15 June - Fan of Quilting

I am a fan of quilting. Today is quilt guild day at the Piecing Partners Quilt Guild.

Be it quilts I have made or quilts made by others, I appreciate them all.

My granny, Virginia Smith Blair was a quilter. I still have 2 of the quilts she made. One is a bible quilt, it was made when I was a wee child. The original wore out and she remade it. It has polyester double knit for some of the applique pieces. There is also a applique dogwood. She was into applique more than piecing. Her's were traditional.

I also own an antique quilt made in South Dakota that I found at a yard sale.

I have made and own both pieced and applique. Mine tend to be arty rather than traditional.

My girly, Rebecca does AMAZING crazy quilts. My friend Luana, owns e-Quilter. Nearly half my friends on Facebook are quilt related.

I like making traditional quilt blocks with a twist. Things like log cabins made from batiks or skewed/wonky traditional blocks.

I also have WIPs and UFOs that are quilt related, piles of them in fact...

Currently on the pile of UFOs are a Steampunk themed, a sheep grazing by a Henge, and a Japanese influenced one about Peace.

Most of my quilts tend to be small, more for the art of them than as a bed cover. I also use unusual embellishments on my quilts, such as nuts and bolts, scrap metal, etc. I use quilting in wearable art as in appliqued shirts, quilted vests and the like.

Where are the pictures you might ask? Well, they are mostly on my external hard drive and not accessible at the moment. If you scroll thru my older posts you'll see some of the ones that I have made and/or own,

18 May - Maybe

Maybe:

Quilt guild will be a great learning adventure today.
Rebecca will be ready when we go to pick her up.
The photography class this afternoon will be very helpful to Erin's business.
I will get the tomatoes planted.
I will not take an afternoon nap.

16 May - Maybe

Maybe:

I missed posting yesterday. Again!
Certain plans are FINALLY coming together.
I will get my room re-do finished today.
I will get the BOMs for the Piecing Partners Quilt Guild meeting on Wednesday done.
I will get over this dang cold.

#101 of 365 - Watch Tower or A Day Spent Rallying Around the Town.

The first thing we did this morning was to head south to pick up Rebecca and the BOM pattern for guild. Then far out to the east of town for the guild meeting. Met our Cheryl's lovely mother, Violet whilst there. Then after, a quick trip back to Rebecca's for some packages she needed to mail. Then we headed back to the west and downtown Colorado Springs for a sushi lunch at Yoo Mae and then a wander along Cascade heading north to look at the sculptures all along the streets as we went. We saw 34 thousand plus Helios, a snowman with rocks in it's head, giant metal koosh balls scattered across a lawn next to the giant Spanish dancers on the lawn by the Money Museum.

Also there were stone plinths, metal and glass figures, stone carvings, bronze sculptures and Patrick Dougherty's woven wood sculpture on the Colorado College campus.

During the wander, we saw bulbs about to spring into bloom, checked out an herb garden behind the McAllister House and found out that I qualify as a senior citizen at the Money Museum. Le sigh... I showed Rebecca the climbing roses we, the Grace Gardeners planted yesterday along the ugly chain link fence on the south side of the church. Then it was back down Tejon to Poor Richard's Book Emporium to meet up with Erin again. We also noodled through the goodies in the front part of the store. Rebecca and I felt up some kewl journals, no, really we did. We talked yarn with one of the clerks after she admired my Summer with Ishbel. I also saw the coolest pair of half chaps that would so work as part of a Steampunk outfit.

We walked east back to the parking garage which is over the bus depot. Which is when we got a closer look at the Watch Tower, which I am looking through in the above photo. There were black Suburbans and dark sunglasses abounding when we got there. The exit to the depot was blocked off by a bus and there were ARMED TSA agents littering the sidewalks. We still don't know what was up with that. Erin could only say, Mother, you would leave a baggie of bay leaves on the front seat of the car, hah, hah, hah...


In the end, Rebecca and I had a loverly day of art for art's sake...and by the way, Rebecca, I was right, it was a hawthorn.

Erin and I hit the Sunflower and saw a red fox just chillin' on a neighbor's lawn on the way there. Spooked the USPS guy right out...

#75 of 365 - Happy Saint Patrick's Day

Again, it's that time of the month, NO, not that time, but quilt guild time.

This month's block is a pieced block called Colour Triangles. It uses colours from the previous months blocks, so if I make one extra block each month I will have a 9 block top at the end of the season.

The reason we only end up with 9 blocks at the end of the year, is that we don't do a block in November (holiday party) and we are on hiatus in December.

Of course, it being Saint Patrick's Day, I am wearing green. The theme of the meeting was going green and we encourage everyone to wear green and be greener by bringing their own coffee cups. I have been doing that for a while and it's a no brainer and saves me from sending hundreds of paper cups into the landfills every year.

Slainte to all. (To Your Health in the Gaelic).

#74 of 365 - Irish Soda Bread in the Making

Twas the Night Before Saint Patrick's Day and all through the house...the scent of caraway and buttermilk permeate.




...I promised that dear daughter of Eire, my wee lassie, Erin that she would have the Irish Soda Bread to the supper. I also promised my friend, Marie that she would have it at quilt guild tomorrow which coincidently happens to fall on Saint Patrick's Day.

The remains of the day or rather the first round of the Irish...

Now on to the Boiled Supper also known as Corned Beef and Cabbage..

Pike's Peak Quilt Show

This past weekend was the first quilt show hosted by the Piecing Partners Quilt Guild of Colorado Springs, Colorado. Here's a picture of me with one of my entries, Stonehenge with Hale-Bopp.

For a first effort, it is a lovely little show. We did a great job and all hands put forth great effort to make it happen. I really enjoyed getting to know some of our members better whilst working more closely with them. The other entry was a group effort by my fave peeps, the Fiber Pirates. It is a slice quilt and it is called "I Think We Made Our Point".

Surprise! I Really am Working on Some New Quilts

Many of you readers may not know that I have actually been a quilter far longer than I have been a knitter. How so ever, knitting has been a force of nature and pretty much taken up all my attention for the last two years.

Since I finally felt I was missing something in my life, I volunteered to be the Block of the Month (BOM) coordinator for the Piecing Partners Quilt Guild. This was as an incentive to get some quilting back into the rotation of things I enjoy doing. Keeping my hand in quilting is also the reason that I have been participating in the sorta annual Baggo Challenges and the Slice Quilt with my Fiber Pirates friends.


Last month, I designed a Columbine Applique Block for the BOM we turned in this month. Here's a picture of one of them.






This month, I picked a Simple New York Beauty type block from 101 Full Sized Quilt Blocks and Borders for the BOM. The guild block is going to be Red, White and Blue. Here's a photo of one of the R, W & Bs that I did for the sample board. The guild members each will make a quarter block with red, white and blue fabrics and then bring them back for a drawing and winner take all and they'll get a scrappy top and hopefully they learned something new in the process.



I have been a fan of this block for a while, so I really enjoyed revisiting it again. To that end, this is what I did today. I made eight quarters to make two circles. This may end up either as a wall hanging or a table runner. I do have enough of some of the fabrics to make some matching napkins. Most of the fabrics were sold to me as fat quarters which are 18 x 22 inches.


This one is an analogous colour run starting with yellow green and ending at blue red. This is now the second time I have made these blocks in an analogous colourway. Since I was having so much fun, I made a third analogous colour run starting with blue green and ending at red purple, this one used two fewer fabrics than the first one did.






Here too, is a photograph of the first one I did, complete with the quilting and binding. I made this as a class exercise for Heather Thomas' Infamous Colour Class back in 2003. It is in the collection of a friend of mine from the Quilt Mavericks as we did a trade for a piece of each other's art.






More to be revealed, so stay tuned, dear readers.