Jo Morton Club #2

Here we are at Jo Morton Club at LQS seeing some wonderful photos of Jo Morton's own quilts taken at Jo's recent appearance at a local quilt guild here in Georgia, with our teacher Kathy Neimann at the computer; she gave us each a CD of the photos. That is Gail at the far right, and two more Little Quilts employees just to the left of Kathy. They had just worked a nine-hour day in the quilt shop, I'm sure everybody else had a busy day too, and I had just finally completed the week and a half of jury duty about two hours earlier; as Kathy said, you have to love quilting to be willing to go to a night class after working all day long.

The trial was a child molestation case; there were two holdouts against conviction and it took us a day and a half of very spirited debate/discussion before getting a verdict. He was sentenced to 15 years, no reduced sentence possible.

Here is my Club quilt so far...applique is not my strong quilty point, so getting this much applique done by hand was a Big Deal for moi :-). The 1" 25-patch blocks will go around the center block.

Weight Watchers: 190.8/166/135 (but haven't lost a pound in TEN DAYS despite being On Points)

Howdy, Getaway, and Jo Morton

A huge thanks to everybody for posting their good wishes re pneumonia; you are all wonderful! Kaiser doctor said it is an infection but not pneumonia so since the trial was destroying the last shreds of my sanity I drove up to Vogel State Park in north Georgia for the week-end. It was fabulous. The fall color was still gorgeous. First sunny and very warm, then on Saturday it got deliciously rainy and overcast (just love stormy weather) and the temperature plummeted. Listened to the wind blowing around the cabin all night. It was 80 degrees in Atlanta Friday afternoon and 37 degrees at the Park on Sunday morning.

There were all kinds of photo ops with the light and then rain dancing on the little lake in front of the cabins.

This is the Park Cat, evidently. He was very friendly and wanted a handout but didn't want the hot dog bit I gave him.

This gourd display was at the entrance to the camp store.





Came home and completed the Challenge top.

Now I need to prepare a bit for the next Jo Morton Club class; here is the layout for the Jo Morton Swap blocks. Oooh I just love all the Jo Morton prints all mixed up like this. I want to get it together to take to the class to show everybody.

Hi there

Haven't posted in a while. My son has had pneumonia, I am now serving on a trial jury, and I think I have pneumonia myself. My last quilting activity was actually very neat, there's just no photo: I met an email friend, who generously showed me her brand-new longarm setup, which as you can imagine, was so much fun. That's it for now, I'm off to bed at only 6pm!!

Two Minutes Before Work

Got up early to work on the border for this Vintage Challenge crib quilt; do you like it?? Can't wait to get home and finish it.

Family Crib Quilts

Oh dear, my camera went dead yesterday at the second session of the Vintage Challenge quilt class so I didn't get photos of the other people's quilts. It was still a planning session though, so they weren't assembled. We are planning to get together in some way in a few weeks to see everybody's finished quilts, so hopefully I can get some photos then. It was a great class and they will offer it again if Alice Berg can be persuaded. We will all take it again if offered, because it will be a different challenge. Great class idea. Alice helped me refine my square on point border and it looks great. Can't wait to get it done and show it to you. Lots of dark colors.

I brought these two antique crib quilts to show since the class inspiration photo was a crib quilt. These are from back in my family and were made in Ohio. One is intact and very lovely, the brown and white one, and you can see that the other is very tattered and was cut down from a larger quilt. But you know whoever kept it did so because they loved the baby or babies that were wrapped up in that quilt.

Vintage Challenge

I've been working on the Vintage Challenge quilt for class. This is the one where we work from the fabrics given to us in class as if we were out in the prairie and we couldn't get any more than what we had, plus we had to decide what to put in the center medallion section. I really wanted to use a vintage block, went through what I had, and nothing was right or else I didn't want to pull a single block out of a set, with the exception of this cute pink basket block that was all by its lonesome. I don't even remember having it. Just have to sew the bottom two rows and I'll either be done or I'll add a square diamond border as in our example. Not sure whether to do that or not. The teacher also gave us some indigo scraps to tempt us to make it super scrappy, and instead of putting them in this one, I would enjoy making a small star quilt with those.

Quilt Classes

What a great day. Took off from work and went to two count 'em TWO quilt classes at the LQS. First one was one I had really been looking forward to: Vintage Quiltmaking Challenge. It was taught by one of the three Little Quilts ladies, Alice Berg. She gave us a delectable stack of pink and brown prints and a mystery scrap bag (!) along with a photo of an inspiration vintage crib quilt. The idea is to create our own version of this little quilt using the fabrics that were given to us, as if we were pioneer ladies out on the prairie and had to make do with what we had. The biggest challenge is to decide what to use for the 12" or 15" center block, whether to make our own patchwork or applique block or use a vintage block that we have around (and I may have one!), or what to do with that central area. What fun! So anyway we started off making our scrappy pink and brown 3" nine patches for now, while lots of little ideas are circulating for that center block. Photo below is where Alice was demonstrating that you can have the simple color range in the left-most strip, or you can add different tones of each color and get the marvelous scrappy range in the next strips; strip at right are fabrics to avoid if you are trying to get an authentic vintage look to your quilts.


Second class was Quiltmaking Study, excellent as always; among other things, we saw this wonderful Sunbonnet Sue. This quilt is in the current issue of American Patchwork & Quilting. The quiltmaker has about 16 of these vintage blocks made by somebody back in her family and this is the first of four quilts she is going to make using the blocks for her nieces, I believe. Isn't this just the cleverest setting for sunbonnet babies? How did she think of this?

Lucy, Your Email

...wouldn't go through. Here's what I said:
You need to make sure you see where the computer is going to save the "Project"; you can navigate to where you want it to be saved. You can just save it to your Desktop for a temporary measure if you like since that way it will be very easy to find. If you save it to your Desktop, you should be able to click on it have it open in EQ5. I think :-).

When you are in the EQ5 program, and open a project, either the project will be listed there, or you need to navigate to it by using the button at the bottom left that on my program says "click here to open a project not listed above" and then you navigate to where you saved the program when you saved it from the email.

Hopefully this will work if you start over with the project sent in this email.....

Be sure to let me know. TTYL! Karen

Sale and Jo Morton Club

Drove south of Atlanta last week-end to see what used to be a great craft show. Discovered it is no longer very good, but when I stopped at a LQS on the way home, it turned out to be all but out of business and I got the above fabrics and book half-price.

Then Tuesday night was the first installment of a Jo Morton Club class. Hooray, Jo Morton Club has finally come to the Atlanta area! Jo had just spoken to a quilt guild the week before as well and the LQS borrowed some quilt samples from Jo so that we could see them. Pictures follow. The first pattern really looks like fun, with an appliqued center block (last photo).

Holiday Market?

Hmm, well I may put some craft items in an upcoming holiday market. This tree ornament is one idea. I digitized the machine embroidery on it to make it look like an antique stocking. Need some tweaking but kinda cute, eh?