I hope to kick myself into gear and try to get something blogged at least once a week. I figure I’m just not going to have enough of interest to say every day — but 6 months is probably too long of a dry spell. Since my business really is that of adding the finishing quilt touches to my customer’s quilts, I plan on showcasing a customer quilt in each posting. I’ll discuss things like decisions made on how to quilt them, what features the quilt has that make it unique, what issues can be avoided if you have me work on one of your quilts, and maybe even some things on trends in the industry or just in my quilting life.

For this posting, however, let me talk about my personal quilting and what I’m doing. My most recent flurry of activity has been to somehow get three quilts ready for the Sauder Quilt Show in May. Plenty of time, right?  (Ack!)  I figure I’ll show one of my older, pre-longarm quilts that I’m pretty proud of (see photo of my Garden Twist), so that takes care of one.  But that still leaves two more new creations to come up with.  Nothing like working under pressure.

A preview of my Garden Twist quilt

My inspiration for the first of the two new quilts is… (believe it or not) the Detroit Auto Show last month. I took a photo of a vintage Mercedes and if I can get it from head to fabric, I think it will be pretty cool. My biggest challenge was finding enough batiks in gray shades that would give me the variation I wanted.  I found tons of medium tones, but very little in light. I won’t spoil the outcome too much right now, but here is the car.   I’ll give you a hint, I’m not going to put the entire car on the quilt.

Vintage Mercedes NAIAS 2012

Tomorrow will find me off hunting up some more Wonder Under which will then get the applique part accomplished. Then to quilt and I hope to add some beads which (again thanks to Kathy) I have added to my obsession list.

Following that, I need to come up with my third quilt for the show. I’m thinking it probably will be my newest pup, but I’m not really sure yet. Plenty of time! (Did I say “Ack!”???)

Oh, and if you really want to see a lot of information on very artistic quilting, pop on over to the Quirks site in my blogroll. The “other” Kathy is pretty awesome.

Happy Quilting all.  Keep safe and warm where ever you are.

~Kathy

What projects are you working on to keep you warm?  Right now I’m resurrecting my pupster quilt (see my “Mosaic” BLOG from last January).  I’ve bit the proverbial bullet and am going to display him at the Sauder Village Quilt Fair. If you haven’t been there or put your quilts on display, you should consider it. This is a wonderful quilt show and this year is their 35th. No affiliation, its just one I like to go to.

Of course, since I’ve entered him in the show, this means I need to actually finish the quilting.  At least I have a deadline to work towards – have to get this done by early April! The main reason I haven’t finished him is that I figured if I quilt him like instructed (Barb Cey, I am not worthy!), with so many thread color changes, I would have to do it on my domestic machine.  Why? First of all because it seems somewhat silly to take the small spools of thread through the longarm, and secondly because it would just be a pain to change threads that often. Plus the needles I use on the longarm make a very large hole. I don’t think that would do very well with small fused pieces.  So I tried it on my Viking.  Unfortunately I was reminded very quickly why I got the longarm in the first place. There was no way I was going to do this on the domestic sewing machine.  So there he sat for most of last year.

I’ve now decided that the only way to get him finished is to quilt him on the longarm. This means that I need to use a smaller needle and I’m thinking of using either a varigated thread or maybe even a clear thread so that I don’t have many thread changes (this way I see probably 4 color changes — black, brown, white, red). I’ll keep you posted on how that goes.

I also plan on entering two of my other quilts in the show (my hummingbird and my thistle garden).

On other fronts, I had a ton of fun for Christmas making a quilt for my eldest daughter.  She’s noted over the years that mom hasn’t made her a quilt, so this was the year (I won’t tell her about the one that’s in a box that I never seem to have time to work on that she might get someday). So this year I bought a bunch of the fabrics that she likes so much (Amy Butler, etc.) and made a lap quilt for her.  It was totally outside of my box design-wise but I was very pleased with it. I think she was too.

My to-do list also includes a project with my art quilt group. We decided to draw a river on paper and then cut it into sections.  Each of us is taking a section with the only commonality being the river part of the pattern and one fabric.  I’ve already seen two of the sections and I can’t wait until we have all of them done.  We are hoping to find a show or two to display them in — or maybe even a local gallery.

That’s all for now.  I’ll try to write more often!  Keep warm, stay safe, and have fun quilting.

~Kathy

This is also a good time for me to jump in and remind everyone to support their local quilt shop. Yes, I succumb occasionally to shopping online — its good to support those folks too.  But too many neighborhood quilt stores are being hit awfully hard by the economy.  And where would we be if we couldn’t compare fabrics side-by-side or worst, not be able to feel their texture or see their quality.  Plus you get to meet a bunch of really great people and have the opportunity in most cases to get classes you’d never see anywhere else.

So back to my local shop.  It happens to be the Quilt Patch in Tecumseh and the class I took was called “Raw Edge Mosaic”. The instructor is Barb Cey and she makes the most awesome lifelike wallhangings. She has a couple of techniques. One is her landscape class.  I started to try to learn that but while I loved her art, I just didn’t fall in love with the process (I think I’m a little too analytical for it or something).  Her animals though — wow! Here’s one of hers:

Isn’t he just way too cute?  She also has started selling some of her patterns at the Quilt Patch.  You can call them for more information:  517-423-0043. Barb tells me she will someday have her own website but until then call the shop and they’ll help you. And yes, this guy is one of the patterns she sells!

And here’s what I’m working on.  This isn’t what Barb had for the class project (I admit, I’m a bit of a rogue), but it’s her technique 100%.  I couldn’t have even attempted this on my own.  This is my shih tzu, Berry. To create the “pattern” I took a photograph of him, pulled it into Photoshop Elements, posterized the photo to get better areas to outline and then took the pencil tool and drew in a lined pattern.   I think the pattern looks a lot like what you see when you get a paint-by-number, don’t you?

I printed the pattern out to be about 21″ x 27″ and then got to have lots of fun with fusible and batiks.

This is what I’ve got so far. I think it looks like him, don’t you? I still need to do the free-motion quilting but that is what Barb is going to cover on Tuesday.  Doesn’t this just make you want to take her class too?

Happy Quilting!

~Kathy