Mar 27, 2006

Not just another cute cat photo...



it's also a picture of yesterday's project. No, not cleaning up the messy sewing room, stop looking at that! I put the binding on that blue and white kitten tent/quilt.

I put this quilt together with blue/white Carry Nation blocks made as housewarming gifts by members of Washington State Internet Quilters and I finally took it to my friend Celia Balderee at Garden Gate Quilt Shop for longarm quilting. (By the way, if anyone is interested in owning a lovely little quilt shop here in Cheney, let me know - Celia has a new job with Checker Distributing and needs to sell the shop). Anyway, it's a lovely quilt and that's flannel backing so it's nice and cozy.

Yesterday's other projects were in the kitchen. I'm having a LOT of fun playing with my new Pampered Chef toys. Yesterday's menu was chicken pot pie and applesauce. Yummy. The chicken pot pie thing was kinda funny. I was reading this trashy novel last week and the lovely heroine was a cook. In a medieval kitchen. So she kept making these meat pies with "flaky golden crusts" and I kept thinking "yum" so I started flipping through recipe books and ended up taking bits from a couple of different recipes to make my own yummy chicken pie with a flaky golden crust. See, you can find inspiration anywhere. LOL!

Mar 25, 2006

Finished!



And it even has a label and a sleeve! Here's Kiwi Laguna just after de-cat-hairing and just before being rolled up in tissue and sent off to the contemporary quilt show in Spokane on April 1. Final dimensions are app. 20" by 22". I love how it turned out, but even more, I love the fact that 3 months into the year, I'm sticking with my "finish" theme. With the baby quilts finished, plus the Emily piece for mom, I've completely finished 4 quilts so far this year. Yay Nikki!

Never met a cardboard box I didn't like...



It turns out Pampered Chef boxes also make great cat beds. Who knew?

Mar 20, 2006

It's not ALL track...



Quilting buddy and fellow track mom Julie Huffman and I did slip out for some shopping during the 3200m races. We went to Emerald Garden, a quilting and garden statuary store in Lewiston, where I picked up these yummy bits.

Quilting content soon...Kiwi Laguna is almost finished!

Mar 17, 2006

Spring is trying...

Despite the ongoing ugliness of this:



We also have an excellent crop of pussy willows busting out here on our little corner lot microclimate:



The iris and tulips are poking up in the nice warm southern exposure in the backyard as well. There is, however, no sign of froggies or mice yet, much to the dismay of the little cat-type.

Mar 13, 2006

Track blog

Track season starts Saturday! I've set up a new blog for pictures and updates on how Ash is doing this season. I'll still post bits of exciting news here, but the serious bragging will be over at That AshLee Rey Girl, so as to spare the Artful Quilters the worst of my track-mom geekiness.

Currently featured are links to this season's schedule and to the track and field magazine thingie Ash is currently featured in!

Bad Blogger

I've been extremely tired and extremely distracted and I just realized I haven't blogged in over a week. And that's not the only thing that's fallen by the wayside. However, track season starts Saturday so it's time to get my butt back into some semblance of a normal routine or I'll be completely lost until June.

So. I had a wonderful time on my quilting retreat and I do have pictures to share, although they are mostly of the gorgeous stretch of Hell's Canyon (along the Snake River) where we stayed and not so much of quilting. I got the baby quilts quilted and I have less than one side of one binding to tack down and they will be finished. Yay! I also got Kiwi Laguna 90% quilted and need to focus on finishing that up this week since I have to turn it in next week for the quilt show.

Thanks for all the great comments on my self-portrait quilt process. I tried to send email thank you's but couldn't get a profile to come up for some people. The jungle leaves are pretty cool, yes? You'll be seeing more of those. My self-portrait has hair and eyeballs now so I'll post some more pics soon. Oh yeah, and what the heck was I thinking using wonder under when I'm going to have layers and layers of fabric and I want to do heavy embellishment?

Mar 2, 2006

Process

I started a new little quilt over the weekend and, inspired by my fellow Artful Quilters, I kept my camera handy and snapped pics along the way. Then I read Rayna Gilman's suggestion that we share thoughts and pictures of our working process on a quilt, so here it is. I'm trying something new with my picture posting, so apologies in advance if it doesn't work.

The last piece I showed, Kiwi Laguna was a bit of a departure for me as it grew out of a piece of fabric I painted and stamped. In the ordinary course of events I'm much more likely to start with a plan, a picture in my head. Sometimes my head-picture develops slowly because I want to make a quilt based on a particular idea and other times pictures just pop into my head. When a picture just pops in there, it's usually pretty well developed, but the details are fuzzy and things change as I begin working and the quilt starts telling me how it wants to be made. Once I started with a picture of a man and by the time the quilt was made he had turned into a woman. I can't explain it, it just happens and I go with it.




I had an idea a few weeks ago for a self-portrait quilt (I'm always running a bit behind - everyone else made their self-portraits last summer so they could send them to Quilting Arts). This is a bit of a practice piece for some other bigger ideas I have running around in my head. I'm really interested in heavy patterning like Alfredo Arreguin does in his paintings. I'd like to try the same sort of thing in fabric with embroidery. Here's a preliminary sketch of Miss-Nose-in-a-Book. Obviously I don't sketch out all the details, just the big shapes that I need to get right. I prefer to have some sort of pattern for the big shapes - if I just start cutting it doesn't turn out the way I want it to. So I draw and when I get it right, I trace, onto Wonder Under in this case, but onto freezer paper if I want to to needleturn.




Once I have a preliminary idea where I'm going, I play around with fabric choices.




Here are some more sketches, trying out different vein patterns on some big jungle leaves. I'm really loving big jungle leaves right now.




And here's my lovely purple head with an excellent big jungle leaf sticking out of it! As I was cutting the first big jungle leaf I thought "oh, that looks like Jane Sassaman" and then I had to stop and run to the library to check out Ms. Sassaman's The Quilted Garden because I haven't read it for a while. So I left myself here with this leaf sticking out of my head overnight.



Sunday I made several more big jungle leaves and played around until I liked the placement. Here you can see I'm cutting away the behind parts. I'm leaving a tiny bit of space between the leaves rather than letting them overlap because in all my head-pictures the big jungle leaves have sort of a woodcut look to them.




Here are the big jungle leaves and the purple head fused down, waiting for more details to be added. I've started to play with some wispy pink bits of hair. The pink hair bits are the kind of shape I don't need to sketch first, I just cut bits and play around with them until they look right. And that's where my self-portrait is for now. Tonight I head for the Snake River Rendezvous for a quilting retreat...so maybe I'll have further process photos in a few days.