March is Tina’s (of Little Blue Cottage) month for our Snip.Sew.Send. quilting bee. She sent very adorable, girly fabric and requested squares within squares, improvisational, but not wonky.
These were fun fabrics to put together and I would have done it in a little different way, but was limited due to the amounts of fabric that were available. This is going to be a quilt for her daughter’s bed and it should be quite cute when it’s put together.
Lisa at Chemistry Couture is starting a new quilting bee called “The Stitchin’ Bee. If you are interested in joining, go to her blog and see the details and then head to Flickr to sign up. It is a lot of fun and a good way to experiment with lots of different fabrics and techniques without committing to a huge quilt!
It works like this: Each member is assigned a month. They choose the fabric and design they want and send a packet out to all of the other members. Those members sew up a block and return it to the person who sent it. Very fun.
Here’s a sample of the Snip.Sew.Send. quilting bee blocks so far. Don’t you love the variety?
Choices, choices! I have been looking for a watercolor journaling class and found that the Alabama Folk School was going to be having a 3-day class in April. Then, I saw that they are having a quilting class/retreat at the same time with Mary Ann & China Pettway of Gees Bend! I have met some of the Gees Bend quilters before and they are such wonderful women that this sounds hard to resist.
Course Description:
In this mixed-level class Mary Ann and China will teach hand-stitching and possibly give some machine-stitching demonstrations. This class will focus on the basics including how to blend color and how to create different patterns and styles, particularly of the Gee’s Bend tradition. They will discuss how to go from colors, to blocks, to finished quilt. Singing and storytelling included! You will go home with some quilt blocks and many good memories.
This session of the folk school is from April 5-8 and I assume most participants will stay at Camp McDowell where the classes are held. Click here for info about the Alabama Folk School schedule.
Anyone want to join me?!
ps Alabama is really beautiful in April and we MAY be done with snow by then!
Drawing the penguin postcard gave me the inspiration to draw a few more Mother and Baby animal pictures. Maybe if I compile enough of them, I can figure out how to have them printed on fabric at Spoonflower!
Some months ago, there was an online “show your studio” tour. One of the blogs that intrigued me is called Tales from Studio Mailbox written by TJ in Germany. She is very creative and does a lot of mixed media mail art.
TJ was asked to do a window display for a local shop for Mother’s Day. Doesn’t that sound fun? She is asking for handmade postcards depicting the theme “Mother”. There is no size or material limitation other than making sure it gets to her by April 9. This sounded tailor-made for me since my other ongoing project is a massive piece of needle-turn applique.
This is the card I’m going to be sending TJ. The cold weather leads to thoughts of penguins, so I drew a Mother and Baby penguin and gave the Baby a fabric heart-shaped balloon. A little bit of icy ground was made with Stickles glitter.
It costs a little less than $1 to send a postcard to Germany from the US, so you are ready to think ahead about Mother’s Day, click here and help TJ out with a little piece of mail art.
This has been a fun week for picking up our mail. First, was a book that I won at the wonderful Prytz Family blog. Janice works at Barnes & Noble and has very frequent book giveaways in between showing her quilts. This is the second book that she sent me and it is called “The Last Resort, a Memoir of Zimbabwe”. I read mostly non-fiction, so I’m excited to start on this one. Thanks, Janice!
Then, I went to the mailbox and found an adorable package from Amy at amy ala mode. She made the most fun quilt with a secret message in it. The blocks were wonky code flags which I knew from sailing and I figured out her message. So, she sweetly sent me this adorable little pouch made from coffee bean bags and lined with cute little coffee pot fabric.
Of course, I love it, but even my husband commented when he saw the card she sent with it:
A wonky code flag card! Isn’t it cute? It spells out “Way To Go”.
I have a new project in the works. Here’s a sneak peak:
This is going to be an attempt at making a Tahitian style quilt or tifaifai. If you have seen one before, you know that they are symmetrical. This will be 1/4th of the quilt. It is going to be TONS of needle-turn applique and I may change my mind on doing it as I get going.
You fold your fabric in quarters and lay the design on top and cut through all four layers which was not fun. Then, this will be appliqued on top of another piece of fabric. If I can get it all basted well enough, it will be something nice to do watching tv or in the car. Or, I may give up and dispose of this idea altogether!
When Elizabeth was little, I made most of her clothes and a few things for myself. The outfits for her were adorable, but what I made for myself was very “loving hands at home” looking, so I gave up on dressmaking. Now, that I’m older and more patient, it seems like it would be fun to give it a try again and this is my first attempt. This fabric came from a sale table at Hancock Fabrics last year. It seemed like it had a little bit of a retro feel to it, so I combined it with a vintage pattern that I picked up at a thrift store for 10 cents.
Since it was just a simple shift-style dress, it looked like it would be easy to fit, but required a bit more alteration than I expected. After putting it together and trying it on, there were wrinkles in the back. A search online showed that I needed to make a swayback adjustment, so I unpicked the seams, took the zipper back out, and altered it for that. I also took it in at the waist in the side seams. The seam ripper is getting quite a workout lately.
The sleeves and the collar were finished with 3 rows of handstitching in orange, white, and pink embroidery floss.
Now, if summer will just hurry up and come, I’ll have a new dress to wear!
This is the Backward Forward quilt. It started with one jelly roll and one charm pack of Moda Basic Gray Urban Couture fabric. This side is made with the jelly roll. The border and intersecting lines are made with some espresso colored linen. The intersecting lines were inspired by V’s “chopsticks” quilt here on Bumble Beans.
This is the side using part of the charm pack with more of the linen and a background of Kona Snow. The quilt is approximately 65 x 93. One side is not shorter than the other, but our barn where I photographed it is on a little incline!. I started quilting it in a small grid of squares and I didn’t like it, so I spent a lot of time ripping the quilting out. Then, I tried out increasing circles and as you can see, somehow I didn’t get it centered correctly and didn’t notice until I had already done a lot of quilting, so it’s going to have to stay that way!
I love this fabric line, but next time I’ll look for yardage instead. The local stores only carried the jelly rolls and charm packs. I used the thinnest Quilter’s Dream cotton batting I could find. That was not a good combination with the linen. When I pulled out basting stitches, little flecks of the batting pulled through and there was fuzz all over the linen by the end of quilting, but the end result was good.
Next project – a summer dress! Maybe that will keep the snow and cold away!
And for the Aperture users – a lot of the reports I’ve seen give some pretty discouraging information about the upgrade to Aperture 3 process, so I am going to hold off until I see if a software update comes along that will address the issues that many people are having.
I’m adding this to Amy Lou Who’s Sew & Tell Friday! Go over and take a look at the rest of the sew & tell!
V, over at Bumble Beans, is collecting quilt blocks to put together for some charity quilt donations.
She is looking for 10.5 inch square blocks with non-wonky houses. I made one using her pattern and one that I made up myself.
This one has a mid-century modern feel. It was made using a paper piecing pattern that I drew up.
Here’s the pattern if you want to make one, too: mid-century modern house quilt block pattern . It was drawn 10.5 by 10.5, but I haven’t figured out how to tile it so that it will print out in 2 sheets on a regular printer. Anyone know how?
The other block I made was using the pattern on Bumble Beans blog. It is not as much my style and it came out a little bit narrow in the bottom half of the house, so I don’t love this one, but it used up some scraps!
While I’m sewing, I listen to a lot of podcasts about a variety of subjects. One of my absolute favorites is a fairly new one called Mirkwood Designs. It is done by Ruthann Logsdon Zaroff and is such a treat to listen to. Her podcast covers a couple of different segments in each episode. There is usually a fiber arts, paper arts, and cooking segment. The music in the introduction is performed by Ruthann and is really beautiful. Go look for it in iTunes. I think you’ll like it as much as I do!
Happy Valentine’s Day! This is the card I made for my husband. It is fabric, watercolor, stitching and a mermaid pin that I picked up at the Salvation Army thrift store.
For one of his presents, I made an album documenting him building our new sailing dinghy. Hobby Lobby had acrylic albums and they seemed like they would be fun to use for this project.
One of the trickiest parts about using the acrylic album was being able to see through to the next page. It made the layouts a little more difficult. Choosing adhesives was also a challenge since they could show. The best adhesive that I found was very thin Terrifically Tacky Tape. It worked on everything and didn’t show very much.
Boats have been a part of our life since we first met. Right after we got married, we lived aboard our 40-foot sailboat in Boston. When it snowed and was cold, it was a real challenge. But, we have lots of funny memories from those days.
Now, we live in Alabama and it’s supposed to be warm here, but Valentine’s Day started out with snow #5 or #6 for this year and we’re supposed to get more tonight.
I think I’ll get started sewing underneath the warmth of some nice incandescent light bulbs while they are still available and watch the snow continue to fall.
