Dreaming of a White Christmas

I was dreaming of a white Christmas when I made these fiber postcards for the Holiday Postcard swap on the Art Quilts forum. I'd been wanting to play more with free motion bobbinwork and drew the trees on my snowy landscapes with free motion zig zag.




Christmas here in the middle of the mitten state is anything but white, however.

The sun is shining, the grass is green and the temperatures are reaching into the 50s. The pond has thawed again. I woke to the sound of six-teen geese a-honking as they circled and came in for a landing.

It will, at least, make the drive over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house to celebrate the holiday with family a lot less treacherous than usual. Wherever you are and whatever the weather, I wish everyone a joyous holiday.

FYI, you can see the wonderful holiday postcards I received on my other blog, Blocks-n-Swaps, in the post, Seasons Greetings.

Why There's No Tree at My House

This isn't one of my cats, it's from the collection of holiday pet photos on weather.com, but it perfectly illustrates the reason I've resisted putting up a tree. Consider that I have two energetic young cats and lots of special glass ornaments and you'll know why I decided not to risk it this year.

There's also the issue of the physicality of pulling out all the stuff and putting up a tree. This weekend I skipped my meds to see how I'd feel without them and the answer is ... like I've been hit by a truck. How come the older we get, the slower we seem to heal? I'm so impatient with this 50-year old body of mine.

An Unexpected Day

A friend and I got up early on Saturday morning to head for Holly, Michigan and their annual Run Like the Dickens 5K race and walk. The temperatures were only in the 20s and it was windy. For me, it was really more of a stroll than a race of any kind. The path went through neighborhoods where people blasted Christmas carols from their homes for the participants, passed briefly through downtown and then looped back to the school gym.

After the walk, I passed on the cookies provided--our plan was to head to Somerset, a shopping mecca in the Detroit suburbs, have a nice lunch and shop 'til we dropped. We had our destination in sight and were talking about parking and lunch options while we waited at a traffic light ... and someone in a big commercial van plowed into the back of my friend's jeep. There was no warning, no squeal of brakes--I don't think he braked at all--before he hit us hard, propelled us ahead into the car in front of us then caught up with us and hit us again. Three ambulances, two patrol cars, two tow trucks and maybe 3o minutes later, we were on our way to the emergency room--my friend in a collar and strapped to a backboard, me, feeling like a bag lady carrying as much of the stuff from her jeep as I could grab before they towed it away. She spent the hours (and hours) at the hospital wondering if she should have refused care at the scene and signed the waiver like I did; I spent the time thinking that she was doing the prudent thing and I was being stupid. I'll be calling my doctor tomorrow ... besides all the understandable aches and pains, it hurts to breath and I'm wondering if I could have cracked a rib or something ...

Happy Birthday Debra

In honor of Debra's birthday today, I suspended disbelief, crossed my fingers and ... made the leap to beta blogger :-)

I hope you enjoy your special day.

Endless Star Blocks

The last time I had my Stretched Star blocks on the wall, I decided I needed more. So I made some.



The number of blocks has gone from 16 (from the swap) to 20 to these 30 ... now, I've decided that I don't like these proportions and need to make more to either make it square or make a longer rectangle ...

I probably would have made those blocks and this project would be a top by now if I'd not been distracted by an antique block being discussed in the Handpiecing folder on the Quilting forum and Becky's idea about how it could be pieced seminole fashion. Of course I had to try it ...



I love that it has 21 points. You can see some great (finished!) examples of this block in the discussion about the North Point Compass.

My last work in progress of the week is my progress toward beta blogger ... I finally was able to get myself removed from a Team Blog that was long abandoned after a knit-a-long finished almost a year ago. Since Team blogs are not yet supported by beta blogger, if you're a member of one, you won't see the options to move to Beta. You can't remove yourself from a team blog and, until a couple days ago, I couldn't get a response from the owner. It was a blogger catch-22. Now, I'm ready to LEAP ... and trust that the NET will appear. (Cross your fingers for me).

Blue Ridge Quiltfest

Imagine this dining room--with it's wonderful mountain views and all that light--filled with quilters ... and you'll have an idea of what it could look like during the Blue Ridge Quiltfest, a gathering of online quilters being planned for March 22-25, 2007 by Janet Wickell, the Quilting guide on about.com.

The venue will be the Pisgah Inn, a charming, historic inn in the Blue Ridge mountains that is opening a week early so we can fill it with quilters. Details will be available soon, but attendees can look forward to something like:

• A few options for excursions for Friday (for people who want to come a day early) like a trip to shop at the famous Mary Jane's (quilt shop) or to tour the famous Biltmore Estate
  
• Some class or quilting options (probably on Saturday) -- hopefully some taught by forum members, but probably also a "name" or two.
• Some sort of entertainment one evening
• Some sort of challenge for participants
• A quilt show of our quilts
• Lots of opportunities to quilt and chat together ;-)

We'll have the place to ourselves, so a quilting pajama party is also a real possibility.

I fell in love with the area when I visited one of my brothers while he was attending college there . I'm definitely planning on a return trip for the FIRST annual Blueridge Quiltfest. Anyone want to join me?

Winter Arrives

Many of my neighbors spent last weekend putting up their lights and holiday decorations ... Mother Nature waited until today to do her decorating in Michigan.

Despite an ice storm that lasted the night and that turned everything into sparkling popsicle versions of trees and cars and roads and the snow that fell steadily all day, the roads weren't too treacherous.



I enjoyed the frosted scenery and white-on-white landscape on the drive home from work this afternoon.

I confess that I have not yet decorated for the holidays ... nor even put away the patio furniture ... after all, we've been celebrating a November that felt more like spring. (I wish I had, at least, put the furniture into storage.)

Due to Technical Difficulties ...

My laptop didn't want to talk to my wireless modem yesterday so I couldn't post on WIP Wednesday.

I smiled last week at Rian's comment of the old-fashioned look of my sampler in progress because it is exactly what I'm going for with this one. I consciously chose toned down medium values for the blocks--since these are not the fabrics that normally attract me, I thought it was a good way to stash bust, too.

Putting the blocks on the wall last week, inspired me to make more and to edit out a couple that weren't working ...











Anyone who has been making lotto blocks may recognize most of these and wonder what happened to Hope of Hartford and That 30's Thing. The latter, a paper pieced block, just didn't seem to have that old-fashioned feeling (despite it's name). My attempt at Hope of Hartford was too contrasty and ended up being added to the reject pile, along with my first Broken Arrows block--rejected because the blue-violet color felt wrong.



It feels like progress even though I still need a bunch more of the alternate blocks.

Sampler in Progress

16 months ago, I re-started the monthly block lotto. Along the way, I made an extra block for me with plans for a sampler quilt. I decided on an alternate block and made some of those, too, but somewhere along the way, I stopped making time for it and my sampler quilt stalled.

I also had plans for a pillow cover for an oblong pillow, made from these three blocks, probably turned and put on point.

I usually spend a day playing in my studio over the Thanksgiving weekend--last year it was at the house of a friend in Texas. This year, it will likely be a solitary day ... I just need to decide WHICH WIP to work on ...

Thank You Libby

Libby replied to my whine earlier today about the forgotten camera battery with a link to her photos of the quilt show.

Here's one of her photos of my favorite quilts of the day, Invitation to a Flower by Kazue Tukayama . I fell in love with the bunny in a kimono.


Here's a detail


Everyone be sure to check out Libby's photoset of Quiltfest 2006 on Flickr. She has some great photos of the show.

I have to share one more quilt, Manitoba Medley by Judy Morningstar.


This quilt is one that gives you a very different experience when you approach it and get up close. Each of the cream squares contains a small landscape, constructed from subtle tones of fabric and lots of wonderful threadwork. It won a blue ribbon for best machine workmanship.

Thank you, Libby. See you in Rosemont in the spring?

What a Quilter Sees ...

What a non-quilting person sees when they looked out the window, while waiting for the elevator, at the hotel where I stayed in Cambridge, Massachusetts last month.



What I saw.



I walked across that pavement many times and wondered if all the people travelling across it or sitting at one of the tables outside the cafe noticed ... I figured the quilters did ;-)

Good news, bad news

Good news. Yesterday, a friend and I drove to the Mancuso show in Schaumburg, Illinois. I enjoyed the international quilts and the special exhibits, especially Alzheimer's: Forgetting Piece by Piece, curated by Ami Simms, and the quilts from PAQA's Water Challenge.

Bad news. My friend showed up early to pick me up ... just when I was about to switch to a smaller bag and pack it. I ditched the plan to switch bags and just grabbed my camera on my way out the door. I forgot to grab the battery from the charger. We even took a break from the show to ride the trolley to the mall to pick one up at Circuit City, but no luck. So I have no photos to share.

A Tale of Two Compasses

I had hoped to spend more time quilting this evening and even imagined that I'd have the beginnings of the hand-pieced Mariner's Compass block that I'm working on along with Becky and many of the hand-piecers on Quilting to share as my WIP this week. Sadly, while I did make some progress this evening--I went to a copy shot and had Becky's templates printed onto cardstock--it doesn't rate very high on the eye candy scale.

(click to enlarge ... and you can see the line drawing of this very interesting, traditional block)

As I was thinking about a color palette for this block, I remembered some other compass blocks I made many years ago for a challenge on Quilting. The challenge was to create a quilt from 12" blocks using no templates, at least one curve, and using a split complement color scheme.

I loved the improvisational compass blocks I made, though they have languished as a UFO because I never had an inspired setting idea. Now I feel I have to put these blocks into a quilt, if only to illustrate the range of my quilting interests ... this two interpretations of the mariners compass are so completely different.

I am thinking of using the same color scheme in the hand-pieced compass. The color isn't good in these photos, so you probably can't tell that I was aiming at the split complement of yellow-orange, yellow-green and violet.

A Saturday To Dye For

Alice Brinkman, a local fiber artist periodically holds Days to Dye For on Saturday mornings in her studio. Yesterday, we played with discharge, using Jacquard discharge paste and a Thiox bath. I started with some black Kona cotton, turquoise hand-dyed cotton and a commercially dyed purple silk scarf.

Is it because Halloween is around the corner that the pole-wrapped shibori piece on the left looks a little a skeleton?

The piece on the right was clamped with a pair of wood rectangle shapes. Both went into the Thiox bath, along with a purple silk scarf with was also clamped. The scarf when back into the bath, after it was unclamped to produce the gradated effect in the circles.

I also screen-printed both kinds of cotton fabrics with the discharge paste using a silk screens. Here is the black Kona cotton, screened with the kanji for Peace.

A Walk in the Park

I've been walking with a friend in a nearby park. The leaves are falling, the colors are fading, but it is still quite beautiful. (Click images for larger versions)







It has been a beautiful October here, from beginning to end. I took these photos on October 2 (on a walk back to the office from a meeting)



It's kind of amazing considering the 2-day snow storm that happened mid-month. France took some nice snowy landscape photos.



They're so much nicer than the one photo I snapped.



(yes, those geraniums DID survive the snow and are still blooming ;-)

1820 Quilt

This quilt is said to date from 1820. It came from Maine and hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, in the Folk Art room.



It's made from cotton fabrics with wool embroidery that looked like punch needle. The motifs range from flowers and animals to portraits thought to represent family members to soldiers on horseback. (click images for larger versions)



I'm not sure anyone would consider this an Art Quilt today, but I think that the quilter who designed and made it in 1820 was surely an artist.

Works in Progress

When I was packing and moving and unpacking last month, I realized just how many UFOs I have–suddenly my stash didn't seem so large because I seem to have just as many boxes of finished and almost finished tops, sets of swap blocks, unfinished class projects and other works in progress.

Here's an oldie but goodie.

60 inch square throw

The scrappy 4-patch stars were from a swap I hosted another time that *life* happened to the swap hostess . . . me. The blocks arrived at my house in California not long before I had to drop everything and fly to Michigan because my dad was in the CCU with a mystery illness adn was failing fast. Although I did send a note to my swappers letting them know what was going on, and another, the following week, when I was still in Michigan, one swapper kept insisting that someone return her blocks immediately. At the same time, she sent accusatory emails to the powers that be and so I was getting demanding email messages from them, too, adding to my already frightened and stressed out existence.

Yes, sometimes *life* happens to the swap hostess.

The backing is also pieced and ready to go. Can I finally finish it in time for the holidays and leave the memory of that selfish, mean-spirited person behind?