Contemporary Traditions

Here’s another quilt finished up for a children’s home here in San Antonio. My friend Karen pieced the top and I quilted it. The first two pictures are the front, the last two are the back. Enjoy the pictures!

Sunday I will be attending an all-day class with Sherry Rogers-Harrison. I cannot wait! Sherry’s quilting is incredible! Take a look at this page and here is her Webshots page.

The class is called Creative Design 101 and will cover Sherry’s method for laying out the quilting on a quilt top. Hopefully some of her talent will rub off on me during this class.

So… I have the camera battery re-charged, I have my sketch book and pencil ready to go. The van is gassed up. I’m just sitting here biding my time until I can go!

This week I quilted up two patriotic quilts for the Quilt Studio Service Quilt Challenge. Sande of Simple Pleasures, Holy Treasures pieced them. The large one is intended for an injured soldier and the smaller one for his child. Aren’t they fun?!

Here are some close-ups. This is the small one…

and the back…

Here is the large one…

They are sure to bring comfort to the recipients.

DH and I lived in Scottsdale, AZ way back in the 80’s. We would go hiking in the foothills and took many, many photos of all the beautiful vegetation in the Sonora desert. One of my favorite plants that we would photograph was the hedgehog cactus. I used it as inspiration for this quilt which I use as a table runner.

You can’t see the cactus? Hm-m, I can’t either. Here is a photo of a hedgehog cactus.

I’ve learned a lot about color and value since then and I think that I also understand more about composition and design. I have more of a variety of fabrics to choose from so I think I could do a much better job today with this exercise.

I also noticed that some of the quilting threads have broken and the stitches are coming out. So I am glad that I’ve learned to use better quality materials since then too!!

It would be interesting to revisit this project and make another to show the changes in my abilities.

Here I go with pumpkins and leaves again. I couldn’t just stop with the ideas that I had. I came up with some more. Here is one that I think is promising.

I took the pumpkins and enlarged them to make them more important and more in scale with the leaves. This sketch is hand drawn on tracing paper and parts are filled in with marker to test values to be used. I want to play around with the values some more; add in some gradations. Once I get the values figured out I think it will be a lot of fun adding in the color. The overall size is 30 inches square.

The great thing and the hard thing is to stick to things when you have outlived the first interest, and not yet got the second which comes with a sort of mastery.

Janet Erskine Stuart

I think we quilters all understand this!!

I started reading an interesting book today, Color Fusion, Fiberworks by Laura Heine. When I first flipped through the pages I was struck by the… what else… color! WOW! What wonderful color! But there’s also composition, fluidity of line and innovation. It is all very inspiring. I am looking forward to reading deeper into it.

Until I do read more, I will leave you with a quote that she has printed in her book. It is credited to John D. Rockefeller III and he says,

Find what it is that interests you and that you can do well, and when you find it, put your whole soul into it.“

Sounds like good advice.

Progress is slow, but steady on my Robbing Peter to Pay Paul quilt. I am excited to see it all coming together. You can see in this photo how the border will work.

I received a flyer in the mail today selling American Patchwork and Quilting magazine. Inside was a photo of a Robbing Peter to Pay Paul quilt, in red and white! It’s all been done before! They had some other very nice quilts too. I may have to subscribe again.

The spiders are big in Texas! Guests to our house are greeted at the door by this long-legged arachnid. He’s about 4″ the long way so he’s about twice the size you see on your screen.

There was an old quilter in Tex-it

Was so picky she always had to fix-it.

Rip-it, rip-it was her song,

She sang it all the day long.

‘Till she turned into a frog in Tex-it.

OK, so I’m not much of a poet. I’ll stick to quilting, even though I sing rip-it so often.

I have a customer quilt on the table right now. I had feathers on the brain so I tried feathers in the corner of the quilt to see how they might look on the quilt. The fabric is so flowery and busy I couldn’t even see the feathers. I even checked the back. Nope, there’s a busy fabric on the back too. I decided that I really didn’t want to spend the time doing feathers if no one will ever see them so the feathers are coming out and will be replaced with a Designs with Lines pattern. That will be much quicker, simpler and makes more sense. But first, I need to get rid of those feathers. Rip-it, rip-it!