What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

 Hello everyone! How is life in your neck of the woods? We have had a run of just incredible weather for January and it has been a joy to be outside for the last several days. Natives of the East coast here think it's cold, but it's been clear and sunny and in the 40s. Who could ask for more from January?

I have another finish to show off today! I told you I was busy over the break. When you don't have to ride off to visit the family, you can get a lot done. A ...

Art should be like a holiday: something to give a man the opportunity to see things differently and to change his point of view. -Paul Klee, painter (18 Dec 1879-1940) 

So I’m part of Mt. Battie Modern Quilt Guild, one of two local groups. This chapter, part of the MQG (Modern Quilt Guild) is the smaller of the two and is almost completely comprised of members of Coastal Quilters (the other group) which is part of the statewide Pine Tree Quilt Guild (Maine is the Pine Tree state). For once, I decided to participate in a round robin sort ...

I think of color as having personality. I get a sense of colors much the way I get a sense of people at a dinner party. There are those who dominate the conversation, others who are quiet, yet have really interesting things to say once encouraged. Some people light up when seated next to someone… Continue reading The Personality of Color

Now Registered participants ONLY can SEE it … CLEARLY!

If you were enrolled in the Virtual Quilt Festival’s second Machine Quilting Forum on Saturday, you know there were serious transmission issues with my presentation that made the video just yucky. TOTAL BUMMERS, but now TOTAL JOY! Thanks to the hard working folks in the Education Department (who should have been taking today off) you can SEE the video through December 12th. After that, like Cinderella’s pumpkin, it disappears. To access it, follow the following steps:

Registered participants ONLY can follow these instructions – 

—Go to My Schedule (be sure to ...

 ...or sings. Or both—because when I finally bound this quilt, I sang!

This past summer, we—along with eleven other designers—participated in a Mystery Stitch-Along. Our block was the Harvest Basket, which you can read about by clicking here. Kara and I (Teri) each stitched the block, as one was destined to be stitched into the Woolen Oak Mystery Quilt, and we wanted to keep one. I decided to create a small wall hanging with the one I made.

Another Scrappy Finish and soon to be another quilt to go to Hospice! I began piecing this quite some time ago and a few blocks sat on the design wall for much too long. In a moment of boredom, a few more blocks were added. Finally, last week, I got a bit annoyed with myself for having let it go for so long, so…I sewed!

I really got into it and by the end of the day all the blocks were together, a pieced border added, and it was a flimsy. was just the sewing therapy I needed. It ...

 When my friend Jayne, over at Twiggy and Opal started sharing her Geo Pop pattern in different variations, I decided to see how small I could make one! I pulled out some of my solid scraps and made this citrussy version...

Each block is 1 1/2" finished so the mini finished at 9"x12". pretty small but, of course, Jayne made a smaller one hahaha, which you can check out on her instagram.

Our Improv small group is doing a placemat swap. In August I needed to make a placemat for my friend Anne who had chosen pink and ...

There’s been a lot of sunshine here but with that has been intense heat and humidity. Many hours of sewing and quilting was becoming somewhat unjoyful for me so I went down a different path.  I had ordered some large art paper and the first happy thought I had was a sunflower and I drew a very simple drawing

The center of the flower is strip pieced, cut and sewn again to give the illusion of a woven center.  Beading in the center gave it more dimension and made it look more like a seed center.

The leaf is ...

My quilting journey began somewhere around 2006 to 2007.  I purchased a magazine, “Quilt It, Two Block Quilts” and immediately loved two of the quilts.  The first is in the back of my quilting closet, partially quilted.  Each time I take it out thinking I’ll finish it, I’m reminded that I don’t care for it very much.  I also remind myself that a fair amount of work went into it, especially as a beginner, and that I should finish it so I can donate it.

The second pattern was for “Baby Love.”  In 2018 I finally got ...

Scraps, scraps, scraps. A container full of one and one half inch scrap strips! There is also a bin of polka dots that has been waiting to be used. The blocks are quarter log cabins with the centers made up of four patches of polka dots.

This option for arranging the blocks just didn’t work for me.

I’ve arranged the quarter log cabins several ways and putting four together for one full log cabin block was most pleasing to me.

For now, this is my layout choice.

There’s a long way to go. I’m now piecing ...

We are at the end of the quilt challenge. It was supposed to be a 10 day challenge, but has taken me close to a month to complete. Talk about technical difficulties, family issues, and life challenges, including a bout of CoVid 19. Believe me, when you're sick from that, you don't care about your blog, your social media, or even your people. 

But this post is about these quilts, which really deserve to be together. They are sister quilts made for two granddaughters who really know how to be sisters. They wanted the quilts to be different ...

For day nine, I'm showing this quilt that I made for a granddaughter. Marley chose the colors and asked for "something zigzag." I think she must have seen another chevron quilt. I needed to play a little, so the compromise became two sizes of chevrons in three colors. They lost their home to mold several years ago and all of their quilts were lost, so this one is in a landfill somewhere. But that does not take away from the fact that it once existed as a silly quilt for a little girl who loved zigzags just because she ...

This happy cross quilt is one that I pieced on a trip to the Great Lakes. I always take a couple of easy kits that are cut and ready for sewing. When we return home they are quilted (or put into a basket where they may wait a bit too long.) I sold this one at a guild show a few years ago. It became a gift to a priest who was leaving one parish and going to another. Don't you think happy is a good description for this one?

When I was working as a contributing editor at Elle Magazine, the Fashion Director called me out loudly in front of the entire staff. She asked me if I was color blind, not in a concerned way, but as an accusation meant to humiliate, and demonstrate just how awful she thought my sense of color… Continue reading Color and Design

Precision piecing has never been my strong suit, but I am — like Michaelangelo at age 80 — still learning. One of the things I’ve learned is that ...

Oh the opportunity I saw when the Great Corona Lockdown began.  I was going to sew, sew, sew, and I did just that! I completed several quilts, made progress on several Works in Progress and best yet – I emptied many project bins! And then it happened – SLAM! I began to feel like going into my studio and sewing was a J-O-B.  So I stopped.  This is supposed to be a joy, not a chore, so…

I immediately ordered a large pad of drawing paper, some Tyvek sheets and checked on my supply of Lumeire paints.  The plan is to do ...

The beauty of doing the Zoom presentations is that I can usually get a picture from everyone, and they are edited for the class, so obviously, they are edited for posting after the class.

One of the quilts we're working on at The Hobby Horse is Celebration by Quilted Moments (Marilyn Foreman). It's a block of the month pattern, but I wasn't that thrilled with it. Let me rephrase that - I like the quilt, but the coloring on the cover is not my favorite.

Celebration pattern