I’ve been waiting for this, and even though I still don’t have my paper, in-the-hand catalogue…hooray! my quilt, Annularity, has hit print. This is a screenshot of the digital catalogue.
The direct link to this page in the Fall Keepsake Quilting catalogue will allow you to order yourself a kit, if you like. I’ve made two of these…now it is your turn to play with color and with the cool Painter’s Palette Solids. (Or, if you want, you can just order the pattern.) Thanks, Keepsake!
Happy Quilting!
It was a lot of mind over matter, but I finished the borders, worked out the measurements and sewed everything together. There seemingly was a big canyon between where I was last post and where I am now: getting it ready to quilt, but really, it wasn’t that hard once I settled down, stopped freaking out and followed Melanie’s advice.
I finished the Gridster Bee blocks for Linda for August. I like her idea of lots of churn dashes all the same size, but in a variety of fabrics. If you head to our hashtag on IG, you can see that Linda has already received some of the blocks.
The same night I finished the Northern Star Medallion top, I stepped outside to see this.
We drove up to the top of our neighborhood to see where the smoke was coming from–way over yonder in Orange County on the left bumpy mountain. California is burning up, and it’s only the beginning of August. When I first moved here 27 years ago, we only had fires in September, just like clockwork. Every year there would be one big one, and then it would be done.
Tonight the fire map looks like this and it’s not even September. Oh yes, we also have an earthquake map, a smog map, but we don’t generally have snow or flood or tornado maps, like some of you do.
This morning I had to have a couple of stitches taken out from a recent procedure, and the doctor was about to throw these into the sharps container. When I asked, he gave them to me. I washed them up and put them in my sewing supplies–those tweezers are great for grabbing the end of the seam of an HST to keep it from going wonky, and I’ll find a use for those scissors. Yes, I’m still sewing on my hexies. I think I’m halfway there.
Look at that yucky sky in the background–seems like it will be a good idea to stay inside and start quilting!
Bread with every meal • Quilt #207 • 24″ square
Ta-DONE!!!
With great relief and happiness, I present to you: Bread with every meal.
The title comes from the back of this quilt, a tea towel my sister gave to me when she was doing the Great Purge and downsizing her life. 
And in that grouping of statistics about what was eaten, was this phrase, “Bread with Every Meal.” Weird to take this for a title, I know. I don’t usually like to be that obtuse in the naming of my quilts.
But it reminded me of the dailiness of quilting, for me. That nearly every day I am at a small feast at my “table” — my sewing room — partaking of the goodness of cloth and patches and stitching. It makes me happy, and so it’s not a far leap to think of this as my daily bread.
Even when I intensely dislike what I’m doing.
Yes, making this quilt was one moan after another, working on it, wadding it in the corner, avoiding it. These are not my kind of fabrics, and making teensy 1-1/2″ half-square triangles is not my favorite thing to do. But I adore the designer (Lisa Bongean) and so I was determined to be a Brave Girl and finish up this quilt.
It won’t win any awards for piecing, or for that matter, quilting, but it will win prizes for being DONE. So now I can post this:
Yep, seven down and five to go.
In other happy news, we had Camp Create last weekend. For years a group of us had gotten together regularly, the first Friday of every month for the Good Heart Quilters. It came time to end that monthly gig (no short story on this tale, so I’ll skip the telling), so we went out with a bang, with Camp Create.
I put up a bunch of photos on Instagram, but for the historial (hysterial?) record, I’ll post them again here on the blog.
Amy, in the green shirt, above, teaches classes on handmade books at the local art museum, and came to teach us the Coptic Stitch and how to make a book from scratch. I could go on and on about her, but she is waaaay talented, as are all the ladies above. She anchored the first half of Camp Create, held in Leisa’s (air-conditioned) garage.
All our books. One of my favorite lines of the day was when one of us hadn’t finished up our binding and laid it down with the rest. Amy carefully tucked the threads underneath saying, “We can hide our secrets.” Yes, indeed. Mine is the green one with the butterfly (click the link for the video). Amy had the best papers from which we could choose.
Then we had lunch and switched gears to screen printing. Both Simone and I had taken Karen Lewis’ class at QuiltCon, and Julie was also experienced at this technique, so we taught the technique to these fine crafters.
For those of you wondering where to get the screen printing cloth, I found this “utility fabric” at JoAnn Fabrics, and it seemed to work great. It’s not 100% cotton, but I did all my printing with this and I’m happy with it.
In other news, I’m making progress on my Hexie Flower quilt, a design by Sherri McConnell. (More info on her blog.)
And here’s my contribution to Hexie Lore: punch a hole in your paper. You can anchor your hexie with a straight pin while you stitch (so the fabric doesn’t move around), and at the end, insert the tip of your scissors into the hole and pop it out. I use the basting method where you don’t take out your stitches, and I use a hexie template to cut out the fabrics.
Lastly, we had some visitors. I set up the grandchildrens’ beds downstairs in the dining room, and Maddy’s bed was taken over by their dog, Cookie. Really, it’s more like their younger sibling, Cookie.
A summer treat: frozen yogurt. We miss you already–come again!!
And with this Rosette (#10b), I finished up The New Hexagon Millefiore Quilt-A-Long.
Contractually. At least according to the rules of the The New Hexagon Millefiore Game.
But I really hate the crenellated edges. I don’t mind the zig-zag edges on the sides, and have loved what others have done, by appliqueing the quilt down to a solid border.
But for this quilt, these colors, every border fabric I chose just looked terrible. Clunky. Admittedly they are kind of wild, but really, the quilt is kind of wild.
Instead, I’m try to fill them in.
You can see what the first two look like. There are 9 crenelations on the top and 9 on the bottom, so two down, 16 to go. This is actually not as hard as I thought, as the fabric choices have already been made, and it’s just sort of filling in and figuring out how the pieces will work. I am trying not to use just one-fabric half-hexie blocks, but instead, create interesting seamed fill-in pieces. I figure the sides will be faster–just a sort of background fabric from the nearest rosette.
Stay tuned.
Research photos (culled from the web, from Instagram and from the Facebook page):
Many of these quilts turned the design on the its side, or upside down. I should note that I also changed the lower edge of mine, melding 4 different rosettes into one gigantor rosette, plus I tweaked a few more places (there is NO star in the middle of my quilt, for example).
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OccasionalPiece--Quilt! 