A New Day, A New Way...

My life has been consumed co-chairing a quilt show for a local quilt guild.   Now that I'm on the other side looking back...it's time to work on some creative stuff for me.   But before I start posting some new creative stuff, I just want to record here the quilts that went into the show:

This little gem is a thread painting of a pattern from Debra Gabel's book: "Quilt Blocks Around the World".   Only the size of a piece of printer paper, I used canvas as the foundation and to provide some stability for all of the thread.

I call this one:  Mildly Magnificent Tree.   The pattern is from the Sally Collins book: "Mastering Precision Piecing."  

The Ultimate Guild Challenge this year was to depict a Beatles song or lyric in a quilt.  This is my original design titled "Back to the USSR". 

This original design titled "Orange You Glad You Like Jazz" was my entry for the guild's bloomin challenge.   I'll be auctioning it off at another guild's Silent Auction later this year.  Hopefully, I'll get enough from the auction to pay for the beads and fabric. 

Dad's t-shirt quilt.   I made 5 of these last year when he passed away and gave them to relatives.  This one is my favorite though for chilly nights.

Retreat!

Who wouldn't love three days of sewing with fellow quilters at this setting?   The place was beautiful, the weather was ideal for a stroll or two around the lake, the food was fabulous, and the company was just what I needed.   This is Hallowood, a Lutheran Conference Center near Sugarloaf Mountain in Maryland. 

The geese who make this lake their home were nesting.   The daffodils were blooming.  But the thing that fascinated me most was the millions of tadpoles that had just been bom.   The edges of the lake were crammed with them.  

I made eleven friends, learned some new quilting techniques, made myself a new purse, completed a challenge for our upcoming quilt show, and enjoyed every minute.   

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. 

Thread Tails and Vapor Trails: A Navy Quilt Challenge

Sometimes it's difficult to find common ground in a marriage when your hobby is quilting and your husband's hobby is working.   He loves to go to aircraft shows though. On on more than one occasion we have gone to the Sun and Fun air show in Florida and the Department of Defense Open House in Maryland.  So, when I saw the Thread Tails and Vapor Trails 100th Anniversary of Naval Aviation Quilt Challenge, I thought this had to be a perfect match for us.

After researching Naval Aviation for months, I was drawn to the Osprey, a helicopter that could convert into an airplane during flight.  While the Naval Aviation Centennial next year celebrates the influence of flight on a seafaring military, it seemed to me that the Osprey also represented a little of the future of naval aviation: an airplane able to set down as easily on land as on an aircraft carrier.  I selected two photos from the Navy's Osprey web page:

It took a while to figure out how to use Photoshop to create a design I could live with. My first attempt didn't really look like an Osprey to me at all.

Then I remembered that I had ordered some Transfer Artist Paper (TAP) from Leslie Riley a while back.   So instead of printing directly on fabric, I printed the Osprey picture on the TAP and ironed the image to the fabric.   Other techniques tried during this challenge were: using Organza to represent the wings of an Osprey bird, using some shiny halloween fabric to make the windows look translucent, adding charcoal netting to the aircraft carrier runway to make it look gravelly, and stippling in stripes. Here's my attempt:

Usually, when I photograph my quilts, I take them outside on my deck to catch the sunlight.  Unfortunately, the entire east coast was socked in with rain yesterday.  And, of course, I waited until the last minute to finish this quilt.  So, at the Friendship Star Service Project Workshop yesterday, I caught the flourescent light from the ceiling and had a friend hold the quilt for my pictures.  It's not the best picture to send in, but I'll hope for the best.  I should hear from the challenge sponsors by October 8th whether my quilt will be accepted as one of many from all around the country to celebrate in cloth the 2011 100th Anniversary of Naval Aviation.  If it doesn't make it in....I've learned an awful lot to improve my quilting skills.    Wish me luck!



Dad gets an award!

Last Saturday nite at Old Dominion Speedway in Manassas, Virginia, my father, Bert Robbins, received a plaque declaring him a Stock Car Racing Legend. 

Old Dominion's website tells the story: Over the years, the Old Dominion Speedway has provided the area with exciting NASCAR Racing Series action, Saturday night style. This is where the local driver can come out, try his hand at driving a powerful stock car, and maybe, just maybe, move forward into racing as not only a hobby, but as a way to make a living.

Many drivers who have competed on the 3/8 mile oval have went on to make it big in the top rank Winston Cup Circuit. Drivers like Darrell Waltrip, David Pearson, Bobby Allison, Morgan Shephard, the Burton brothers, and of course the "King" Richard Petty. By the way, 2 of Petty's official 200 wins are at the Old Dominion Speedway. Other Winston Cup drivers who have visited victory lane include Ned Jarrett (a 500 lap event), Junior Johnson, and the late Elmo Langley.
 
Dad is now 79 years old and doesn't race anymore.  He did race at Old Dominion speedway, however, with many of the drivers mentioned above.  I get a kick out of this one race result from the October 1964 Nascar Newsletter.  Dad came in 5th behind Ned Jarrett, David Pearson, and Richard Petty.
 

Here's a photo of one of his first race cars and his last.
 

Okay, so what has this got to do with cloth and creativity.   Nothing!   I did make him a single bed quilt once with these pictures in it, but forgot to take a photo of it before I wrapped it for Christmas.  I guess that just makes me a proud daughter!