Quilting Retreat

Back this weekend from a quilting retreat on Thursday and Friday in the western Adirondacks. Lots of funny friends, good food, and sewing until the wee hours of the morning. Only took two projects to work on for the two days...hand-quilting on the last border of a mystery quilt and sewing Sunflowers for a reproduction quilt. I'm finding that hand-quilting is becoming more difficult if I work for long periods of time as it aggravates some of my finger joints and definitely my carpal tunnel tendencies (numb fingers). It's a pain getting older.

The other quilters laughed at my rather unorthodox method of piecing the latticework for the Sunflower blocks first and then using applique to insert the round blocks.

The holes in the quilt look rather odd, I admit, but I only had a certain amount of the red fabric and wanted to make sure I had enough to make the framework! As it was, I had to piece some of it, but the curved arcs cover nearly all of the seams and the small dots on the fabric make the seams almost disappear. Here are some of the blocks I completed last Thursday to fill in some of the "holes!"

This pattern was from Nancy Martin's Pieces of the Past, but was one of the only quilts in the book that there was no pattern for - out came the graph paper and my pencils!

My Quilting Buddy Returns Home (For a Short While)

The younger of my two daughters (aka quilting buddy Lindsay) came home for the day from Pennsylvania. She was not able to come on my recent textile trips to NYC or Maine...so she received consolation prizes of fabric (in blues, one of her favorite colors). Also lasagna dinner with apple pie and lots of fun! I miss her a lot and hope she can come home a little more often...but with winter coming the drive is pretty long.

Back to the quilting room to quietly hand quilt tonight. It's very rhythmic and quite soothing. Warm, too and I have been caught trying to quilt with my eyes shut! Out to the last two borders of a mystery quilt I worked on in a class at the Vermont Quilt Festival. This is one of the dozen that will hopefully make it to our guild's quilt show in June.

Design for the 2012 Quilting Arts Calendar

Just got my photos of Katie Cat to use in my design for the 2012 Quilting Arts Calendar contest. The 12" x 12" quilt has to be finished to send in photos and entry at the beginning of January. This will include more thread painting than I've ever done before...but I like the threads and fabrics I've accumulated: silk dupioni, batiks, and my own dyed fabrics.

Here is the starting photo: