Now I am on to adding corners to the blocks. I need to do that so there aren’t big holes in the quilt. I suppose that would be a look, though.

I started out with 2″ squares and cut them in half. They work on some corners, but are too small for others. I want enough extra so I can trim the corners, if I need to do so. I will try 2.5″ or 3″ squares next. I cut a bunch and don’t think I will be able to use these.

Flowering Snowballs

Had a cruddy day at work today, but came home to some Pineapple blocks on the wall and that made me smile. They weren’t new ones, but I really had a good look at them and was reminded how much I like dots!

In between working like a complete dog on the weekend clearing out my aunt’s craft room, I sewed a tiny bit on some Flowering Snowball (Cross Blocks). I did most of the sewing on the plane, but some in the morning over my coffee. I decided just to do corners, except for one block, because I was running out of the colored pieces and had mostly greens and pinks left. It is a scrap quilt, but I don’t want to have too many greens and pinks. It’ll be a balanced scrap quilt. 😉

When I got home I pressed all of the pieces and, on a whim, counted the finished blocks. I have a total of 22 finished Cross Blocks thus far. WOW! How did I get so many? Just plugging along, I guess.

My next task for this project is to cut blue, purple, orange and yellow corner pieces to round out my choices a bit.

I also talked to AJA this weekend. She lives near where I was working, but we couldn’t fit it in to get together. I didn’t e-mail her in time at the beginning of the week to remind her and she forgot to write it on her calendar. Not sure when I will be back, but we had a good chat. We discussed doing the next color Bullseye quilts. Purple, I think. She put me in charge. I will have to talk to JulieZS and see what we can work out.

Halloween Revisited + Some General Notes

I was browsing Deirdre’s Sloppy Studio when I came across the Sassy Art Goddess blog. I think of this as the best pumpkin I saw.

Other notes and tidbits:

Yarnstorm has some new and interesting links to other blogs. Pea Soup is quite good and I love the creativity of the names of people’s blogs. How about Lobster Squad? Kind of makes me wonder if Artquiltmaker is a misleading name since nothing that I am working on currently could remotely be called ‘arty.’ Her drawings remind me of what I would like my visual journal to look like. Oh, yes, visual journal. Got to get back to that….

I was asked when is the best time for me to write my blog and my other writing and I really can’t figure it out….yet. I often write in my journal in the morning and my blog at night – bookending the day with writing. But I also write more blog posts on the weekends and more journal entries during the week. Today I am writing in my blog in the morning and I definitely feel much more energetic about it. Of course, since I am not at home, I don’t have all of my tools, so the posts are more texty that full of pictures,perhaps skewing the impression? Let me know if you see a difference in the posts I write in the morning vs. the ones I write at night. I know you are rolling your eyes at my unreasonable demands, but just let me know if you notice! Otherwise just read on!

Artquiltmaker blog has not shown up in Technorati yet, per my Entering the Internet Age post. I will have to investigate. The blog is showing up on Google results, however, which, I guess, is good. I haven’t seen any additional traffic, but also don’t have a counter. More investigation required, I believe.

Have a great day!

Pools of Color

Yarnstorm has a gorgeous quilt on her blog, which renews my belief in simplicity and that I did the right thing with Thoughts on Dots. Her post talks about her pool quilt. Stop reading now! Right click (so you don’t leave my blog completely, thanks) and go read the post on her new quilt top.

Now that you are back and ooohing and aahing, I hope you enjoyed the quilt. First of all, the photograph that she has shared with us is wonderful. It has made me realize that, perhaps, you would be happy with ripples of color instead of the whole quilt perfectly centered with no extraneous info peeking in? Also, the way she talks about the colors and the quilt is like a poem. It reminds me of some writer who I have read recently, or whom I have read in the past and made an impression on me.

The quilt looks like it is made from all of those tightly, yet very soft cottons. I know that is not 100% the case as I have some of the fabrics. I don’t think any of them are loosely woven, though.

I also like the way she has used large scale prints. It seems like some of the flowers are fussy cut (notice the centers?).

I have been thinking about another quilt of squares only and I am inspired once again. We’ll see how it progresses.

I am out of town again. Back soon with photos.

Fun pincushion

I have been thinking that I would like a small project that I could churn out quickly and would have some use. The gift bags, you ask?? I know, I know. I should get to those. The fabrics in this one are bit boring for me, but can you imagine it in DOTS?!? What else? I am glad she posted the link to the directions. Easier to make….

May Britt from Norway has a tutorial of an awesome pincushion on her weblog! I love it so much that I had to give it a try 🙂 With this result !

Lucy

  blog it

Flickring All Weekend

I spent a lot of Sunday uploading quilt photos to Flickr. I also spent Monday night, Tuesday night and a little while this evening on the project. I believe that I now have all of my digital quilt photos up on Flickr. In any case, there are about 3500 pictures of quilts.

Some observations:
1. I used to take a lot fewer photos than I do now.
2. Adding the digital photos to Flickr is wonderful, because you can organize them in sets. Each photo can be in multiple sets. This means that the Pineapple photo on the right (as usual, if this is your quilt, I will be THRILLED to put your name here!) is in the PIQF 2003 set as well as the Pineapple set (kind of like iTunes allows you to have one song in multiple playlists). I love this! It allows me to think about quilts in a number of different ways.
3. 2003 and three was a good year for quilts. The quilts are more vibrant (less brown, I guess) than now. The designs are good and the techniques are top notch.
4. I scrolled through many, many of the photos as I tried to organize them and it is quite wonderful just to look at a bunch of different quilts.
5. My photography has gotten better.
6. I was also able to discover interesting quilts about which I had forgotten, including a few more Pineapples hidden in the dark corners of my hard drive. .
7. I wish I could blog sets of photos, but it doesn’t seem like I can. Perhaps I can add a link to an entire set of quilts, so you can see them as I blog about them? Here is a link to a set of tree quilts. You can tell me if it works.

I am considering sending my prints off to someplace like Shoebox reprints and getting rid of the boxes and boxes of quilt photos that I have under my desk and in my bottom drawer. I really don’t know what I will do in the long run with all of these quilts on Flickr, but for the moment it is interesting to me. We’ll see what develops.

Thanks for reading and have a nice day.

A Little More Progress

I spent a lot of the day playing with Flickr, adding a lot of quilt photos so I could organize them in different ways. As a result, it meant that I didn’t sew much. I did finish another Flowering Snowball while watching some TV and worked a little on the Pineapples.

I am working on four at a time and I really should cut back to two, but I’d like to get them finished.

Entering the Internet Age

Well, I have finally done it. I have allowed Google, Technorati, and all of the other blog search engines to index Artquiltmaker blog. Up until now all you were here because of word of mouth or somehow stumbling on to my blog. You are the elite, the special and the charter members. Thank you for reading and commenting.

I am putting myself out there now, so, faithful readers, please excuse, in advance any spam comments or weird things that happen to the blog. You can reach me through the comments section or from the mail to page at Artquiltmaker.com.

Fabrics, Blog Fun and Product


I hope the above describes some of my work lately!

I spent the better part of 4 days in Monterey at a conference (for my other life). I have gone to this particular event for a number of years, particularly when it is in Monterey (some years they have had it in Palm Spring, San Diego, etc.). One of the nice things is that I stay with friends rather than staying in a hotel (no late night Law & Order sessions for me!). This year their house was under construction and my friends were sleeping in *my* bedroom! The nerve. They shuffled me off to his sister’s house a bit down the road where I was treated fabulously and helped out as well. Sis’ hubby went in for hip surgery after my first overnight, so I kept her company. I had my own ensuite bedroom and bath. The bath had a heated floor!

Back Porch Fabrics

Back Porch Fabrics is a wonderful quilt store in Pacific Grove, which I have visited and written about before. It is light and airy and the people are friendly. The absolute first thing I did when I got to the Monterey Peninsula was head to Pacific Grove. I didn’t think there could possibly be any dot fabrics I didn’t own, but I was mistaken.
Not only was I able to find more dots (and a few other fabrics), but the lovely Quilts Japan mag as well. There was another issue that I liked, but I really only liked the cover, so I didn’t buy it. The quilt store staff didn’t leave me alone long enough to take a picture of the cover, so I will have to try and find it online.

The quilts they had hanging up were not in my colors, but they went together really well, were graphic and well made and that made me like them. Unfortunately, the staff would not let me take ANY photos in the store. I knew they wouldn’t let me take photos of their class sample quilts, but I wanted to show you some overall pictures of the store so you could get a sense of it. No dice. Sorry, maybe next time.

Sherri e-mailed me and was kind enough to offer the two lovely dots above, which arrived while I was away I’ll need to cut some strips and add them to the piles. I probably won’t be able to use the grey in the Pineapple quilt, but, as I have a few more dot quilts in me, I will find a place for it. Thanks, Sherri!

Finally, I have been neglecting the Flowering Snowballs (Cross Blocks), but sat down in front of bad TV last night and finished this one. I only had the two middle seams to finish, so I can add this to the stack.

I also attended the CQFA meeting today. We spent, probably, 1.5-2 hours on show and tell. It was a lot of tell and that was great. I showed the Nosegay and the sleeve on Sharon’s quilt, which is now finished. Hooray!

I was looking for the Quilts Japan issue when I came across Little Shika blog. It has a Yarnstorm kind of feel with my dogged resolve to show all the steps in a project. (Suppose I should rethink that, e.g. how much information is too much information???) Great photos, too.

Stay tuned for a report on my new iron!

Back!

I am back from the wilds of Monterey where I was well taken care of, refreshed and rejuvenated.
This is a little scene that I saw at my friend’s house. I loved the machine in front of the thread. She has a wonderful eye and everything in her house is subtlely colorful, beautifully arranged and restful.

Her garden is wonderfully wild. Also restful.

Using Liquid Paper to Satisfy a Child’s Halloween Dreams

How to Make a Halloween Costume

Supplies and Tools

  • Picture of child’s dream costume
  • Felt (of appropriate color(s)
  • Sewing machine
  • Scissors
  • Shoelaces
  • Timtex
  • Liquid Paper (correction fluid)
  • Aleen’s Craft Glue

The Halloween costume, except for some decoration, which are drying, is finished. The Darling Child is happy and I didn’t have to buy anything except 2 yards of black felt. I like using felt for Halloween costumes, because the raw edges don’t ravel. You can also just cut it off, glue things to it and cut strange shapes out of it with no problem. The costumes are a bit fragile and don’t usually last long. You can see the cloak that I made by looking at this picture from Wikipedia.

I didn’t have any white paint, so I used Liquid Paper to create the whorls on the red emblem the Darling Child needed.


I only had enough red to make five of the emblems, so we had to place them carefully for maximum effect.

It is kind of fun to make the Halloween costumes – to make a child’s Halloween dream come true. It is also fun to kind of figure out how to make something work with what you have on hand. I always buy enough felt to get through the main part of the project, but inevitably, I don’t think farther than that. One costume I made needed a fat tail that stood up. I used a paint stirrer to keep it stiff enough. That was before I knew about Timtex.

More Hiatus Progress

Here is an update on the progress I made while the 9K was in the shop.

  • DONE: 6 baby blankets: two colleagues and one person I want to impress are having babies: 2 each

: I made all the blankets I set out to make and then I found out that another friend was having a baby, so I made an additional two as well. I didn’t have the 9K as mentioned, so I just used a zigzag to hem the blankets. Not the way I normally like to work, but I wanted to get them done.

 

– I made the binding and sewed it on and am almost finished with hand stitching it to the back of the quilt. The sleeve is also made, but does need to be applied.

  • Binding for Serendipity Puzzle -I made the binding, but am waiting to finish Sharon’s quilt before I apply it. The sleeve is also made.
  • Gift bags: I have lots of fabric for bags, and Christmas is coming. Not done.
  • Cut out fabric for test blocks. I am going to start looking at new machines soon and I want to have some piecing in my own fabrics, which I can use to test the machines. Not done.
  • DONE: Wash and press new fabric.

 

– The Fabric Queen did this for me.

  • DONE: Replenish Pineapple strips

 

– This is partially done. I cut some last week as I worked on the most recent Pineapples.