Getting There

I've finished all the words and have sewed a frame around them all and am filling in the rows with color blocks. I'm almost done sewing the words together into rows and will surely be able to get the top done by the end of the week--finally have a pretty empty week!

Although I don't have a good photo of it, I attended a class today in El Cerrito that the Spindles and Flyers Spinning Guild put on teaching us to make a duct tape dress form. We donned a close-fitting t-shirt and started wrapping the tape around us fitting it closely to every contour of our bodies. The 'bumps' and 'valleys' needed small pieces of tape and I probably tore or cut 150 pieces for mine. Because we needed to make the form quite thick to be sturdy, we each used 2 whole rolls of duct tape for the process! With the great patterns of fun duck tape available now, I used pink and purple!

At the end, we cut the whole thing, t-shirt and all, up the center back and will tape it back together and stuff them for use in making future garments. Can't wait!

Take a look at Judy's 
blog see what everyone else has on their design walls!

This Word Quilt is FUN!

I've been very busy this week flying to L.A. on quilting business, making a presentation closer to home and teaching a class all day Saturday so I haven't started anything new. That doesn't mean I'm not quilting.
    Yes, I'm still working on the "word" quilt! I'm telling you, Tonya Ricucci's "Word Play Quilts" book (see here) is such a fun way to put fabric together! If you think about it, quilting is usually very precise: measure this, cut that, sew this, all VERY exacting. But making letters by this method and turning them into words of totally freeing and I'm loving it!

I'm up to 16 words now with only 2 to go (poem and screenplay). I'll put them them on my design wall and get them arranged the way I want them then I plan to put 'frames' around each word and somehow construct a quilt top. I'll show you the process the whole way!

Come back week to Judy's Design Wall Monday and you'll see my next step.

More Words

    My design wall looks vaguely similar to last weeks, right? I actually added 3 more fun words: Hashtag ("spelled" with a pound sign instead of an "h" which I thought was rather clever), Asterisk (which is pretty hard to see here but better in person) and Exclamation Point. These words are so fun to create and I'm really looking forward to making more! My list includes: Ampersand, Apostrophe, Period, Paragraph, Parenthesis and Slash. I'd love more ideas if you have a suggestion.
     Take a look at what everyone else has on Judy's blog!

Words On Quilts

My design wall has three little words on it. They may seem odd but I can explain: I've always loved quilts with words on them so when I saw this book, "Word Play Quilts" by Tonya Ricucci, I just had to buy it. Her method is totally free-style, no measuring, no dimentions. It's not at all like any quilting I've ever done and it took me a little while to get used to it but it was totally freeing and I LOVED it!

So, about the words: I recently bought a fat quarter tower of Moda's new "Comma" line. I love the colors but the real reason I bought it is, it's perfect for a quilt for my daughter and her wife. They're both writers so the asterisks, commas, dots and swirls on the fabric will be perfect. I'm going to make about 20 words that have to do with writing such as comma, dash and hyphen (the last also happens to be their cat's name) with period, semi-colon, paragraph and others to come. 

The book suggests making each letter individually then put them together. After they're all done and you've arranged them on your design wall, you put a fabric 'frame' around all the blocks and put the quilt together. I'm looking forward to making more of these fun blocks and I'm sure this quilt will be a big hit when I give it to them for Christmas!

See what everyone else has on their design walls on Judy's blog!

I'm Late!

Oh, darn! I totally forgot it was Monday! I'll dash this off quickly and see if anyone takes note.

I wanted to add another class to my teaching repertoire and decided to use selvages that we used to thrown away. Don't we all have hundreds of yards of selvages clinging to the edges of the fabrics in our stash?

Whenever I travel, I have 6 cords I need to take with me that get all tangled and I wanted an organizer for them. In this fold-up case, there are slots for my cell phone charger (one for the wall and one for my car), my camera battery, my Kindle charger, the cord to download my photos from my camera to my computer  and my husband's electric shaver charger! I also created a pattern for a protective case for an e-Reader or i-Pad--aren't they colorful!

What's on your wall today? Check out all the other projects on Judy's blog!

Luck O' the Irish, etc.

I follow several hand-picked blogs and look forward to reading them, some every day! A couple of weeks ago, I was reading one of my favorites, "Kim's Big Quilting Adventure" and she had a great shamrock pattern on it. I drafted it out in a size I need for the little quilt hanger I have on my front door and whipped it up in no time. Finally I have an appropriate St. Patrick's Day embellishment in my foyer! This is about 19" square and was actually up for 10 days before St. P's Day yesterday!

       I have a new favorite ruler, the Omnigrid 8 1/2" x 24". It's huge and not easily transportable but when I put it down on my fabric to cut long strips, it stays put! Unlike my 6" x 24" which always seems to jimmy around at the end no matter how tightly I hold it. I didn't have any secure, padded container to put it in to take it on my recent retreat so I created a pattern and made one--softly but surely padded, complete with a handle. Know what? it's also perfect for my newly purchased yoga mat!! (That's Tippy our #2 kitty).

And speaking of my retreat (loads of fun with Thimble Creek Quilt Shop to Murphy's California a couple of weeks ago) this is one of the projects I worked on. The pattern is "Peppermint Wreaths" by Bonnie Sullivan but I wouldn't recommend it as it doesn't give you a CLUE as to how to put all those 1" squares together--just an illustration and the rest is up to you. VERY difficult to piece as there are no obvious sets of 'blocks' to put together and in many places I had to "Y" seam a single 1" square--blagh!

    This is the 26" table-topper version and there's a tree-skirt exactly the same pattern only much larger--an no easier to piece!
     I've just finished quilting the center and green parts with the off white edges remaining. Then I'll cut it around the edges to form a 26" circle (also no CLUE in the pattern as to how to manage that!) and bind it in red.
     Seems it's the pinning of a quilt that's always the point where I put it aside and start on another project. I find small pieces like the 3 on this page, where I can pin them on my cutting table rather than struggle to find a large area to pin, they actually get finished! Could it be I'll have this one done months before I need it at Christmas-time?

     Check out the other design walls on Judy's blog today!

Retreat Time!

I spent the best time at a 4-day quilting retreat in the Gold Country of Northern California last weekend with 20 other quilters! No teachers, nothing scheduled, just bring your own projects and sew for 3 1/2 days! It's the first time I've attended this retreat and I went by myself not knowing any of the other quilters when I arrived. But, like all quilting retreats, by the time I left, I'd made delightful new friends!

I brought several projects including a Christmas table-topper pattern, a top to pin and quilt, a paper-pieced NY beauty-type quilt with many tiny components, fabric for blocks I need to make for a community service project in May and this, a BOM from last year called "Rotogravure". I finished these blocks each month right on schedule and LOVE them! Each block has an intricate, 6" block INSIDE the pumpkins and the checkerboard finished at 1" squares so precise piecing was essential! The quilt was designed by Joe Wood, owner of Thimble Creek Quilt Shop in Concord, CA the shop who put on this fabulous retreat. I highly recommend their delightful "Thimble Creek Gazette" blog posted every Tuesday morning. You can sign up to receive it here.

In subsequent Design Wall Mondays, I'll show you the progress of the other projects I brought on this wonderful retreat. Thanks for the opportunity, Judy!