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.