Sew Nice Mini-group Challenge

My mini-group is doing a Japanese challenge for a local quilting show in October.  And, I'm going to a retreat this weekend....a great opportunity to make some progress on this challenge.  I have a quilting book that shows man-hole covers in Japan.  Evidently, each town has designed their own.  So, I've taken Shannon Town cover design and modified it a bit.   Here's the design from the book:

After playing around with it for a while, I came up with this:

Of course it needed to be enlarged...so I greyed it out to conserve ink and printed it out 32" square.   This will be the first quilt I've done in reverse applique.  I taped the 32" pages together and also taped some wonder under together to cover it.  Last night I traced all the lines.   Today, I will apply the wonder under to the back of my black cloth and cut out all of the white areas above.   I'm going to stick with greens for the pine trees and may vary the colors for the Chrysanthemum and the purple background....but I'm envisioning satin stitching all in black.   Since I've never done this, I might have to do some creative cutting of the background colors.    Hopefully, when I'm finished placing the background colors, I'll be able to iron the black cloth to the colors without leaving an area of wonder under uncovered.  Gosh I hope all of that makes sense.   If not, this'll be another learning experience.

Getting ready for our guild's show...

Alas, I still don't know how it happened....but I somehow volunteered to co-chair the Friendship Star Quilters show this year.   If any of you have done this...you know it's no fun....lots of details....lots of politics....learning lots of things I didn't know about my guild.  Somehow it'll never look the same to me.  Still, I'm not a quitter so I'll keep going forward.  

Here's the first quilt I'm putting in the show.   You'll notice that it matches the picture at the top of my blog.   I took a Betsy True class where we were encouraged to take a photograph and reproduce it on a quilt.    Here's my completed quilt:

It's only an 8x10 inch quilt.   I am very pleased with the results.  It's only been 9 months since my Dad passed away, so this quilt means a lot to me.   The picture was taken in the early 1960s at a racetrack in Maryland.   Miss you, Dad.

New Quilting Digs

It's taken a month to move my stuff from an unfinished part of our basement to a finished area.  What a difference it is just having some sliding glass doors to view the outside world.   After the last rain, there must have been 20 robins hopping around looking for worms and the daffodils are now blooming.  Here's a peak at my new digs.

Call me crazy...but I just love having all the tools I use most often hanging over my sewing machines.   Those Octopus laundry hangers from Ikea hold quilting gloves, containers to put pins, a 2.5 inch rular to measure binding overlap, seam rippers, brushes to clean the bobbin area, magnets that hold the needles I use for burying threads and labels.

This is my ironing board.   Since I've moved, I've had to put sticky notes on all the drawers so I don't have to open them all up to find what I'm looking for.  This cabinet is a stand-alone kitchen cabinet from Ikea.  I covered the wooden top with batting and ironing board material.  Notice the shelf at the end of the cabinet.   Ikea came up with shelf brackets that attach to your counter top (actually used for desks)....so I didn't have to screw the brackets into the wall. 

Finally, here's my view out the sliding glass door.  Our Dachshund, Misty, keeps her favorite toys on her bed by the door.  She has already tuned into the sound of the blinds opening so she can come down and take a nice sun nap by the door while I'm quilting.