Rocks in My Head

Making some progress on the lake quilt, although for anyone but me, it may be hard to tell.

Quilting the rocks in the foreground turned into a major undertaking after I decided they needed more delineation. I don't even want to guess how much time was spent just sitting and staring at the quilt, trying to figure out where the rock formation lines (the free-motion, satin-stitched ones) should be. And the longer I stared, the more the formations shifted in my perception, making it almost impossible to settle on definite stitching lines. I wanted to throw my hands up in the air and jump into this darned lake! Even after stitching, some of the lines had to be ripped out and repositioned because they didn't look as natural as I'd imagined they would. The good news is, if you're going to rip stitches, satin stitch, even a free-motion one, is about as easy as it gets.

Here is a closeup of the area I finished this morning. (The poor turtles are still waiting to be quilted. Let's hope they can keep their paint on through all the handling. So far, so good.)

At times during these last two weeks, a break was much needed, so I finished the baby afghan I'd started in Wyoming.

 

 



But the baby (my great-niece, Chloe) is not going to get this, after all. Why? Because in my determination to make the afghan soft and cuddly, I kept my tension deliberately loose, and by the time the last row was hooked, my tension had become so loose that the end of the afghan was nearly a foot wider than my beginning chain--even though my beginning chain was made with a hook 2 sizes larger to ensure against that possibility. Now, I'm no novice at crochet, so I know better than to pull a stunt like this! Instead of trusting myself to keep an unnatural tension consistent throughout, I should simply have used a larger hook for the whole afghan and worked with my normal tension. Duh. Apparently I still had rocks in my head!

Wednesday was better because the UPS man brought me these beautiful batiks (isn't he nice?):

And because I found this little treasure at JoAnn Fabrics (speaking of yarn):

 

OH.  YEAH. 

 

Yesterday was good, but not because of quilting. Took the day off and went to the Frazier History Museum here in Louisville with my good buddy Connie. We had a wonderful time, and we learned how to sword fight. NOT. But the demonstration was really cool.

 

Closing here with a photo I took today of Zoe--a different kind of tortoiseshell than what you see in the lake quilt above (actually, those aren't tortoises, but I needed a segue here). Zoe is our (mostly) Norwegian Forest cat. Napping away, she was oblivious to the fact that the prism in the window had cast this intensely colored light right across her tail. Awake, this would have perturbed her at the very least; asleep, it just made for a cool shot. 



Everyone have a great week. The kids are back in school now (mine are grown and out, so no change here), and I'm guessing a lot of quilters will be going full speed ahead now with projects that may have languished somewhat in the heat and busy-ness of summer vacation. Looking forward to seeing an increasing number of reader hookups at two of my favorite Friday blogs, Leah Day's FMQ Friday and Sarah Craig's Whoop Whoop Fridays. Check out their latest posts and their awesome reader hookups when you have a moment. Enjoy!

Linda

 

Back on Dry Land (mostly)

Finally back in the studio after 9 days in Wyoming and 2 subsequent weeks of catching up on laundry and housework (and playing hooky--oops!). Wyoming was/is beyond beautiful, and there is plenty of landscape quilt inspiration among the 850 (I'm not kidding) photos I took, including this one.

Rafting on the Snake River, Jackson, WY

As mentioned in a previous post, I don't usually travel, so this summer has been a godsend for me as a landscape quilter needing some original, non-local photos. And let's face it, Maine and Wyoming are none too shabby for starters. Here at home, though, the weather for the last few days has been unbelievably beautiful, 70 to 75 degree highs, which has made it almost impossible to stay indoors. So I ran off to the state fair yesterday, and the Big 4 Bridge walk (where you walk or bicycle across the Ohio River from the KY side to the IN side and back) the day before.

Consequently...ok, I'm not finished with the lake quilt, but have certainly made some progress.

The water, grass, and the dogwood branches and blooms are quilted. For the branches I used YLI's variegated poly thread in black, brown and a sort of rust shade--perfect for this woodgrain fabric.

Confession: the branches are not entirely fabric. Those little fine twiggy parts were drawn with a brown Sharpie marker and then thread-painted with the same YLI variegated. This was so easy I couldn't believe I'd never thought to do it that way before!

There have been a few hours of knot-burying on this project, by the way, so I shouldn't berate myself too much for not being closer to finishing the quilt. The dogwood blooms, for example: they are so spaced apart that I had to stop and start with each little group of flowers. I ended up burying about 30 knots just for them alone. (That's because I still don't trust the lockstitch on any sewing machine, although I use it for the initial tackdown of all raw-edge applique on the quilt-top itself.)

In the meantime, my glaringly blank design wall was beginning to bug me...plus, I'd been wanting to make use of these quirky palm trees I fused together several months ago during a 'playtime' session.

 

I've let this 'audition' sit for about 4 days now, and something tells me that some of these fabrics don't really want to be together. Maybe the water fabric needs to be different, or maybe it's the beach. Overall, this is just not grabbing me like I wanted it to. I'll play around with it some more, though.

 

Let's go see what some other folks are up to over at two of my favorite quilting blogs, Leah Day's FMQ Friday and Sarah Craig's Whoop Whoop Friday. Be sure to check out the reader hookups at the end of each of their blogs. Always inspiring, always fun!

 

Getting ready to help my son and his wife move in to their first house this weekend! Hope your weekend is filled with family and fun, too!

 

Linda

 

 

 



Water, Water, Everywhere

Didn't think I would get to post this week, but found some time today to say there has been some progress on the lake quilt. The progress is hard to see in this photo, because all I've worked on is the water...and there's a whole lot of it.

The water in the upper half of the quilt (where you don't see pins anymore) has been free-motion quilted. Kind of hard to see here, but that's ok, because I want the water fabric to speak for itself.

That said, I had a heck of a time choosing the threads for it. I started out with this conglomeration:

But trying to figure out, much less mark, where all of the sections of these colors would meet up or overlap, just drove me crazy. And then I remembered all the gorgeous, variegated thread my friend Janet gave me for Christmas (in a beautiful fabric basket she'd made). Tada.....!!!


(Bad) early photo of lake quilt inside transparent vinyl, marked 'light' and 'dark' with dry-erase markers.

These spools are 'Rainbows' by Superior Threads. Oh. My. Gosh. The way they stitch out (sorry, I'm a novice with them, so excuse my enthusiasm)...incredibly beautiful. This photo doesn't really do them justice.

What it does show clearly, along with the photo below, is something I hadn't encountered with any other landscape quilt. This one is larger than any others I've made, so the scale of the quilting needed to be larger, meaning keeping the stitching lines further apart, as well (or so I was thinking). Also, the background (water) fabric is not stabilized and is of course the first layer of fabric atop the batting. So, long story short...I wasn't prepared for the soft puckering that occurred between the lines of stitching.

The reassuring thing is, after the rest of the elements--rocks, turtles, grass, etc.--are quilted, there will be the option of adding more stitching to the water. That should diminish, if not eliminate, the puckering (and some people don't really mind puckering--it's just not something I'm used to with all of my previous, denser quilting using polyester batting). Even so, one thing to keep in mind is that the density of the overall quilting needs to be fairly consistent. Otherwise the quilt can end up with some narrow sections and some wide sections---and by the time you square all of that up, your landscape may look totally out of proportion! Not good.

At any rate, quilting is coming to a halt here for a couple of weeks. The next two days will be spent doing laundry and packing, and Monday I'll head out with my son and daughter-in-law to visit her family in Jackson, Wyoming--a part of the country I've never seen. Yesterday a friend said to me, "Oh Linda, you won't believe how beautiful it is there," so I'm more excited than ever about taking my camera for new landscape quilt inspiration. Whoop whoop!

Taken this week at the house of a family friend in WY

Everyone have a wonderful weekend, and try to stay cool. It was ninety-five degrees yesterday here in Kentucky. Wyoming should be a bit cooler, but with the weird weather everywhere these days, who knows? Crossing my fingers, as hiking and rafting--more water!!--are on the schedule. Whoop whoop again! :) And that's my segue over to Whoop Whoop Friday. I love what Sarah is doing for her granddaughters for Christmas. Check out her reader hookups, too. Also hooking up with Leah Day's FMQ Friday. She's hitting the road, same as I am, but her trip is definitely quilt related. Check it out, along with her reader hookups.

See you in a couple of weeks!

Mainely Quilting

Back from the wonderland that is Maine, I've pin-basted the lake quilt (how appropriate is that--lakes and Maine?) and it's ready to go on the machine.

Other than for the lake itself, I have no idea what threads will be used for all of this free-motion quilting. The water will be stitched with three shades of green. Those periwinkle flowers in the tall grass could be a bit of a bug-a-boo because of their small size, but something will occur to me (I hope). The rocks might be a lot of work but will also be fun once I figure out what color of thread(s) to use. The turtles, geese, dogwood blooms and lily pads will be the last to stitch so that they can appear as dimensional as possible. The fabric on the edge is just a temporary extension of the backing, not a border or a binding. It serves to cover the batting, which also extends beyond the quilt-top edges and tends otherwise to get caught under the machine needle.

And speaking of Maine...forgive me for posting a couple of photos, but I don't get out a lot. Nature scenes are a big deal when you're a landscape quilter, and Maine is a world away from Kentucky.

This is on the way out from Portland to Great Diamond Island, for my niece's wedding rehearsal dinner. The weather was great, so I was able to get some wonderful shots for quilt inspiration.

Then there was the day-after brunch at my sister-in-law's home. I pretty much want to live in a tent in her back yard...

...but as you can see from the first photo on this blog entry, I did come home.

I can't sign off here without sharing this next little gem. I had taken a few ratty white washcloths on the trip to wipe makeup (which I wear seldom and very little of) off my face after the rehearsal dinner, wedding and reception. But as ratty as they were, housekeeping kept taking them away with the nice hotel washcloths, so when my husband and I went to the grocery today we bought some more.

After I took them off the grocery shelf and tossed them in the cart, my husband, a punmaster from way back when, picked them up, pointed at the brand name on the package and said, "Couldn't be more appropriate, since they're replacing the ones that stayed in Maine."

Gotta admit, that was a good one.

Hooking up with Sarah over at her Whoop Whoop Friday link (since I'm definitely whooping about getting the lake quilt on the machine). She just happens to be showing some other folks' work, which I missed seeing last week. There are also plenty of reader blog hookups to check out at the bottom of her post. Also hooking up with Leah Day at FMQ Friday--she's dyeing fabric, something I want to do eventually.

Hope everyone has a great week. Don't know if I'll get to post again before heading out to Jackson, Wyoming on the 22nd with my son and daughter-in-law (it was no joke when I said I don't get out much--this summer is the exception). Looking forward to visiting with my daughter-in-law's family, rafting on the Snake River and hiking in the Grand Tetons with them, and bringing back even more photos for quilt inspiration. Yeah!!!!

Stay cool, everyone!