First finish for 2009

Wohoo, I finished my first little project for this year.
A little background to this wall hanging - I took the Flower Power class offered at Quilt University from Susan Brittingham in February of 2007 (you can see more about that if you browse my blog entries for that time) and Susan provided us with the pattern for the Thistle. This week I finally decided on how I wanted to quilt it and you can see the result of my freehand quilting in the picture. Now talk about procrastinating on finishing something this small, but I'm glad I can strike one project of my UFO/WIP/PIG list for 2009.

Progressive Sampler

I realized I've never shared the picture of the Progressive Sampler I was teaching at Bearly Stitchin in Goodyear, AZ.

This was a 6 week class with 3 hours / week.

For the quilt top I mainly used my hand dyed fabrics from Marjie McWilliam's cotton dyeing class at Quilt University and added some batiks from my stash to it.

Below is a color wheel I dyed and the dyeing set-up in my backyard. Unfortunately life has been too busy to dye anything for several months, but I hope to get back into it again soon.

It's JULY already!

Gosh, I just realized that the last post I've made to my blog was in March! A lot has happened since then and currently things are a bit crazy again. Since I didn't have a chance to blog about it, some of you didn't know that I went to Germany with the kids for a little over 3 weeks last month to surprise my dad for his 72nd birthday on June 3rd. He had no idea we were coming, so the surprise was a good one. We made it back home 10pm on the 25th and since then I'm just going, going, going to catch up on things around here. DH has been feeling sick with coughing, body aches and no energy since the day we got home and he's not getting better, so he's home sick right now, waiting on blood results etc. to finally find out what's wrong with him. Then yesterday I also received a phone call from my sister, that my dad is in the hospital again. While we were there, he was on antibiotics for an infection on the leg, which he had an amputation on. The infection did not go away, so now he might need to have some surgical intervention. My fear is that, because he still has not slowed down on his smoking a bit, his circulation is very bad in that area again and that the doctors will have to remove even more of the remaining leg. Not that there is much more to work with, so if you have a moment, I'd appreciate prayer for my dad.
On a happier note, I did sign up for another of Marjie McWilliams' dyeing classes (Quilter's Palette) at Quilt University - the down side, with me keeping the kids busy on their summer break, Cliff sick and me waiting on a maintenance guy for two days to fix some things around the house I have not been able to touch any of the dyeing materials and the next lesson will be loaded tomorrow already. UGH! Well, maybe I'll get to try both lessons over the weekend.
In my first dyeing class (which I didn't blog about here either - hanging my head in shame) I was able to do my set up outside on the patio. I thought of dyeing outside again, but I guess I need to get up early for that, because the temperatures hit the 90's before 8am already and from there on it just gets too hot to stay out there for very long.

Last but not least - Cliff made Master Sgt.!!!!!
Don't know yet what changes will come with that, but I'll try to be better about updating my blog. I might just throw some random posts with pic's in, here and there to follow up on some things I have not posted about earlier.

Time sure has been flying this last month, but stress seems to bring out the productive side in me. When I know I have a lot of appointments with waiting time coming up, I always try to have at least one project ready, that's portable, so I don't just sit around, wasting time. So if you should have wondered about how I get a lot of quilty things done, that answers the question. lol
First off I wanted to share a picture of the finished table runner I was working on in the Quilt University class by Nancy Chong. It's on our dining table right now.

Since I had dabbled into drawing my own Celtic design and still had oodles of self made bias strips, I prepared my fabric for the next project:

If you remember, this is the doodle that I created. The left side shows my drawing with highlighters, because I wanted to see how many fabrics I'd be able to use for the bias and the black line drawing to the right eliminates the "stop marks" I used for the designing process. It gives a better overall impression of the design without distractions.











I then created the real size drawing using a 2" grid that I drew on some drafting paper. This step is more time consuming, because it involved quite a few more steps than just redrawing the original line drawing at a larger scale. When you click on the picture to get the larger view you can see that I had to draw the lines to the left and right side of the design line, then I had to create the over/under effect and finally to make the tracing on fabric easier for myself I traced over all of the lines with a Sharpie.
After this step the pattern is ready to be traced onto fabric and the appliqueing can begin.





After several days of appliqueing all of the required bias strips down by hand, this is the top I've created:




At this point it's "aging" on my design wall as I am working on other UFO's. I've decided I want to completely finish at least three more projects before the year is over and I think I'll be able to finish more than that, but three is my minimum goal, but I'll share more of that in my next posts.

Celtic knotwork class project

This picture was taken at an earlier stage of the knotwork. I'm almost done with all of the applique and I really like how it's coming along. I made one change to the instructions - I'll be using two different fabrics, instead of a one color application, but other than that the design will be the same.
I've met Nancy Chong (who is teaching this class) in person, while we were still living in Washington state, but living in AZ now, it's nice to take classes from her long distance at Quilt University. Her classes there are great, because her material is very detailed and you work at your own pace, while still having the benefit of classroom discussion/input.

I don't know if I'll finish the applique over the weekend (DD is having little guest over), but if I do, I'll take a picture of the finished top to post here.

Celtic Knotwork doodles

After having signed up with Nancy Chong's Celtic knotwork class at Quilt University, I've ordered a few books, how to "draw your own Celtic designs". Last evening I started experimenting with some practice designs of my own and I wanted to share the process with you.

Here I'm working with a 7x7 block grid. The red marks tell me where the grid will be interrupted and the light pencil markings are the beginning of the knotwork. (You'll see an oops in the picture here, where I didn't highlight one of my "stop marks")In the next pictures you see how I'm working my way out of the center.With some lines I stop to take a moment to see where the lines will lead me.And then I can continue to close the lines. By now this looks pretty confusing, don't you think? To make the visualization easier on me I decided to use different color highlighters. Later on, if I decide to turn this into an actual project I can use different colors of fabric in place of the different colors of highlighter that I used, or make the design all in one color, but I think different colors make the projects more interesting.Here you see more clearly that some parts of the design are continuous and others (although continuous in themselves) are not continuous throughout the entire design.

Now it's time to fill some of the empty spaces, shown with the orange highlighter - and you probably can see that something's still missing.So to balance the design out, I mirror image the orange line and fill the rest of the design in with the yellow highlighter.

Voila! This is the finished design doodle. I think this design, once worked out in a larger scale would make a nice table topper or wallhanging. Maybe you'll see this as a finished project in the future on my blog. ;o)