Progress report

I still have a couple of sets of Noel blocks to spare, if anybody else is interested. (They don't necessarily come in the order shown in the picture, incidentally - how I cut them up it depends on where they fall on the fabric.)

I went to Mom's on Sunday, and I pretty much got the third quarter of the leaf quilt assembled. That seems to be the pattern, it takes a whole afternoon to get 1/4 of it together. Which makes sense, since there are 49 blocks in each quarter. A lot of itty bitty blocks. It's a wonder I don't hate the thing by now, but I don't. I think I'm going to have to put it aside for a couple of weeks, though - the gift quilt is on its way to me, Karen says. I am going to put some additional quilting on it and do the binding and then send it on its merry way.

Ann Fahl

Ann Fahl roses

Ann Fahl was the speaker at my guild a while back, and I didn't think I'd ever heard of her. I really liked her quilts, though, and a lot of them looked awfully familiar, and when I looked in my pictures later I found that I had taken pictures of several of her quilts at festival over the years. (Like the water lily below.)

(I love that rose quilt in general, but I also want that border fabric. Bad. Anybody know where I can get it?)

Books and referrals

I applied for an Amazon Associates ID, even though the idea makes me a little uncomfortable. Somehow I doubt that this is ever going to bring in more than a tiny amount of money, anyway (if any at all - and as a matter of fact it would be Amazon gift certificates rather than cash, if that makes a difference) but it still sort of bothers me in some vague way. On the other hand, if I am going to recommend books anyway, it seems silly not to have one. I put up the link to Amazon; you can buy from them or not, naturally - in my mind the link is there as much for informational purposes as anything else, so that you can get more info about the book if you're of a mind to. I am an Amazon customer from way back, myself, because I like the convenience of it, but not everybody loves them as much as I do, I know!

Well, anyway, here's the link they provide to the book I want to talk about:



Blogging leads you into some interesting arenas; I got an e-mail from a publicist asking if she could send me a review copy, and I thought, sure, why not? The book sat around for a good while before I even really looked at it, and I'm still not finished, but I like it quite a lot. The funny thing is, though, that it doesn't have much to do with quilts so far. Obviously the quilts are going to come into it before the end, but the part that interests me the most is a first-hand account of this woman's experiences in the Dutch Resistance in World War II. So if that's something that interests you, then you might want to check it out. It's definitely not quilts, quilts, quilts all the way through, though.

What do y'all think about the whole referral business? Does it bother you if I put up the occasional link? (I suspect that I will use just a regular text link more often than the kind above; it seems a little more intrusive than I really like. I do like having the little picture of the cover, there, though.)


(Later: that link has gotten a little wonky on me once or twice, so here is the non-picture version of the link.)

QuiltCon 1, 2003

me and KarenD quilt-shopping, 2003

(Karen is the tall one.)

The first time Karen came to visit, we went on a massive quilt-shopping expedition. This was the last stop, Painted Pony in La Porte, Texas. It was late in the afternoon and the shop was practically deserted, so the ladies there didn't mind stopping work to take our picture.

Jerbet quilt

Jerbet quilt (unfinished)
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

This is the only picture I could find of this quilt, which is the one Karen and I made for Jeremy & Beth last year. (Jerbet, see?) Karen has a picture and accompanying narrative here, and more pictures here, though, so I guess I shouldn't worry about my lack of pictures - she really has it covered.

(Looking at Karen's album with all the detail pictures reminded me - I spent the whole time we were putting it together looking at the pictures and going, "Now who is this again?" Most of these are people I've been talking to online for years, but I have no idea what a lot of them look like.)

Weblogs and weekends

I've been nosing around randomly this morning - Melody Johnson has a weblog. So does Gabrielle Swain! (I adore her leaf quilts. I think she's one of the reasons I got the bug to do a leaf quilt of my own.)

And more art-quilt-y blogs found by following links all around the web:
What's THAT gonna be?
leap-of-faith
Sonji Says...
Pamdora's Box (including pictures from Quilt National)


I didn't get a lot done this weekend - I had a headache Saturday and didn't end up sewing a single stitch. I did, however, start picking out and trimming fabrics for my theoretical Chinese Coins border. I did get a good bit done on that. I am mulling over how I want to do it - randomly, or maybe sort of a rainbow effect (a rainbow of fall colors, if you will)? I don't know. Random doesn't feel quite right to me. I was mulling over the possibility of putting a different color on each side - maybe red, gold, brown, and orange. I'm not sure how easy that will be to do, though. I have a lot more of some colors than others. The blocks that go in the corners are green, so I think that's enough green already, and I think bright yellow would be too distracting.


I found a note I had written to myself sometime in the last month that there is a pieced puffin pattern in Go Wild With Quilts-Again. It's not quite as cute as the appliqued puffins, of course, but it's cute, and I thought that most of us in the real world are not going to create their own appliqued puffin pattern and so might be interested in tackling the pieced ones!

Something non-quilty

Mom & Dad & grandparents

In honor of Father's Day - sort of - here are my parents and grandparents on my parents' wedding day in January 1959. (My dad's father had died several years earlier.)

(Jesus, look at my mother's waist.)

More fabric geekiness, and a giveaway!

Noel blocks

I bought a whole yard of this fabric (because it was on clearance at Virginia Quilter) and now I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do with it. I still have a good bit of metallic gold fabric left over from this and similar projects; I'm thinking maybe I will use some of that.

The first three people to e-mail me their addresses can have a set of these blocks, btw. (By "set" I mean an N, O, E, and L, in case that's not clear.)

The fabric jackpot!

fabric from Carolyn!

Remember way back (ok, maybe a month or so ago) when I said that I would swap some of my green nickel squares if somebody was interested? Well, I sent some of them to Carolyn in Chicago, on the understanding that she was going to send me a few fat quarters, and today I got all of this fabric in the mail. Wow. This is not what I call "a few" - but she claims she was just getting rid of some fabric that didn't match what she was working on, so I'm not arguing!

Mixing and matching

I was looking at the really amazing variety of fabrics in my autumn leaf quilt the other day. I've always been fairly fearless about mixing fabrics, and if anything I've gotten more so as I have gone along. Other than sticking with 100% cotton, I don't really have any rules. I'll mix $2 a yard calico from JoAnn's or Hobby Lobby with $10 a yard batik, reproduction with ultramodern, whatever. As long as it seems to work for the quilt, it's fine. (About the only exception to this is if I'm making something for an exchange. That's different. I try to follow the rules there, and I usually keep the $2 a yard stuff out of there, too.*)

So here's some of the things I saw in my quilt:
-- state flower fabric
-- 30s fabric (a good bit of it "borrowed" from my aunt)
-- Christmas fabric
-- at least one Halloween fabric
-- gold-embellished leaf prints and paisleys
-- a Loni Rossi typographical print
-- Moda Marble Swirls, in several colors
-- my beloved dragonflies, at least in one leaf and one background print
-- batiks, lots of them
-- Provencal prints

Sometimes I wonder if I got carried away, but it's certainly more interesting than it would be if it was nothing but tone-on-tones!




* I have to admit that I'm mostly exaggerating about the $2 a yard fabric. I won't say I've never used it and I won't say I never would either, but I'm a little bit picky about fabric quality - so I'll use it if it seems like the quality is good enough, but in actual fact I rarely do. Most of the fabric I buy at the chain stores tends to come from the $5-6 a yard section.

Progress

Half-assembled leaf quilt
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Look at how much this thing shrinks! But it should, it has a heck of a lot of seams in it. As you can see from the 9-block section at the left-center, I am assembling it in sections. I decided trying to do this one row at a time would make me completely insane. So I'm doing it in quarters and dividing that up into 9 or 12 or 16-block sections (they vary because this thing is 14 blocks across, so the quarters don't divide up evenly). It's sort of fun to sew together, really. You really have to keep watching and make sure you're not messing up, though.

another Karen quilt

Karen - triangle quilt with fish

(If this has a name I have no idea what it is. Karen? you reading?)

I like this quilt a lot. It was hanging over the bed in the guest bedroom, so that probably means Karen likes it too.

Weekly report

Wow, how did I manage to go three whole days without posting so much as a picture?

Karen wrote about "QuiltCon3" (i.e., my visit) here, incidentally. (She was even more close-mouthed about what we were working on than I was, probably with good reason. I have no reason to think that the intended recipients will be reading over here - although they could, I suppose - but they might well be reading her journal.)

Yesterday I sewed together autumn leaves. I am over halfway done! Only, uh, 90 or so blocks to go. I took a picture but I haven't uploaded it yet. I'll get it up in the next day or so. Mom is working on assembling a quilt made of bee blocks - which for some reason I didn't think to take a picture of. I might have a picture of some of the blocks, I'll have to look.

Karen's watercolor lone star

Karen - watercolor lone star

This is a fabulous quilt. (And I wonder if making this might have had to do with the genesis of that fabulous stash, too. Look at how many different fabrics are in that star.)

(I looked on Karen's website to see if she had any more pictures of this quilt, but she only has one very similar to this one. It does give the information that it's based on a design by JoAnn Belling, and it won an honorable mention in the scrap category at the 2001 NQA show. Also, if you haven't looked at her quilt album, it's definitely worth a look!)

Karen's sawtooth star quilt

Karen - sawtooth star quilt
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

part of Karen's fabric closet

Karen's closet
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

I can't decide whether to be happy to see somebody with more fabric than me, or just plain jealous. I want all that beautiful fabric! (And, it's so neat!)

Ypsilanti quilt shop

Quilting Season is the name of the shop.

quilt shop & silo
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Fabric purchases

Here's the fabric I bought at the quilt store in Ypsilanti (which was cute - I might put up a picture). They had a lot of sale fabric for $4 a yard and you only had to buy half a yard - the three fabrics on the bottom row that are not batiks (so, the two paisleys and the dragonflies) were all sale fabrics. The batiks were also all on sale for 25% off, too.

That was a nice store, but it didn't have nearly as much fabric as the other one we went to, which was in Ann Arbor. I was feeling too broke to really indulge myself there, but I sure could have. I bought about a yard and a half of fabric, total, which is fairly restrained by my standards.

So since I was off work today, I washed all my fabric. I had a good bit of other fabric that needed washing - the last time I washed fabric I only ran one load and I had a bunch of indigoes that I didn't want to chance putting in with anything too light. I had enough today to run two pretty full loads, one light and one dark, and I have been folding fabric for a good while now.

fabric I bought
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Cuppaz

Here is one formerly-top-secret project: the wallhanging I made for Karen for a hostess gift. The thing we worked on this weekend is still top secret, though, and will be for at least a few more weeks. I will probably be putting some pictures up on Flickr, though, so if you have a Flickr account and you want me to friend you so you can see them, just let me know your username.

(These are four of the Jan Mullen blocks I had stashed away. I still have lots more of them that I am going to have to do something with eventually.)

Cuppaz
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

How Big Is Your Can?

I have to add this one. It's great.

(Not that I expect to be dieting in Michigan or anything.)

How Big Is Your Can?
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Off for the weekend

I'm leaving early in the morning to fly to Michigan to see KarenD. We are going to work on a top secret project. (It's a gift, naturally, so I won't be able to talk about it until after the gift-giving. Hopefully it won't be too long.) Should be a fun weekend. I won't be back until fairly late on Monday, so unless I manage to post from there, don't expect to hear from me until Tuesday or so. I posted a couple more quilts from Dallas for you to enjoy in the meantime!

Radiance

Made by Linda Ramundo.

This is a gorgeous lone star. It's quilted either with metallic thread or with Sliver, I'm not sure which.

(Ugh. I have quilted with both. Neither was easy to work with, but the metallic thread was the worst. Total nightmare.)

Radiance
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

It's Pink!

Here's a quilt that looks like a normal person could actually make it (unlike some of those art quilts I've been posting lately). Although there seems to be a lot going on in the sashing area between the pinwheels - I haven't quite made out yet how that's put together. This is another one from the Dallas show.

Made by Betty Carpenter and Kim Shalom.

It's Pink
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Love Apple Star with a French Twist

A really pretty quilt. I will have to go dig out the maker's name tomorrow, if I have time. It's from the 2004 Dallas Quilt Celebration.

Made by Ruth Douglas

Love Apple Star
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

Work in progress

Mom - pink broderie perse
Originally uploaded by Mellicious.

This is something my mom has been working on for a good while, off and on. (As a matter of fact, it's the one I worked on myself at one point - see entry here.) The center is broderie perse, and the rosebud blocks will be all the way around when she's done, I think.