Monday, August 31, 2009

KK's Fire & Ice Quilt

I was really looking forward to quilting a bit last week when i got home from vacation, but unfortunately, as a result of our delays resulting in our 3am arrival at home Monday instead of 9:30pm Sunday, I came down with a bad cold in which I was bed ridden for a good portion of last week. You know you're really sick when you can't even bother getting out of bed and doing a little quilting. I had a fever for a couple of days and everything. Yuck.

The good news is that I'm feeling better now, so hopefully I'll be able to work on a few things this week. I really want to work on getting some of my quilt tops quilted and finished. I just have so many that I need to focus on finishing and I need to stop starting so many projects with so many unfinished ones still hanging around.

Here are a few pics of KK's Fire & Ice quilt from our Carol Doak class at the Lowell Quilt Fest last month.



Here's what she had to say about it... "This poor quilt started at one thing (with the lovely fabrics I bought in Maryland), morphed into something else because of the inner border fabric I picked out, and then morphed again because that inner border fabric looked nasty. So this is what I ended up with. I think it is pretty cool (or hot, with all the yellows and reds). The backing will be green. I thought it needed something quiet on the back. I actually like it a lot, even if it wasn't what I planned to create."

Monday, August 24, 2009

I'm Back!!!

Well, I'm back from our vacation.  "What vacation?" you're probably wondering.  Well, we went on an Alaskan cruise with my hubby, my parents, and my sister.  Here are a few teaser pics.  I haven't had the chance to go through all of my 1000 pictures yet since we just returned what was supposed to be last night but ended up being 3 am after several delays.  Lets just say it was one of the most frustrating trips home ever.  


I even managed to find a few quilt shops.  The fabric that's rolled is a panel of one of the towns we visited designed especially for that town and printed by Robert Kauffman.  



Tuesday, August 11, 2009

More Pics from Lowell Quilt Fest

As promised, here are more photos from the Lowell Quilt Festival the other day.  I tried posting them yesterday, but I kept getting an error message when I was uploading the photos.  Let's give this another try...


This one was made by a 12 year old.  Amazing for a 12 year old.  It'd be amazing at any age actually.  
This quilt won best of show.  You can see the amazing details below.  

This was one of my favorite quilts of the day.  Look at the detail below.  As you can see, it won several ribbons.  

Sunday, August 9, 2009

Lowell Quilt Festival

Today we went to the actual show at the Lowell Quilt Festival.  We spent some time shopping the vendors (and my sister, the non-sewer, even sat in front of a machine) and then went to see all of the wonderful quilts being showcased.  Here's a sampling of some of the quilts, in no particular order.  

More pictures to come in my next post...

Fire and Ice Class Yesterday

Yesterday was the Fire and Ice class with Carol Doak at the Lowell Quilt Festival.  I took the class with my aunt, KK, and co-worker, Lynn.  We all really enjoyed it.  Even though KK and I had paper pieced before, it was fun taking the class because we learned some tips of the trade from Carol to improve our accuracy and speed.  

Here's my work-in-progress block.  It's coming together.  

This is Carol posing with the quilt she made using her 300 block book (I don't remember the exact name off the top of my head and I'm too lazy to double check right now.)  She jokingly referred to it as her "Dear Carol" quilt since it contains ever block in the 300 block book.  

Here's Carol showing the class how to attach several squares together to form your block perfectly, or as we said in class yesterday... "puuuur-fect" 
And here it is... a photo of my finished block.  I love it!!!  I probably should have taken a photo of it on point since that's how it's going to be in the quilt, but you get the idea.  Just tilt your head a little if you really want to get a feel for it on point.  ;o)  I absolutely love the colors here. I can't wait to see how it comes out. 

In this photo, you can see the colors in the little dots in the background fabric.  You can really see how the colors used in the quilt really go well with the colors in the background.  

Here's KK holding her finished block.  It's made of batiks and I think it's going to come out awesome!!!

And here's a close-up of KK's finished block.  

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Set 5 of the Blooming 9 Patch

Here's set 5 of the blooming nine patch blocks.  Just one more to go...

And here are all 5 of the sets of 9 patches.  


I have to cut the strips for the next 9 patch still.  I probably won't get to that until next week.  I have to add a sleeve to a quilt I made a while ago for a show that a friend asked me to submit a quilt to.  

I'm also taking a class on Saturday with Carol Doak at the Lowell Quilt Festival, so I need to do a bit of prep for that.  I'm so excited for the class. I haven't taken a class in over a year, maybe two, so it will be nice to learn some new tips.  Even though I've already taken a paper piecing class before, I always seem to learn something in classes I take because someone always seems to have tips and tricks to share.  It's one of my favorite aspects of taking classes.  

I hope to report back with pictures from the festival itself as well after.  I have a bunch of stuff that I'm looking to get from the vendors... thread for the machine quilting of several quilts, backings for 3 quilts, fabric from the Santorini and Kiwi lines, maybe a few charm packs, batiks, and neutral fabrics to add to my stash.  This is one time that I will probably add a bunch of fabrics to my stash at one time.  Yay!!!