Texture Magic

Once again, this may be something that's not new to all you active quilters, but I hadn't seen it before: Superior's Texture Magic. I've mislaid the original link I got there from, but what it is is a lining-type fabric that shrinks 20-30% when you steam it, so that if it's sewn to a regular fabric before it's steamed, the regular fabric has to scrunch up when the Texture Magic shrinks. Does that make sense? If not, watch the videos on Superior's website and all will become clear. (Try video #3 to start with, because that's the one where you first see the finished effect.) It looks really cool. Apparently you can use it with or without batting and you get really nice results either way.

Quiltless 2010 (more or less)

Hi there, I'm alive, and this is my more-or-less annual entry! I might even manage more than that, you never know. I've been evincing some more-than-sporadic interest in quilting recently, although I haven't actually gotten the sewing machine out or anything, so far. (I have gone so far as to contemplate how I would go about doing that - our second bedroom is still an ungodly mess. We'll see.)

I did go to a quilt show with my aunt weekend before last - it was a new show put on by the Coastal Prairie Quilt Guild, and it was very nice, especially when you consider that they hadn't done one before. The show was in Stafford, on the southwest side of Houston, and I got the impression that their meetings are also in that area, although I don't see confirmation of that on the website offhand. Anyway, good job!

And then on a whim I re-subscribed to The Quilt Show, so see, I am all awash in quilt things lately. I have watched exactly half of one episode so far, which featured Camille Roskelley, who has a book coming out soon. (Simplify with Camille Roskelley: Quilts for the Modern Home (Stash Books)) I liked her quilts; they are fairly traditional, with sort of a modern twist to them. Apparently she also designs a line of fabric (with her mother) for Moda, which is Bonnie & Camille. You guys may know all about these people by now, but they were new to me, anyway - I am very behind on the trends. I am still planning on going to the Houston festival next month so I will have to try to catch up!

Dying with the most toys

I did a post on the jewelry blog that's at least as much about quilts as it is jewelry. Over here.


(Locking comments for this because it's been attracting a large amount of spam and I'm tired of deleting it!)

FYI

I seem to have abandoned quilts in favor of jewelry, at least temporarily, and in case you're interested, I am blogging doggedly away over here. (I just threw in a quilt picture the other day, though - you know I can't resist for long.)

I did go to the quilt show, but predictably, all I bought was beads. I did look around at the quilts - I was most interested in the Tolkien quilt, which can be seen on the winners page. I also got a parking ticket, which may be why I am a bit grumpy about the whole subject!

I started updating the list of quilt shows while I'm here, but if it doesn't say "2010" on the date don't depend on it. I'm glad to see Houston is back to its proper place in early November next year. October 15th just didn't feel right!

Blog(spot)roll

I would like to fuss at people for not putting one of those kewl "Follower" widgets on their Blogspot pages, because I've just been adding people like crazy and it does make it easier - except I don't have one either. I added it and then I took it off again, because I have exactly one follower and it looked silly. Of course it makes sense that I have no (well, few) followers since I am not really updating these days! Anyway, if you happen to have wandered over here, you might take a look at my profile and you can hopefully see the whole ton of people I'm following. I went through my delicious craft-blogger list and added everybody with a Blogspot blog who seemed to be blogging at all these days - and an amazing number of them are, considering some of them have been on that list for close to five years, I think. That's aeons in internet time!

Belated quilt show report

I wrote this more than a month ago and I can't believe I didn't at least link back to it from here:

So, I went to the quilt show. I went zipping through the whole thing - exhibitions, vendors and all - in a little over four hours. (People who haven't been there and don't know how incredibly big this thing is will not appreciate this achievement.) I did not take a single picture - I didn't even take the camera, actually, for the first time in ten years or so. It certainly made things move much faster! I walked up and down every single aisle and at least glanced at every quilt and every vendor. I'm not sure what my aunt was talking about, about the quilts being better than usual - I will have to ask her. I mean, they were good, but I always think they are good. Here is the winners list, with pictures. Sharon Schamber won Best of Show for the second time - that seems to have become a pattern lately, actually. (Two-time winners, I mean.) Her thing is that she does really fabulous machine quilting - which, of course, you can't see at all in that picture. (Here's a detail from her other BoS, though.)

I only bought a couple of things, amazingly, and only one of them was a quilting thing. I bought a pattern (a pattern! I never buy patterns!) for a quilted crown, of all things. It looks like stained glass and it came with the stiff foundation material, along with the pattern, and it was just so cute I couldn't resist. I used to be known as the "Princess of Chat" on a forum I hang out on, and so crowns have a sort of odd significance for me. Besides, crowns are just cool. (Oh look, here are the crowns - mine is the second one from the bottom.) Then I bought a finished pair of polymer clay earrings, and a bunch of pewter beads - just spacers, mostly. That was it.

I didn't notice a lot of new trends at the quilt show, generally, but if I did, I would say that embellishments was one. Every other vendor had beads and fibers and paints and things like that. Oh, and you know what? I saw a surprising number of teenagers there. I hope that's a good sign for the future of quilting, because quilters in the 20-35 range are still awfully rare. It seems like there was a generation skip there, or something. (I'm aware I'm not the first person to notice this!)

Oh, and there was a whole exhibit of political quilts - some very funny ones, too. Somebody did a whole series of quilts about recent elections - so there was one with the Clintons and the Doles, for example. (Bob and Bill were having a chicken fight on their wives' shoulders, no less.)

Oh look, she's alive.

I'm back, sort of! It's still to be seen if I will keep posting, but I've been meaning to post for ages and let you guys know where I went off to. I've been updating my Livejournal pretty regularly all this time and so if you really want to know the whole story, it's over here. Short version of recent events: hurricane, evacuation, flooded apartment, new apartment, new town. You know, all that sort of fun stuff.

As far as what happened to the pictures, that pre-dates the hurricane and in fact, it was the same thing that happened to several other bloggers that I know of around the same time: some people who exhibited quilts at the International Quilt Festival, but who apparently had never paid any attention to the International Quilt Festival's policy on posting pictures, decided to report us all to Flickr for copyright violations. I don't believe that I was violating copyright but after a couple of rounds of this I made most of my quilt pictures friends-only to stop it from happening again. I have gradually been making more of them public again but it's a slow process and of course it completely messed up this site. I hated to do it but at the time it seemed like the best option. And I meant to post and explain at the time but it was hard to know what to say. And I was angry and anything I said showed it all too clearly.

So anyway, here's a belated catch-up post and if I decide I have something to say about quilts I will post again. I haven't been quilting so far since the move, but most of the fabric and stuff survived the storm so I may yet! I did update the quilt show calendar while I was at it, and I have re-posted some of the pictures, but I think I have to do that manually so I don't know how far I will get.

(Ooh, there's a couple of pretty quilts on this page.)

Happy holidays, y'all!

The Five-Dollar Quilt

I don't think I ever posted the picture of my mom's "five-dollar" quilt. (I should've gotten this up earlier so you could enjoy it for Mother's Day, but better late than never!)



(Click through to the big version to see Denise Green's beautiful quilting.)

Quilt pieced and embroidered by Billie Standley, from a pattern from Painted Pony & Quilts; quilted by Denise Green and finished by me. (I finished the binding and the sleeve about 12 hours before it was due to be at the quilt show!) This quilt is to be given to my sister, and then there is a sort-of-twin made partly from the same pattern that is mine.

Coventry Stars

I keep forgetting to go back and check my Mayfest program to see if I can figure out for sure who made this quilt:


("Coventry Stars" is the name of the pattern, but they must've named their version something else, because I couldn't find that in the program when I looked before.)

(Added: the quilt is "Folk Art Funky" by Karen Watts. The pattern, "Coventry Stars", is by Jo Morton.)

I knew the pattern name because my mother had made a quilt using it, too. I initially couldn't find a picture of hers, but I finally unearthed one last night. (I have over 200 pictures of my mom's quilts on Flickr and there are still a significant number that are missing, which is just a little bit mindboggling when you think about it!) So here it is (and once again, click on the picture to see the bigger version):

Very much alike, and yet... not.

(This won't surprise anybody who knows me very well, but really I like the other one better than my mom's. I'm a bright-color person to the core.)

(And... that's funny, I coulda sworn I posted this entry already - but here it is in draft mode. Trying again!)

Mayfest Best of Show - Cathedral Windows

This is not as visually arresting as some Best of Show winners I've seen, but it's beautiful workmanship.

Redwork

I haven't gotten the picture of my mom's bluework quilt from the show online yet, but here's the redwork one which was also entered:



Redwork done by Billie Standley and Gloria Marquis; pieced and quilted by Billie Standley from an Alex Anderson kit.

My mom and her friend Gloria went on a bus trip to New England in 2003, and during the trip they did all this embroidery. I was with her when she bought this kit; it may have been in Brenham earlier that year. This has an extremely light batting in it - we were thinking it might be Thermore.

Quilt shows!

Updated list:
Apr 23-26: AQS Quilt Show & Contest, Paducah, KY
May 1-4: Denver National Quilt Festival, Denver, CO
June 19-21: NQA Quilt Show, Columbus, OH
July 12: Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show, Sisters, OR
July 24-27: Quilt Odyssey, Hershey, PA
July 25-27: International Quilt Festival (new summer edition), Long Beach, CA
Aug 20-23: AQS Quilt Expo, Nashville, TN
Sept 4-7: Pennsylvania National Quilt Extravaganza, Harrisburg, PA
Sept 18-21: World Quilt and Textile on Tour (whatever that is!), Manchester, NH
Oct 8-11: AQS Quilt Expo, Des Moines, IA
Oct 16-19: Pacific International Quilt Festival, Santa Clara, CA
Oct 30-Nov 2: International Quilt Festival, Houston, TX
Nov 13-16: Greater Chicago Quilt Expo, Schaumberg, IL
Jan 15-18, 2009: Road to California, Ontario, CA
Feb 26-Mar 1, 2009: Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival, Hampton, VA
April 2-5, 2009: Quilters' Heritage Celebration, Lancaster, PA

Annnnd I have to pimp my own quilt guild's show: Lakeview Quilters' Guild's Mayfest, which is this weekend in the major metropolitan area of Alvin, Texas (south of Houston). Hours and directions and stuff here. C'mon by, it's usually a very, very good show for its size.