Busy Ladies Quilt

I got the binding on my Busy Ladies quilt! It has in the ditch machine quilting and it still needs some meandering or maybe criss cross (which I've never done) or scallop quilting (ditto) in the blocks; criss cross or scallop would be more in keeping with the 30s look of the quilt. Here are some individual blocks:



I really enjoyed settling on the rather drab colors for the sashing and border, as opposed to the cheery feedsack type of fabrics in the individual blocks. It's supposed to look like the maker had to use burlap or something to sash and border her quilt. I digitized the designs and sewed them out on the machine. I just love the Depression era feel of this darling design (by Laurene Sinema). To fit in with the era and with the subject of ladies going about their activities, I added the quotation by Eleanor Roosevelt ("When you cease to make a contribution, you begin to die").


I was driving past Intown Quilters' new location in Decatur yesterday, so stopped in. Their new spot is in a little separate shop next to a mall and is very bright and airy, although I really liked the old location, which was in a sort of mini industrial area that interesting businesses have moved into. Close to the Emory University campus. Anyway, got these fabrics:


They had a pricing feature that was a new one on me. They charge a higher price for a quarter yard off the bolt, a flat fee of $2.75. Which works out to $11 a yard for a bolt that is actually $9.25 if you purchased more than a quarter yard. Have any of you encountered that? I don't think much of it. Although come to think of it, maybe other shops do that and I just never noticed.

Thank you for the kind comments on the table runner design (hope I can get that made, I LOVE it) and my folk art blocks: Bonnie, I'm doing the blocks by machine applique. I'm using Aurifil thread, which the good ladies at Little Quilts have recommended at the monthly BOM meetings for years. I finally tried it this summer, and they are right, Aurifil thread is fantastic. It lasts such a long time, the bobbins hold so much more thread, and it is beautiful. There's less fuzz. It's thin, so that your blocks work up more accurately.

Better get to work!

Saturday

Yesterday, at the LQS' BOM morning, we saw Marti Young's trunk show of her original-design quilts. There was a very nice table runner, for which unfortunately, no pattern is available. I drew as much of it as I could remember:

It has more vining and flowers. And the urns are shaped differently.

Got some blocks completed, two for Lori Smith's Folk Art Applique and one for the LQS BOM (to Nancy, Hi, the fabrics are a mix of batik and some gorgeous hand-dyed cotton that went on sale for 40% off at the LQS; the hand-dyes are pretty much a solid tone but are the most heavenly colors and the cotton they used is very delectable, I've been wondering what it is exactly because it is very very cool :-) ).




The LQS pattern this month is Bow Tie, but I didn't feel like making that, so made this star block instead with the kit fabric.

Quilts Early and Antique

These are some of my early quilts that are hanging in my "dressing room" (a small work room like a closet built by previous owner to house part of his wedding video business; it has lots of shelves that are now for clothes). The snowman...



















and this is a wall hanging that I made for an apartment front door. I was so much in love with the fabric that had the seed packets on it and had a few yards of it. My neighbor asked to borrow it and I foolishly handed over the whole length assuming she would return it quite soon minus a few seed packet squares. Well, I never got it back and I had lots of ideas for those perfect seed packets. So all I ever got to use were these four. Let's see, that was about 1991.




















Then I made this largish wall hanging featuring my toddler son's hand outline and using lovely reproduction fabrics (sorry, it's too dark to see), dated 1993:



















Gosh, does anybody know the secret of adding photos and inserting text in between them on this idiosyncratic Blogger?? I've tried all different ways and they are all difficult. Anyway, here are some antique quilts I want to show you sometime. They were bought at a very, very country auction in southern Indiana, close to the Kentucky line. There were gazillions of quilts, but most were recent and not interesting. There were only a few older ones. I got the top one with the "big stitch" quilting that is so popular just now. The bottom pieces are sections from a quilt that is very interesting, I think, a large version of the vase and bouquet pattern. It was in sections for some reason, but I just treasure them anyway.









Well, let's check in on the June Goals:
--June BOMs for LQS (main one but not the alternates)
--Lori Smith Folk Art Applique Block #2 (YES)
--Finish "Neighborhood" (YES)
--Quilt "Busy Ladies" (argh)
--Finish rug hooking (almost!)
--Do quilting on quilt on the frame (there isn't even one on there just now, must rectify)
--Do some work on Lillebet's Garden (YES)

Toe Trauma

Oh, I was doing so well this morning. Did some yard work in the drizzling rain about 7am. It is so blazing hot here in Georgia that a rainy day is a happy day. We’d had rain the day before, too, guess a lot of the country did and had trouble with their fireworks getting spoiled, but anyway, it was a good time to transplant the poor hosta, which no longer had the shade from the tree that was cut down earlier in the summer. Moved them to a better spot, got them all mulched, got the garbage and some discards to the street, changed the kitty litter and got that to the street, got a shower, and began straightening up the sewing room and other rooms. Rushing around. Jammed my toes headlong into a vintage suitcase. I can't even walk now. My son's friend has lent me his pair of crutches.

Baby Dear at the Beauty Salon.


Baby Dear cuddled back into her cleaned clothes. Her body needs more treatments but she is a happier baby now.


Found the perfect background for the hooked rug. A pink and dark grey large check jacket, only a size 8. I only used the strips that had pink in them, so it was only half of the recovered fabric. Amazingly, there wasn’t any fabric left at all after hooking the circle. I’m finishing it up with a grey curving line and solid Dorr pink wool for the outer section.


Aaah, Second Saturday Sampler is this Saturday at the LQS, so I must work on my alternate quilt blocks.

The Fourth was nice. I made potato and egg salad and three-bean salad and had loads of fruit. With tasty burgers. Yum.

Don't Get Out Much

Well, you know, I don't get out and about very much. For instance, haven't flown in about 14 years. So today was quite a day. First I stopped at the secondhand store (well, I'm used to doing that anyway) and got an immense pile of wool for hooking, but haven't held them up to the Bird rug to see if they would work as a background (great prices, most half the marked price), went on to an estate sale that was in an intown neighborhood of Atlanta that has been neglected, etc., but which is on its way up, at the very beginning, in fact. The woman had her sale items set up all over her house and, in fact, it was one of those sales that the people have more than once. She was delightfully friendly and we were talking about the neighborhood, her fixerupper Craftsman house (that she got for only 110K a mere 24 months ago in a bankruptcy sale), her merchandise, etc., when my friend showed up that I was meeting there. She was looking and noticed the woman's business card and the woman's last name was the same as mine. Not a common name. Couldn't believe it. Her dad is from Detroit originally, and my family is from Ohio, Berks County PA before that, Alsace-Lorraine region before that. Then my friend started looking through the stack of photographs that the woman said were from a local photographer and they were photos of the family who had owned the elegant 1924 Avondale Estates craftsman house at least since the 1940s that my friend and her husband had recently purchased. She knew that because a few photos had been left behind in the house. Can you believe that?? Then my friend and I had lunch at a Mexican restaurant, then I drove down early to the airport to wait for my son to arrive from Albuquerque. He had been to an ROTC Honors Camp. I got there a few hours early, so sat down and talked to everybody who sat down next to me, people-watched all the arrivals walking through the South Terminal, and just had the best time. All the stories, all the rich lives. One pretty young woman had just gotten married six months earlier, was five months pregnant, and was waiting for her husband to get in from Paris, which he visits regularly on business. She had been there a week earlier visiting him. Then the middle-aged woman sitting by me just before Timothy showed up dropped a bombshell that she was waiting for not only her boyfriend to arrive, but her boyfriend's ex-wife, the boyfriend's mother, and somebody else, I think the ex-wife's boyfriend, who were flying back together from Missouri, where they were attending their son's graduation from something in the service. She said that her boyfriend's tone of voice had distinctly changed over the week as they spoke on the phone, that is to say, had gotten colder, and she was understandably concerned, and now I won't ever know what happened!!

Junking on the Way Home

The rug hooking class yesterday was great. There were only two of us, so we had the teacher's undivided attention :-), the teacher being the owner of Little Quilts, Mary Ellen von Holt. She showed us several rugs in her collection, ones done by her and also by rug hooking friends of hers. She had done an extraordinary large, square, very antique-y looking Tulip Cross, which looked like a block from an antique four-block quilt. It was approximately a yard square and she displays it in front of her fireplace. The background was a variegated lamp black dark. The greens were a combination of dull greens in one area contrasted with a brighter variety of greens in the four feathered leaves, super variegated. The whole thing was totally gorgeous. The pattern is from Mary Lou Lais' book American Primitive Hooked Rugs A Primer for Recreating Antique Rugs. Mary Ellen had begun this at a workshop with Mary Lou.

She had so many wonderful examples, another being the cutest dressed fox sitting on a log with the forest, sky, and large moon beyond, that was done by a woman who works at Little Quilts and has hooked rugs for years.

My fellow student had a lovely blue Puritan rug hooking frame and a collection of pencil-style rug hooks that a friend's husband had made for her. I borrowed one and borrowed Mary Ellen's hooking frame and they were great to work with. I definitely need a hooking frame with the gripper strips.

Here's my little class heart:



Thankfully, Mary Ellen knew why I was constantly coming up with a twisted loop, so it was great to get that problem solved. She asked me what color I was planning to use for the background on my other rug, the Pennsylvania Quilt Bird, and as she suspected, I had no idea. I was just plugging in recycled wool as found from the secondhand stores, so the color scheme is a bit erratic. I had plugged in a bit of beige as a possible background, but it blends in too much with the vase and the berry. Not only do I not know what color to use for the background, I know I don't have it yet in my recycled collection, so I'm going to stop in at a few places this morning to see if there are any wool clothes. In promising colors.

On the way home, traffic on the expressway was stalled, so I pulled off and found these treasures at the secondhand store, My Favorite Place. All this great stuff for $26 total! I never see dolls from the 50s just sitting around in vintage stores, so it was amazing to spot her from a distance, and closer up to spot the price tag of a measly $3.50. If any of you collect vintage Vogue dolls, you know this is a small Baby Dear from about 1960, very collectible. She came with three bits of her clothes, all Vogue, two of which are very hard to find (her diaper and her bunting). All filthy and stained, but they should all clean up fairly well. They've been soaking overnight in Perk. Baby Dear has stains remaining on her vinyl, so that will take longer to treat (with Twin Pines RemoveZit), but at least she's clean now. The boxes are to hold small quilt blocks and sewing supplies, and the primitive chair is for the front porch.


Even though she has had some treatments, her hair troubles aren't over:



Thank you for your comments re work and painting. Judy, I just love the Corn and Beans, too. What a great block!

Class Day

Hooray, today is class day at LQS, my third and last class for the summer: Rug Hooking. Here's our kit:


and then here is the one I've been working on since signing up for the class:


Am working on BOM blocks. Here is the regular 12" LQS BOM, Corn and Beans! Nice block to make and aren't their fabrics cute?



Finished the last pieced block for Lillebet's Garden:



And I would like to show you one of my primitive portraits:



Off to class!

Digitizing Delirium

I spent two days or more digitizing the applique border design for Black Bird Lane. Got it all digitized in ten sections sized for the Viking Mega Hoop (not including the reversed sections), but completely forgot that the needle would constantly dance about among Parts 1,2, and 3 throughout the designs on that hoop, and that combined with the difficulty of matching all the rehoopings just made it too hard to do the applique that way. All that time wasted, argh.

Have done some more work on Lillebet's Garden:



including this block:


I love how it turned out. I was sort of dreading doing this one, with all of the Y seams. Did this accompanied by reruns of Season 4 Monk episodes, some of which I hadn't seen yet. What a great show. The one with Jason Alexander as a sort-of detective was absolutely great. The fabrics used:

The four on the right, that is. Don't they look pretty...


Lucy posted her sampler, so here is mine:

A pattern from the Scarlet Letter. The Scarlet Letter's husband used to make these GORGEOUS tiger maple frames and I do wish he still did; this is the only one I have. I worked this sampler while the divorce and custody battle was raging and I marvel that I could work the thing with no magnifiers on back then (ah, youth LOL that is to say the early 40s), although I could only get good enough light by sitting outside.

Heating Up

Oh My, we're getting some hot weather here in Atlanta...90s. Not nice. Time to rush off and do house-proofing chores, but I wanted to post the nine blocks for Black Bird Lane:


The sashing isn't pure white; it has a stripe in it. Gotta run.

A New Week, A New ...

There are so many quilts in progress here that the solution was obvious: start a new one! These are the first three blocks for Black Bird Lane from The Rabbit Factory:



Now wouldn't you think that there would be lots of fabrics to choose from for this quilt from this lovely fabric collection:



Well, there are some nice ones but not enough for one this scrappy. So I had a ball choosing fabrics Saturday at the LQS. Thanks to Kathy for her great help in choosing fabrics. She is planning to make this quilt herself and had chosen the fabrics for hers and it was all in her head. She showed us the central portion of one of Lori Smith's Christmas applique quilts that she is making, one of those really intricate ones, and it was just gorgeous. Her hand applique stitching is absolutely invisible.

Have some really heavy-duty household work to do these next few weeks, and I really resent having to spend time on keeping the house together rather than quilting but it must be done.