Three More

Three more in the Lincoln's Platform. Really looking forward to the week-end and catching up on all of your blogs. I decided to just wait instead of trying to go through them too quickly. I have to say that work is simply interfering with the more important things in life like quilting.

Blended Girl, and Angels for Lucy

Thank you for your comments on Lincoln's Platform. You all are so supportive and make blogging so much fun!! More blocks to come soon in more color groups.



Lucy asked for some photos of the angels in front of the log cabin quilt; I adore these angels. They were in a booth at the Yellow Daisy Festival years ago, which is one of the top-rated craft shows in the country, and is held in Stone Mountain Park in Atlanta. I went into "I found a treasure" mode when I spotted these cute angels wearing their antique quilt top dresses made of such cute fabric, and asked the craftswoman, "now are you sure these are all you have left with this fabric? absolutely sure??" :-). Great fabrics, don't you think?

And I've been wondering; when you use Bloglines or, sorry, it's early and I forget the other notification service, you can't match a comment to the post, can you. I wish Bloglines and others would list the date of the post along with the comment.

Here is one of my alternate BOMs for LQS.

Three More Lincoln's Platform

Did three more; this is like eating jelly beans.

Lincoln's Platform "12-Hour" Quilt Blocks

Oh, I just couldn't resist any longer even though I have way too many projects started. I love the ones you all have going. I'm working from my Jo Morton stash. It would be embarrassing to tell you how long it took me to do these three blocks. Oh well, so I'm a slow sewer. I like the results :-).


Does anybody know what the large-scale fabric is in the second quilt down on this page (the basket one)?
Laundry Basket Quilts
Click on "Quilt Recipe Card Photo Gallery" in the left toolbar.

Gratitudes:
1. Saturday Night
2. The Yellow Daisy Festival is coming up
3. Music

Tied-Up Design Wall

Lillebet's Garden has monopolized the design wall all summer. Hope I can get the remaining 10 sashing strips done and get LG assembled and off the wall before too long. I'd love to see something else up there for a change.

Tonight I'm going to meet friends at Super Suppers to get six entrees prepared, which will be 36 handy servings in the freezer. I've done this twice before and it certainly comes in handy.


You might enjoy seeing my daily painting that is a primitive portrait of a young girl standing before an applique quilt.

Sunday Evening

Thank you, Dawn! Dawn gave me the dimensions for the flying geese no-waste method for this 6" block and voila success:

I've shown these before but this is the last time because happily the 70 Jo Morton swap blocks are finished and ready to mail after work tomorrow:












Chinese Coin setting, that's what it is (re earlier post)! Perfect way to use up scraps. And to have a remembrance of 2006 quilt fabrics. This is near the top of my Be Sure to Make This list.

To answer Sue who by the way has a very nice quilt blog, thank you for asking about my artwork. I'm getting back to my painting this year, and decided that the A Drawing and a Painting blog would be a great way to do it. So far it's a great way to keep on task! I'm going to list one now and then on eBay to see how it goes, especially a full-size primitive portrait. I've listed those in the past on eBay and have done very well with them.

The pull of quilting is so strong, though, that even while I am enjoying myself painting, I think, oh.....I'd like to do some quilting tonight, too.

the Treadmill Video

Just want to post this for now in case some of you haven't seen it. This is just great!

Scraps

Hanne and Mary (re Comments), never fear, there are other proliferating scrap piles in this Quilt House ;-). That one pile of little log cabin like strips, though, is intended for one of those "memory" strippy scrappy quilts that somebody described a few months ago. Like this:



where you use strips of fabric that you purchased that year for other projects and then you have a little "reference" quilt for favorite fabrics of that year. What a great idea.

Here's my daily painting for yesterday:

Dimensions and Ratios

Hi everybody! Am showing some of the signature swap blocks today. And here is the current BOM block...

The directions used this quick method of making Flying Geese for this 12" size block:
No-Waste Method. I am making a 6" version of each block as we go along and tried several times to figure out the dimensions for this method scaled down to a 6" block. Does anybody know how to do the math for this?. For actual pattern pieces, if necessary (since I use EQ), I subtract the 1/2" seam allowance, divide the dimension in half, then add the 1/2" seam allowance back on. I did ratios. Shouldn't ratios work? Nothing seems to work. I decided I could start with the final drawing in the method, draw it to scale, then gradually work backwards with scale drawings and maybe that would work, but unfortunately no time last night what with doing my daily drawing and painting (!). I'll keep working on it.


Here is my growing pile of scrap strips. I toss them under my cutting table (aka drawing table) as I work on various things. I still have in the back of my mind that great idea of creating a quilt a year from scraps of fabrics used for other projects...forget who had that idea or wrote about it.

Absolute devastation. Filters at work are preventing me from seeing any blog pages. Absolute quilt ring blogs withdrawal.

Thank you for your kind comments last post including re my new "work a day" art blog. Laura asked me about my art background. There isn't much to tell, not much training, but I have been drawing and painting since I was young, with the constant frustration of not being able to spend enough time on it due to the unfortunate necessity to earn a living. I did major in art history in college, along with history, and those art history courses were wonderful. Oh dear, I'm going to be late for work, must stop. I'd just love to talk about myself all day long :-).

Quilt Motifs

It was fun going back to get the two free yards. Top is for binding of the patriotic quilt, bottom is a woven from the Mistletoe Manor line.

I've begun to keep a painting blog for which I'm going to do a drawing and a painting each day; so far the subjects are mostly quilt/folk art motifs, so you may want to check it out: a Drawing and a Painting a Day

Two Free Yards

Well, for goodness' sake. I was just beginning to thrash around in my stash to see if I have a good fabric to bind this quilt with (my son made the blocks along with me in the LQS BOM a few years ago...he hated it by the way...I don't know what he thought it was all going to be like but I made him finish them once he started), and I had little hope that I would find anything that would work, when the cell phone began to beep. It's my only phone and there hasn't been reception at the house (or indeed in a good portion of my neighborhood) for years -- used to work just fine. There was a faint reflection of one bar so I tried listening to the message and, garbled though it was, I think I heard the LQS telling me that my name was picked as one of the alternate BOM block winners and I heard that lovely phrase "two free yards". Or maybe it's one. Anyway, I'm going to drive back and pick out some binding for this quilt. Hooray!

I showed the Folk Art Applique quilt top at Show and Tell this morning and everybody just loved it. The other Show and Tell was also a quilt top only and was very pretty. I should really start taking a camera to BOM.

Bonnie and Lucy, have a wonderful visit!!

Decorating with Quilts

I've owned this antique log cabin quilt almost from when I moved into this house ten years ago. I hung it at my entry and the three primitive angels with their rusted wings joined it shortly thereafter and they have all been there ever since.


On the opposite wall from the log cabin is a painting I did long ago, a still life; portion shown here. It shows the hooked rug that my dad made when he was 12 and a small crib quilt that was made by an ancestor a few generations earlier (in a rather painterly version that is).


A few weeks ago I was headed to the garbage can with these fabric samples because I am on an August to May Reduce the Inventory project so that I can manage a move without it being a total nightmare. I got these at the secondhand store with the idea of making a tote of some kind. Anyway, on the way to the garbage can, I thought, hey, just sew these five rectangles together to make a sort of tablecloth and put them on my outside picnic table with the shabby white birds. So they have been used after all.

Thank you ~ALL~ for your helpful comments re the Folk Art Applique quilt top. I have six colors of perle cotton to experiment with and if I quilt it, it will be with hand quilting, which means I have to quilt the one in the frame first. I have to say I am severely tempted to get a second hand quilting frame. Especially since I'm planning to sell a lot of the furniture around here, which is to say, there will soon be room for a second frame.

Next on the to-do list are rather more housekeeping quilting chores than otherwise, i.e., work on the Jo Morton swap blocks (those cute little blocks! but they are 70 of the same thing) and beaucoup handquilting. What can I tell you about such activities? If you've seen one identical swap block, you've seen them all :-).

Tomorrow is BOM at the LQS; they also do Show and Tell as we stand in line and I have been using that to encourage myself to get something finished each month to take for Show and Tell. I do not have anything finished this time (actually the quilt for Jack is done) but the night is young and after this I am going to poke around to see if anything is finish-able even if I stay up into the wee hours. Thank you all again, you are such good Blog-Friends!

BQ = Before Quilting

I asked Amy what BQ meant on her blog and the answer just happens to be the Most Suitable Title for this post. Please people, please help me. I don't want to ruin this quilt top (had a near miss with that vine thing lol). I pieced a back for it from some ancient brown fabric in my stash that I love very much. Got the print in several different colors at the time (is anybody else old enough to remember this fabric???).

Was about to sandwich it with fusible batting. Then stopped. I don't know if quilting will help or hurt this top. Not sure if I want to quilt it at all, but could it be finished w/o quilting? The blocks look pretty all nice and flat. What would you do?

Do-Over

Oh arrrrrrrr, tried to machine applique the border vine, it is ugly, it is worse than ugly I have to rip it oooooout. Because I have no more black fabric so must salvage this. Too bad I can't rip out stitches in my sleep so I wouldn't have to be around while it's happening.

Thank you for all of your kind words re the quilt. It looked so much nicer before I stamped on that vine. jpquilter, I would dearly love to see the photo of the Morning Glory fabric if you don't mind sending a picture; I'm still trying to identify the fabric. Just love these internet hunts. Amy sent me some links and it was very close but the flowers were roses rather than the flat open flowers that are in this pattern. jpquilter, you are another who has your email sent to "no-reply"; if you'd like to change it, you go to your Profile, then Edit Your Profile, then put a checkmark by "show your email address".

So I'll be ripping for the next three hours as I cry into my Diet Coke. Bye bye.

Folk Art Applique Together

Got it together! And not only that, it's minutes away from the third episode of DesignStar on HGTV, what could be better?

Re Comments: No actual sale at the LQS, Gail, sorry :-)! But I went to Little Quilts, Marietta. Gail, you do not have an email established for people to answer you, do you know that? You have the "no reply" email. jpquilter, the points idea sounds like fun. Lindaj, you have a cute kitty helper, too. Thank you, May, my black cat is a great cat, fur like a bear pelt and he is a true character, of course, aren't they all. Nancy M, thank you re the Robyn Pandolph lead for the fabric, I tried to email you directly but got a mailer daemon thingie back...oops, sorry, DesignStar is starting, gotta go watch.

Last Vacation Day

Well, ladies, I fell off the NoBuy wagon on Saturday, I may as well tell you, and in shame I removed the NoBuy graphic from my sidebar. The plan is to buy no more for the rest of the month, but this occasion was a Farewell to Summer visit to the LQS since it is not very handy to reach at any time and now that I'm on my work schedule again, I can only get there on the occasional Saturday, most likely only for the monthly BOM. So I'm sort of on a LowBuy for the Year plan rather than monthly LOL. But that is good for stash reduction and my checking account. I needed a few spools of basic color Aurifil thread, a few Clover white marking pens (if you haven't tried this pen, it is a dream come true for marking on dark fabrics, see pic further down), and some FQs for this pattern that I've been wanting to make forever from my Pattern Stash :-) :

Here's the pattern:

Does anybody happen to know which fabric is in the borders, the one with the green background? I believe it's a Moda and I can find fabrics that are almost identical but don't think I located the same one yet. I just do not have anything in my stash that is right. Maison de Noel and Faded Memories both have fabrics that are very close, but this pattern is older than those lines.

I'm so happy, I have all 12 blocks from Folk Art Applique close to completion, just have the last two to finish up as you see, and all of these fabrics are from stash; in fact, one thing on the list for the Farewell Visit was to look for a few colors that I didn't have for the last two blocks but they weren't at the LQS either, so I just kept on struggling with trying to match colors from stash as I did throughout these twelve blocks and I think they look fine even though I kept feeling I was compromising on some of the colors:

I'm hoping to finish up those last two blocks today and perhaps even get them all sewn together today; I don't have enough of the background black for the strips in one length so am hoping to piece the outer borders from the remaining stash. Also if you can see those two small blocks in the front, those are the start of 70 swap blocks for the Jo Morton list, all to be done from my Jo Morton stash collection. I didn't have a light Jo Morton, though, for the central part where the signature goes, so I tried using Color Remover on two fabrics, thus and thus:


and got some background colors. Not as light as I would like, but okay.

Thank you all for your supportive comments re last post about my painted floors; oh dear, it's just hard to even think about but I did want to say thank you for your kind thoughts.

Quilts as Flooring

I thought you might enjoy seeing these old photos of painted floors that I did in my old frame shotgun house that I owned at one time in near-downtown Atlanta (Lake Claire). I put down wafer board 4x4-foot squares, primed, backgrounded, and did quilt paintings. This first one shows my son's nursery. I decorated the rest of the room in a North Woods theme continuing the idea of the quilt motifs:

This picture is of the front porch that we enclosed. I painted a hooked rug at the entry that has tracings of my baby's hand and foot prints and of my then-husband's and my hands:

This photo shows part of the living room, which was about 15x30-feet, so it was a pretty amazing sight with all of those large quilt block motifs, which were set on point on the 4x4-foot squares. The applique blocks are taken from the cover of "Treasury of American Quilts" by Carter and Houck:

I bought this 1922 house before I got married and worked on its renovation for ten years, including knocking down and carting out the brittle plaster and lathe from all rooms myself and hand stripping about 12 doors, years of extremely rigorous work, and then unfortunately was not able to keep it post-divorce, so it is quite the heartrending experience for me to look at these pictures.

Tobacco Silks Quilt

So, here we are in the 3rd day of NoBuy Month. I feel fine, just fine. Really . Especially when I look at this list of projects for which I already have fabric lol:

Got the next two Folk Art Applique (Lori Smith) blocks made:



While rearranging my bedroom, I found this flannel quilt that I finished a few years ago in my small blanket chest:

Remember when they put out the flannel reproduction fabric of the antique tobacco silks? That's what the flags are. This was a kit I bought way back when I lived in Indiana, at, I believe, Back Door Quilts in Greenwood. That was just so long ago. I had friends over a week or so ago to show them some old furniture I need to sell and Jim mentioned antique tobacco silks being made into quilts as they were looking at the quilts I had made and was working on, and I thought, oh yeah, where is that reproduction silks quilt that I made??? And then it obligingly showed up this afternoon.

Hi, Amy, yes, the Cat Quilt is cheater's cloth, Home Sweet Home by Kathy Hall, Andover. Libby, I do think that would be a deliciously decadent feeling to have whole bolts of fabric in the house, like your backing muslin. Judy, I know that would be such a good idea to keep replacement fabric with a quilt; there's also that idea of making a fabric envelope for the back of your quilt and putting replacement fabric pieces inside it. Tonya! Love the glowing eyes in masks image, it certainly does look like that. Funny how the original intention was that they are flowers; good thing for my Halloween quilt that they look like fireflies and glowing eyes as well :-). ForestJane, the images are copies of vintage Halloween cards with the verses on them that were on the antique cards.