Row Robin Round One

I am doing a Row Robin with a group of friends that I met on a quilting form. We go to a quilters retreat every February and this year decided to begin a row robin. Each of us has a theme and as the projects go around rows are added by each member.

The above row With the rabbit,turtle, and lizard belongs to my friend Hilda. Her theme is Nimbres art meets Gees Bend. Well I could not figure out the Gees Bend part so finally opted for more Southwest Indian art. My addition is the bottom row that is a simple border. Well it only looks simple. As you can see from the closeup there are many tiny pieces to create that simple design. The secret to doing it was first to work from a grid drawing and begin with strips sewn together. The strips are then cut across and sewn together with new neighbors.

I already have round two here but that is gonna wait for inspiration and a slot of time to work on it. I still have plenty of time. Well I thought the same with row one but it is now quite late getting to the next person.

I Did The Balloon Raffle Quilt For 2008

This is one that was hanging over my head for months. After several delays it finally arrived in my studio just as I was was off on vacation. Of course since it was already late getting done they wanted it yesterday. Well I got back from vacation and spent 4 days doning now much else but working on it. This is the final result. I actually finished it a few weeks ago but am just now shareing the photos of it. I hear that it is now finished, photographed by a professional photographer and post cards and pins have been ordered. My guild sells raffle tickets for a balloon quilt every year and it usually does really well. Hopefully this one will generate lots of ticket sales.

I have been quilting like a fiend since. Last week I quilted 4 quilts and delivered 3 of them. This week I picked up 4 more to do so I am status quo. I need to get on the ball this comming week and finish the landscape quilt and get that out the door so I can get back to the Business of quilting.

If there were only more hours in a day for me to get all the things done that need doing. I was really late in a Round Robin I am part of getting the first round out the door. I think it was two weeks late. Yesterday I spent a good part of the day working on that. We are doing rows for each other and the row that I needed to add has a Mimbres Indian theme. I finally figured out what I was doing and just did it. Since it was complicated I had been procrastinating which of course did not help in the least. It did require a fair amount of time but now it is done. I will photograph that tommorow and send it along to the next person. I already have the second round here and it is due in two week.................oh yes this seems like plenty of time, but I need to get that going very soon or I will be in the same boat again that I found myself in this round.

No Pressure On This One! Yeah Right!!!

This is a landscape quilt that is a group effort. I was asked to be the quilter and also was asked to do some thread painting on it. The two trees were merely fabric trunks with no branches when I was given this project to work on. After a couple of trial pieces I finally figured out how to make the branches and leaves on the tree on the right. This was done on my Phaff with an embroider hoop free motion embroidery. I had to put stabilizer behind the applique as well which had to be trimmed after I was finished. I am pretty pleased with the way the trees came out and defiantly see more trees in my future.


So now onto the quilting! A sky can be a daunting thing to quilt as any of you that have ever attempted it well know. I wanted to create lines but also give the feeling of "sky". Before I even began I spent over an hour looking at photos of landscape quilts on the Internet to see how other people did skys. Well I never found one that really said sky to me so I finally just started drawing on paper and came up with this. Then I drew it with the machine in metallic thread. I was really worried I would not get the metallic thread to play nice but after calling my friend Judy and asking her how she did hers I got a few pointers. I also have a little section off to the side of every quilt where I can play with tension, so I did that first. This is with Sulky Metallic on the top and Bottom Line in the bobbin. I do have a photo of what I did later on the mountains but for that I just used Mettler Silk Finish and Bottom Line in the Bottom. Simple lines in the mountains in matching thread.

Today I am going to figure out the water! Now that is gonna be a trick but hopefully I will figure that out.

What does one do on Spring Break to get out of the cold? Well mostly that means heading South to a warmer climate. For us this meant Texas right down to the Mexico border in Big Bend National Park. I had been there many years ago as a child so did not really remember much about it. The beauty of the desert is just awesome. There was so much to see and do. We spent 6 nights camping right there on the border. You could see Mexico right across the lazy Rio Grande slowly meandering its way towards the Gulf of Mexico.

One thing that amazed me was the history of the place. The park ranger described it as one of the most remote of places in the continental US. To me though it was full of people dating back to ancient times. There were many sites that held the ruins of old ranches and even a resort at a natural hotspring.

On the way home we stopped at the Salinas ruins where I took the photo of the pot. I just love the black on white pottery that is even still made today by the local Pueblo Indians.

The past week has been a very busy one trying to get caught up on quilting and projects that are waiting to be made. I did manage to cross four more things off my list of quilts to be finished.

Finally Some Eye Candy!

Whoooooo Hooooooo finally got some photos of this beauty! This is the latest custom quilt to come off my longarm machine. When I first saw the top I was just awed by the wonderful colors. Then I had to wait about 4 months before it arrived in my studio. It was a really fun custom to do. I actually had to design as I went as often do. The biggest decision was how to break down the space as there were lots of options there. I finally decided to put feathers coming around the wreaths of foliage, fruits, and other things. I then designed a feather shape which I built off of the spine. This meant that I only needed to mark the spine shape on the quilt and then the rest of the feather was done freehand so every feather motif is a little different. Once I had that quilted the rest just kind of fell in place. I was most pleased with the overall finished quilt.

I already have another custom quilt loaded on the machine and will be trying to get it quilted in the next few days. Things have gotten really busy here this last month as more tops are coming in than finished quilts going out. This means backlog which I am very happy about. I will have plenty of work to keep me out of trouble for some time.

It is actually beginning to start looking like Spring here. I noticed my iris leaves beginning to shoot up with the new green fronds peeking out around the old dead ones. I guess it is about time to work on that little garden plot. Since I live in an area that has little rain, high elevation, is teeming with deer and rabbits, and to top it off very poor alkali soil my gardening is very limited but at least it is just enough to be able to go dig in the dirt every once in awhile.

I do love Spring and am looking forward to warmer and longer days. I also miss the buzzing of insects and the singing birds. Even the snakes are kinda interesting to watch when one comes around. I also love the lizards basking up the sun on the rocks. There are also occasional horned toads which are most interesting creatures. They are actually lizards. One of these days I am going to make a quilt that features a horned toad!

Life is Busy!

I guess for me the content of the blog is more about writing than about photos. I only wish I had the energy to post lots of great photos with each and every post but then if I did the posts would likely be few and far between.

I have been quilting like a fiend the past few days. I took a custom quilt off the frame and when I added up the hours I realized it was 31 hours of time. No wonder I thought it was taking forever. I will say though that I spent two half days and two really long days and then a few days with just a couple of hours. I had no idea I had spent that much time on it. I am quite pleased with how wonderful it looks though and will be taking (and yes actually posting some photos of it in the next couple of days). I also did a couple of pillow shams to match and then did another quilt that had an allover loose meander. No wonder I was too tired to actually quilt today. I did load another custom quilt on the frame and it is really cute and whimsical with Overall Sam or Bill not sure the exact name. It is for a young boy and is very cute. Just need to go out there tomorrow and have at it. Seems like my quilting business is beginning to really start being steady and finding the balance between a normal life and trying to get every ones quilt back when they want it is another thing. I just wish I could make a couple of clones of myself to do the quilting some days!!

How Does A Quilter Recharge Their Battery

Good question you say! Well the way I recharge my battery is a good quilters retreat. I recently attended my favorite retreat over in Phoenix. I got out of the cold, boy was it good to thaw for a few days and bask in the warmth.

I have been at this yearly event six times now and each year it is so much fun to catch up with everyone in person. We have classes but the atendees give the classes and they are included in the retreat fee. This year I taught a class on feathers which was very well received. It will be fun to see what my friends do with the information I have given them on constructing a feather with thread and needle via machine be it domestic or longarm. I took a class on convergence quilts and it was very fun but my quilt did not come out with the look I had envisioned. When my friend Hilda admired it I decided it needed to go home with her.

I had gone a day early to give a friend a one on one session on her longarm. It is very sad when someone says they do not enjoy their machine and dread turning it on. Well that has now been fixed. She has told me she is now looking forward to using the machine and is playing with all sorts of new ideas. This was not a one way street either. I also learned from her as well. I too am pretty excited to get back to my longarm and play with some new and fresh ideas and techniques.

Hopefully in a few days I will finish my current custom quilt and will share some of the feathers I am quilting on it.

T-shirt Quilt Revealed!

This story began with a pile of ordinary T-shirts. A very large pile! I was asked to put these together in just one quilt but for a king sized bed. Having never made a T-shirt quilt before I gladly took on the task and went home with 4 large boxes of shirts. I had been told there were about 70 shirts.

The number of shirts turned out to be 88 and of those I was to use the back and front of two of these. I had already done quite a bit of research on the making of a T-shirt quilt so I began with step one, which was to sort and measure each shirt to determine the finished size of each one. You can see the mountain of shirts in the first photo. Next I cut out the design with some extra all around on each shirt and labeled it with the finished size as you can see in the next photo. Now the easy part was done. The next step was to fuse a woven interfacing to the back of each shirt. This had to be done with a pressing cloth as a hot iron would melt the fusible as well as the design on the shirts. This process was long and slow but I pressed on...................literally and finally had that chore done.

So now the next step was to find a space to lay these all out. The best solution was the family room where everyone watches TV. I figured a couple of days and I would be done.................WRONG! This process took all of two weeks. First I had to figure out how to lay these all out so they would actally fit in the space that could be about 120x120 square inches...................and let me tell you that is 10 feet X 10 feet! After much arranging and rearranging, and rearranging I finally got them all laid out. Ok all I had to do was get them sewn together with sashing in between. This process took days. I could not really cut lots of sashing and sew. No I pretty much could cut a few planned pieces at a time. Since the setting was variable each piece of sashing had to fit in an exact space and that ment cutting and sewing pretty much one at a time. I sewed on, and on. I took blocks to the sewing studio and worked in sections. Most of the time things worked out but there were a few times that things went wrong and ths required taking apart and redoing. At last the shirts were all in one huge piece with a nice 3" border around the outside. Let me tell you that was one moment of joy.....................and then I went to bed. I had of course accomplished that on a day when I as determined I would finish so I worked pretty late to get it done.

The quilting actuall went without a hitch. The top took up most of the space on my 14 foot longarm frame but not all of the space. I had it easily off the machine the same day. Now the final step was that binding. I played with some instructions for a machine turned binding which did not look perfect so I resolved myeslf to the handturned binding around that fourhundred and ninety two circumfrence. One stitch at a time and two days later it was DONE!

Now that I have done my first T-shirt quilt I think it will be the hardest and biggest one I will ever do. I have learned alot and am ready to do more. Of course they are all going to be smaller and have fewer shirts. I do love the idea of putting those shirts into a quilt!

Guess I Have Been Busy!

I have not been writting in my blog lately! I guess one reason is that I have been pretty busy. We are getting used to the water situation. At least we are living with it. The big thing is to just be careful to make sure the laundry is really a full load, dishes really need doing as they take quite alot of water so now they get stacked and done less often than I would like.

I have quilted my third large quilt this week! My goal at the beginning of the year was to do 100 quilts on the longarm in 2008. Well I have been working on the t-shirt quilt. That pretty much took up the last two weeks of my quilting time just getting it pieced. I was also pretty busy with the water problem, the kids and stuff around the house so did not have lots of time to devote to my quilting. Well this week I dove in. Monday was a large quilt that got a baptist fan ( I love that template). Tuesday was another large quilt that got an allover loose meander.................fast and easy! Then today I loaded the monster sized t-shirt quilt and did an allover loose meander. Now let me tell you I am feeling a huge sense of accomplishment getting that one quilted. I still need to the binding and that is gonna be alot of binding but the end is in sight at last. I will post a photo of part of the t-shirt quilt when the binding is on................there is really no way to take a full on photo as it is 127 x 116. Now that is a huge quilt................the largest quilt I have ever made. The scarey thing is I have had about 3 or 4 about that large on my quilt frame already. I am pretty happy that I opted for the 14' table.

Water - At Least More Water

This is our new water tank. I am not too happy that it sits right in front of the house but it is water. This tank holds 1500 gallons of the precious stuff. We have to have someone deliver it to the house in a truck and it is not as cheap as the water that comes thru the pipes (which are still frozen), but it is water and I can take a shower and wash my dishes without having to worry about driving half a mile to the neighboors to fill up the assortment of 5 and 7 gallon water jugs any more.

I will have to say that I have enjoyed camping all my life and know how to use very little water but have never been without water in the house for more than two days. I had always taken for granted that I can turn on the faucet and have water come out until I turned it off when I am in my own home. I think this has been a good lesson for me how spoiled we all are.

Water is scarce in much of the world. With our growing population and population centers spreading out to places where there is little fresh water it is a problem for many of us. Yet we continue to use it freely without a thought. I am posting a challenge here for each of you who reads this to have a look at your last water bill and see how much you used. Then for the next month think about water each time you turn on the tap. See how many ways you can cut back on your usage and tell me about it.

Here are a few things I have done this past week:

Flushed the toilet with water from doing dishes instead of sending it down the drain (this is refered to as grey water...............you can also water plants with it if it is filtered). Many people find this a disgusting subject but another saying for flushing, "If its yellow, let it mellow, if its brown flush it down." At the least you do not have to flush every time.

In the shower turn off the water exept to get wet and to rinse off. Ditto for handwashing and brushing teeth.

Only wash dishes when there are enough................if you have a dishwasher never wash less than a full load...............ditto for doing laundry.

I know that I will be thinking about my water usage much more from now on. I got by with less than 200 gallons in a week and a half for a family of four so I am sure I can cut back on my water usage from now on. These will be small changes but I am sure they will add up.

Ok now that the water crisis is over I promise my next blog entry will be more quilt or art related. I am still putting together the t-shirt quilt and now have lots of large sections together and a few single blocks to join. Hopefully by Monday I will have one humongous top ready for quilting. I have ordered the backing fabric online as I could not find any localy and that will be here end of next week so I will have to wait till then to get this quilt quilted. This is my first t-shirt quilt and it is gonna be amazing when it is all together. The customers son has collected all these shirts for running, and triathalon events and there is some amazing history in the quilt. I have been enjoying making this memory quilt and now want to do more. What a great idea to take all those t-shirts and make them into a quilt!

Still No Water

Life without running water is now in its second week. Amazing about the stories I have heard from friends. Some are horrified and there are some that actually grew up with no indoor plumbing. Everyone has a water story though. I am so hoping that someday this will be my water story. I think the worst is not being able to clean things like I would like. Dishes is really the worst. I actually can not cook as I would like to because so many things require the use of water in the cooking and of course the clean up afterwards which sometimes requires a bit of water to clean the pots and pans. No I have to keep it all simple.

Bathing is actually not the worst. At its worst a sponge bath requires very little water and even a shower can be taken with between 2-3 gallons of water if you turn off the water after you get yourself wet, shampoo your hair. Then rinse and turn off to condition your hair and then one last rinse. In and out of that shower fast as you can. Humm I am one that loves to linger under the warm water so I am saving lots of time with the ultra short showers.

The rest of life is still pretty normal. I am darned busy trying to get the t-shirts tamed into the quilt I am making. I got them all laid out finally. Since the designs come in a huge variety of sizes they are kinda like a puzzle that needs to be set in a certain space. They are currently residing on the family room floor and yesterday I began the process of removing a few at a time to apply sashing. I now have the first group together and today will try to tackle as much as I can. My goal is to have the top completed in the next day or two. The quilting is gonna be a piece of cake as it is an allover loose meander. The biggest thing with that is the large surface that I need to fill.

No Water - Day Five

It is getting frustrating to have to be thinking about water so much. I do not want to think about where I am going to get the water to wash the few pots and pans that are dirty to fix meals.

This morning I actually scolded my daughter for dumping the dogs water out of his bowl down the sink. She could not find another bowl for his food so dumped his water. Usually this would be just the normal routine.

I stayed up late last night and finished fusing all the interfacing to the rest of the t-shirts. I counted again and there are 87 t-shirts to cram into a quilt that has to be 120x115 or smaller. That is gonna take some good planning and that will be what I will try to figure out today.