zen and the atr of quilting

 I'm in my happy place again




the sun is shining through the prisms



sending little rainbows all over the sewingroom



 the window is open for now 'cause its warm in the sun








I've got something on the machine and something  in the longarm
(thank goodness for charity quilts and the quilt guilds who spawn them!)

 practicing my feathers when piecing gets boring or frustrating in a rippit sort of way

Giving myself plenty to do so I can ignore politics for another week or so


I've gotten a lot of practice this year!

the throes

I have a bad case of the throes,

as every quilter realizes at some point in their quilting career

there are way more Ideas in their heads than they can ever make in reality

and when you are a quilter like me

who is well and truly bitten,

you have more than one hobby horse to ride

this makes for a messy table

or two............


I am always in the throes of an idea

I've various stages of done laying about the house.

I try to keep them contained but they keep crawling out across various tables in the house

tossing themselves around

at least that's what I tell myself

You know they just got out again, like recalcitrant puppies refusing to stay in their basket


here's another one!

and you have to lay it all out so you can see all the colors and how they will interact with each other!

next thing you know there are parts all over the room

It just exploded! honest!

I need to stop buying fabric, is what I need to do.

Ha!




that last pile ended up looking like this so the process is messy

but look at all the pretty colors!

the bird book

 A long, long time ago, I joined two separate round robbins with Crazy Quilting International

one round robbin was to CQ your favorite poem

one of mine is "When Women were birds" by
Terry Tempest Williams

“Once upon a time,
when women were birds, t
here was the simple understanding
that to sing at dawn and to sing at dusk
was to heal the world through joy.
The birds still remember
what we have forgotten,
that the world is meant to be celebrated.”
 
 When Women Were Birds: Fifty-four Variations on Voice


I was quite pleased when these blocks came back, though only two had the phrases sewn in that went with their pieces.

I always meant to sew the rest but never got around to that part as so many other things were pressing then.

what were they? I cant remember. I just remember something else needed to be done and I put the blocks aside.


 The other round robbin  theme was Women in gardens(?) I think.

And that one came back to me exquisitely sewn too!

and then life so it got put with the others and sat sad and neglected at the bottom of the ufo box

I took them out earlier this year
thinking to make them into a wall hanging

but that wasn't good enough either
so they sat on the desk in the "waiting" pile.

then I got them out to show someone and they got all mixed up together and well,

 they looked good together
so I thought "Aha! a book!"

and here it is.

the bird book

Wichi-poo doll

 I don't know why I hadn't thought of this before

a bit thick I guess.


Isn't she sassy?

Her slippers are bats (of course)

her skirt and hat are both CQed

shes got an under skirt and her body is made from green dot cotton and barber pole stripes


So much fun this was!

I made up the pattern for her skirt and hat

as there really wasn't one in the Tilda pattern book I was using

and now I can't remember which one I used but I think it was the christmas one from last year.


 The one side I used a small lace motif and beaded it on and gave it a little fringe and some extra flowers




The other side has ribbon roses and a ghost bead though in the picture you can't quite see it

I had a hard time not getting blurry pics for this so excuse if they aren't up to snuff

there are skull beads all over the place and fringe and lace and ribbon and did I tell you how much fun I was having here?







I tried to keep it down to two colors besides the black silks and velvet's I used for the skirt









 Do you know how hard that is?

especially when the purples and browns were yelling at me from their boxes!






but I managed it, whew!

there is a lovely green spiderweb and a sparkly spider

a dangling skeleton

the ribbon roses all have a skull in their middles as a surprise guest!

Another elderberry faerie

I think this is one of my favorite of Cicely Mary barkers faeries.


The berries just lend themselves to be embellished deeply with beads.

as you can see I've been here before.

She was the first faerie I did when I started this project in 2013(!)

It's fitting she should be one of the last.

I will be interested to see how I have improved since I last saw her.

The last faerie and other stuff

 It seems I am not done with the faeries yet

I found 3 more panels digging around for something else,

I'm sure some of you can relate

I've been a berry busy bunny this summer

lots to sew and do and wow It's August already?

How'd thAt happen?

Anyhoo

there were birthdays in all of that mess too

the Peacocks were made for my dd#1


Good long arm practice they were too!

Then there's the help/nothelp

Napping on the job as usual








I'm kinda proud of the quilting on this one

Its a panel so again so I'm cheating but It was to much fun to pass up!











I'm getting better!

I can see it in my swirls

















This is the back to another one

you can see the front when I give it to it's intended





Then there is this quilt, I was given 3 donor flimsies by Susan the owner of Gathering Fabrics

It seems these poor babies were the last made by one of her ladies before she died and donated by her husband as "I don't know what to do with these ones, please find a home for them." Quilts

My working theory, now that I have done this one is that it was an early quilt made with 30's fabrics and originally made into a tied quilt with synthetics taken apart that she meant to "Do something" with and never got around to.

I loved working with this one even though I had to pick out the old bits of synthetic yarn that was used to tie it, yech.
I also had to do some spot repairs because many of the seams were splitting due to uneven seams and the age of the fabric.

I used what was left of the extra yellow and green and added some pink from my own stash to finish the backing.

I'm following Angela Walters Swirl-a-long on youtube and am getting much better as I go.

I love the different looks that I got from the different style of swirl

The top 2 differentiation's let the fabric lie flat
they are the swirl echo and swirl in swirl

whereas the feather swirl all over is "lumpier"

And the obligatory Vegi garden for this year

I'm going to have hella cucumbers!

I paired the zucchini down to 2 plants this year and they have started to produce as well as the tomatoes but those I can preserve if I need to.

What do I do with cucumbers?

I obviously did not think it through well enough this spring as they have never gotten big enough to produce more than 3-4 misshapen cuecs in previous years, eep!

The last faerie

 The last in a long line of faerie blocks,
20 in total, Is done!

Wheee!               Awwe!

Wee, because I love these fairies

 I grew up with a whole set of little flower farie books illustrated, beautifully, by Cicely Mary Barker

Abc faeries, summer faeries, tree faeries etc. 10 little books in all all lovingly kept a little dinged on the corners or lovingly rubbed but mostly still pristine.

Then I gave them to my children

and most of them went missing

Many of my, lovingly kept, childhood friends met their demise in this manner *sigh*

I had a whole collection of Asterix and Obilex and Tintin Illustrated novels ( don't you dare call them comix!) that died a horrible death at the loving hands of my children when the glue that kept them together gave way. my son still has them or whats left of them in a box to keep the pages from flying away and dispersing further.


As a former Librarian this both horrifies and warms the heart.

Thank goodness I saved my first edition set of OZ and Bookhouse books safe.

Though my "Friend Flika" got passed around every friend they ever had, until it was so bent, dogeared and missing pages you couldn't read it anymore.

You see they loved them enough to share them and that is friendship

Sane update

 So now that I have a longarm
 all that strum and drang
 of crawling across the kitchen floor on my knees basting
                       is OVER!

just pin it to the leaders and off I go!

                           WHEE!

The top quilt is one I made for a friend who is pregnant for the firs time



I think I got the animal prints because they were 70% off
 You never know right?

The rest is stash busting

I quilted it using a straight loop line that is staggered over the whole thing and an outline for the faces so they stood out from the rest.

 The other is a quilt I made from wine fabric I have been hoarding, ahem, saving up for about
10 years to "do something" with


all the green fabric and the brown back is stash busting, as I am in that mode too.

I quilted it with an allover meandering swirl

I even felt confident enough to try my hand a phrases in the wine labels
One says "In vino veritas" and the other says "It's wine o'clock"
It's not great but its getting there.

Then to use up a load more fabric because I didnt have enough of the brown for the whole thing

I pieced the back too.

 I finished both quilts in 2 days.

I would never have been able to do that before

It would have taken me 1/2 a day to baste the crib quilt alone!

My back and knees would have refused to go any further!
so whoopee for the longarm and big table if you can swing it I highly recommend getting one. So much better on my back and knees!   and I can get a whole quilt out in a week. Instead of the three it used to take so more incentive to use up all those scrappy bits I have lying around.