Henry Glass Blog Hop

A really cool thing about knowing a fabric designer is that you get to see stuff before it's available to the public.  I got to see Renae Allen's Patriot Dream fabric for Henry Glass back in May.  The center panel is printed with traditional quilt blocks (perfect for those of us who hate to piece)  and was designed with Quilts of Valor in mind.

And, I just found out that Renae has started to blog!  Not only will there be cool things to win with the Henry Glass Blog Hop, but she's doing a blog give-away  of her Skillsbuilder Series.

That was where I got the idea for this particular feather design I attempted on this baby quilt.

Looks like my limited quilting time today is going to be spent blog hopping and trying to win prizes.  (It could happen....I won something cool.  Once.  A long time ago.)   Maybe by next Wed my WIP post will have more that 2 petals progress on my Heart's Whim.(Started as Heart's Desire but the passion is gone.)

Leaves

My daughter had friends over Saturday to watch movies and eat pizza to celebrate her birthday, so I was displaced to the bedroom to applique and listen to football on the radio.

I have a rather alarming pile of green batik scraps.

Which means that there's a lot of variety in my leaves.   13 leaves finished over 2 days.

As is the one blossom that I made months ago using the freezer paper method.  The others will be back basting.

Thanks for all of you who took the time to leave comments about format. I like the classic format too, so you'll keep seeing posts this way.

Post Options

Over the weekend, I changed the view of my blog to be what blogger refers to as "dynamic"view but then changed it back.  My friend Heather at Retro Fabulous  now has her page set up this way.  What do you think?  When you log on, I think it appears in the format that the blogger identifies, such as Mosaic - where the photos of dozens of post are what you see and you click on the one that interests you. If you click on the header bar you can select "Classic" and get info the way most of us post. "Flipcard" option gives you thumbnails of the previous posts and the mouse-over gives the date and # of comments."Magazine" provides the first couple sentences of a post with a photo (click to read more).   There are several other options that you can click on to see the post as you like.

Leave me a comment.  What do YOU like??  I see pros and cons each way.  I want to provide information the way that most people want to receive it.  In this contest, the most vocal participants in the poll win.  If you don't give your opinion, no whining.

Vining for you

The problem with hand applique is that progress is slow.  I added blue centers to the flowers in the upper right corner of the section I put in the last post. 

Then I lost interest and started drawing the flowers that drew me to Esther's mystery quilt  in the first place onto the back of a strip which will be the bottom of my revised quilt.

For several evenings, I've been adding vines.

And more vines.  I have a couple more stems to add then it's on to leaves, and at long last those flowers that I love.

Little Progress

I am still trying to adjust to my new work schedule.  After a decade of consulting work, I'm finding it a real challenge to work scheduled hours 5 days per week, and have to factor in commuting time.  It's amazing how exhausted I am at the end of the day, trying to absorb and retain all the new information.

I've added some leaves to the corner of my variation of Esther Aliu's Heart's Desire.  The cluster of 5 flowers is from the outer border corner vase.  The buds on the left were already drawn on the back of the fabric which was supposed to be like the upper left block before I gave up on the original.  I think I'll add more leaves once I figure out what is going into that lower left block.

I have a few hours today to work on quilts...will I end up working on this, or something entirely different????

Mission Statement

A friend re-posted this on Facebook.  I think it is brilliant and perhaps exemplifies my personal mission statement. I wonder if Marilyn Monroe actually said it (as is claimed).  I'm posting it here as I think it's a great way to approach the process of making an amazing quilt.

Oct In Review

My goal for October was to finish up some UFO's.  I was fairly successful.  This Crazy quilt was started about 2003 to use up blue scraps from a Hawaiian applique.  It was actually the first of the series of Crazies that I've made over the past few years.

It took forever to finish because I had decided to do all hand embroidery on every seam (what was I thinking???)

The top was backed with an iron on stabilizer to support the stitching.  Then, like a traditional crazy, there's no batting - I made bar tacks on the machine every 3 inches or so to connect it to a minkee backing.

I also finished this quilt which was my first attempt at free motion quilting a full size quilt on my machine.  I discovered that I am NOT a natural at feathers, which you can read more about in this post.

My newest UFO I pulled out is Hearts Desire which was a mystery block of the month by Esther Aliu.   I was 3 blocks into it when I realized that I would never finish it.   You can see her finished quilt here.  I have a master plan to tie together some of the blocks I did with some of the elements of the original quilt that I really like, without having to do multiple repeats of any design.  This weekend I added the hearts to the upper right block and over the past 2 days have been adding a curvy vine and flowers which will have more leaves.  

I've been practicing my FMQ whenever Leah Day posts some cool new fill.

I made my younger daughter take a batik class with me and we made this.

And I squandered 6 hours of quilt time making my paper doll costume for halloween.

But it was so worth it!  I won 1st prize at work, and had fun changing outfits every 30 minutes.

So, what did you get done this month?