Oops.

I'm pretty sure the link in the post below is wrong. I'm about to fix it.

old quilt festival pictures

I'm not going to post all of these, but I found a whole bunch of pictures from the 2000 Houston Quilt Festival, and they're in a Webshots album if anybody wants to look.

Borders

I asked the Livejournal quilting group (the link is a couple of entries down, in the list) about the border issue and they have been a font of opinions, which is exactly what I was looking for. The consensus seems to be, something fairly simple, like a narrow border and then a wide border, and 4 leaf blocks in the corners. I like that a lot and it hadn't occurred to me (the part about the leaves in the corners, I mean). There is not much consensus on what should be in the wide part of the border - some people think background fabric, but others disagree. Chinese coins were mentioned. I'm still thinking that part over, myself.

Only a little bit more to go! (Hey, if anybody has any brilliant ideas about a border, I'm all ears.)

Saturday

We went to Painted Pony yesterday, to take my mom's Janome in to be worked on. (It just quit running. No idea why.) Of course I bought a bunch of fabric - and there's a picture of it below. The pale colored batik I had an actual reason to buy, it's for the batik swap we're doing. (I think I already talked about that in the entry about the retreat.) We're on the 3rd month of it. We did cool colors the first month, and warm colors last month. This month is multicolors. I bought a fabric for that already, from my favorite eBay seller. Next month is neutrals and backgrounds, that's what the pale batik is for. I really love that fabric, so I bought a little more than I really have to have so I'll be sure to have some left. Anyway, the rest of it is just stuff I liked. I've used up a lot of background fabric on the leaf quilt, so I was thinking about replenishing those. And I've been working on getting more greens for a while now; I've done several quilts that have really used a lot of greens.

Anyway, it was 3:00 by the time we got back to Mom's, but I still got another 11 blocks made, which isn't bad. (I'm doing them 6 at a time, so it should have been 12, but I messed one up and I didn't have the patience to fix it, I just tossed it out.) I'll post the latest picture. Only 16 blocks to go!

Mom has her 3rd Santa block (see below for the first two), so she worked on cutting out the pieces for that. She has a light table and she was tracing the pieces she needed onto fabric.

(I thought that Blogger had lost this post, but it didn't - which is great because I don't have the energy to rewrite it right now. Whew!)

Here's the fabric I bought at Painted Pony.

Links galore

I went looking for quilting weblogs & journals, to supplement the two I already knew of. I didn't exactly find a million of them, but I did find some. So here's my very imperfect list. Some of these are completely about quilting and some are only occasionally about quilting, so I decided to categorize accordingly.

All (or at least mostly) about quilts:
All Too Quilty
Frequently Wrong But Never In Doubt (a crazy-quilter)
Hip To Piece Squares
In a Minute Ago - Sharon is a fabulous crazy-quilter - I was already knew her work but had no idea she had a weblog!
LiveJournal's Quilting Community - sort of a mass blog
Mayflower Quilt Guild - a quilt guild with a blog!
Quilt Reflections
Quilting and other Stuff

I don't really think of Susan Druding's little piece of about.com as a weblog, but it is set up in weblog format, and it's an excellent quilting resource if you're not familiar with it.

Often about quilts:
Hat On Top, Coat Below (my friend Karen, who recently wrote about getting rejected by the Hoffman Challenge*)
Layers of Meaning - art quilts and other embellish-y stuff
Stitch Witch

Occasionally about quilts:
Arrrgh!
Girlreaction
Ceridwen's Cauldron (bonus: all sorts of interesting stuff about Wicca)
Crafty Blog
Dan's (sometimes) Daily Musings

needlecase.net has a list of weblogs you can sort by field of interest. So does Globe of Blogs.

(I based the categories and my descriptions on recent posts, so if people have gotten off on an unusual tangent lately, that may be why they seem to be in the wrong place. The descriptions, what there are of them, are entirely my own.)

Note: I don't know how to put links on the sidebar or I would. If somebody wants to try to show me how, I'll give it a shot, but keep in mind that I'm severely html-challenged, ok?

*I love Karen's Hoffman Challenge entry. What were those people thinking?

Mom's weekly project

Laurel Burch "Christmas card" quilt - it's a panel so all she really did was add the borders and quilt it. (I want a Christmas card with that moon in the bottom corner. You think they make those?)

Sue's Santas

Here are the Sue Garman Santas in their "normal" colors, courtesy of my mother.

My mother is on an absolute block-of-the-month tear right now, which is why I can't keep up with all of them! I think she's doing four, including two of Sue's. (See below for the angels.)

It's not a very good picture, but I said I'd post it, so here are Sue Garman's Santas in neutral colors. I think this pattern is already available, isn't it? She just changed the colors.

Self-promotion

Remember what I said about how somebody's going to complain no matter what? My mother e-mailed me today and said, regarding the guild meeting: "You know, all Shar Jorgenson was really doing was selling her stuff." Well, that's true, really. That's how she makes a living, selling templates and patterns and things, not really on giving lectures. Almost everybody who speaks at the guild is basically the same way. She was definitely not the most subtle person about it, but she probably wasn't the least subtle I've ever seen, either.

Quilt guild

Shar Jorgensen was our speaker last night. She was really good and had some gorgeous quilts, but boy, did she talk for a long time. Although I ended up getting home at 10:15, which wasn't too horribly late. She said she didn't even bring all of the quilts she wanted to bring, so I guess it could have been longer! I believe she brought every single quilt on this page, though. (Bonus: if you're doing the October Shop Hop, you know where the bunny is now!) The people behind me were grumbling about their butts being sore - but nobody got up and left. I think that's the mark of a good presentation, because, honestly, somebody is going to grumble no matter what. I've been an officer in the guild and I've learned that for a fact.

In other quilt-guild-related news, there are finally pictures from our quilt show up! And, well, here's mine. (This one is mine, also, but the picture is sort of muddy, and the first one is my pride and joy, anyway.) And this one is my mother's, and so is this one.

Autumn Leaves

Here they are, all 169 of them - if I'm counting right. Actually I didn't count the blocks at all, I counted blank spaces backwards from 196, if that makes any sense.

It looks huge, doesn't it? But it's only going to be 42" when it's put together. And I guess I'll put some sort of border on it, but I haven't made any decisions about what that's going to be.

Center of the leaf quilt, as I've got the blocks arranged currently. I doubt that I'm going to change it a whole lot.

Another Saturday night

I got a whopping 11 blocks done today on the leaf quilt - I'll post the pictures in a few minutes. Actually that's about the same speed I've been going; I've made approximately 168 blocks so I've gotten awfully efficient. I don't think I'm going to get much faster. Less than 30 blocks to go!

I also did some rearranging of all the "rows" outside the 2nd brown one. What I'm calling a row is actually sort of a circle, or a diamond to be more precise. If you look at the pictures you'll see what I mean. I started with yellow in the center, then green (oops, I left that one out at first!), then red, orange, brown, red again & brown again. That gets you out to the edge of the quilt. Up to now I've just been making blocks more or less randomly, as far as the colors. So today I had to figure out what I'm going to put in the corners, and make the rest of the blocks accordingly.

My mom worked on connecting the quilt-as-you-go angel blocks she's been doing. (Actually, they are just a normal block-of-the-month. She just decided to do them quilt-as-you-go.) She has six of them done now, all hand-pieced and hand-quilted. (These are a Sue Garman pattern, which reminds me that I didn't post a picture of the Santa quilt in neutral colors that Sue had at the retreat. I'll have to be sure and do that, because I liked it a lot.)

So the pictures below are several of my mom's quilts. Have I said that my mom is amazingly (and sort of disgustingly) productive?

diamond quilt from this month's Fons & Porter magazine (she changed the colors a tiny bit)
Posted by Hello

detail of diamonds quilt
Posted by Hello

Sue Garman angels (in progress) 

Christmas boots quilt 

(By the way, if anybody is just crazy about this quilt and has to have it, let me know because I'm pretty sure this one is going to be for sale. Of course, it's not finished right now, but knowing my mom it'll be done by the end of the week.)

Mom's scrap quilt (#1) 

back of Mom's scrap quilt 

#2 of 2 scrap quilts that my mom is working on 

Retreat pictures start here

(See below for explanation)


exchange blocks in fall fabrics 

pickle dish cats (note the tails on some of them!) 

ocean waves variation in Christmas colors 

these are Kaffe Fassett fabrics 

I believe the quilter said that the 2 figures were her granddaughter and her father. 

For anybody else who uses Blogspot: I highly recommend the free "Hello" software that Blogger offers for managing pictures. I had to download a patch to get it to work correctly, but boy is it a breeze adding pictures now!

I don't have any idea what this pattern is, but this is another one with colors that I love! 

I love the colors in this pinwheel quilt. 

This is sort of a round robin - the person who started it made a block and chose a theme, and everybody else made blocks to go with it. 

this is blurry, but hopefully not too horridly so - I think this one is called Winding Ways 

flip-flops! 

(You do understand that these are not my quilts, right? I just thought I'd point that out, if I hadn't already. These are things people had at the retreat. Somehow I didn't even get a picture of mine!)

Part of this is a log cabin, of course, but what are the curves? Are they fan blocks? 

unfinished applique block (I love the bees) 

I can't remember the name of this pattern with the curves, but I really love it. (That's the top of my mother's head in the foreground, if you're wondering.) 

(I think the name of the pattern may be Radiant Suns.)

cute table runner 

Morning Glories 

Is this flannel? I think it's going to be a raggedy quilt. Anyway, I love the colors. 

There are more pictures under the long text entry, incidentally.