Moda Bread 'n' Butter on Sale

If you love the jelly roll in my Dresden quilt, you might want to know that Eleanor Burns' Quilt In A Day has it on sale today for $19.97.

In addition to this jelly roll, I used four strips of other fabrics, less than 1/4 yard for the yellow centers, several yards of white, fabric for a first border, and have ordered three yards from this line for a larger outer border.

I have no financial interest in Quilt In A Day, although I do make purchases there.

Happy Quiltmaking--especially if you are about to get socked in by winter weather!

ABQ Quilt, Craft, & Sewing Festival

As I mentioned in a previous post, from May 22-24, Albuquerque was blessed by a Quilt, Craft, & Sewing Festival. Even the  times I've gone to really big, national shows, I've come away with negligible purchases, so I'd like to encourage people to attend this show if it's within driving difference.  Their next show will be in Castle Rock, CO July 10-11, 2014, and the vendors do vary with the event. (One of my friends lives near their Puyallup show, and I've wanted to attend for a long time.)

Here are some photos of what followed me home:

Sweet Teen was shocked because she knows I love choosing fabrics for quilts, but I loved these and thought they would make a very cheery prayer quilt without my having to dig around in my stash.  (Karen does not have an online store; she just enjoys gathering fabrics and marketing at shows--and getting to travel to them.)

These batiks are from Rabbit Hole Quilt Shop from Chico, CA.  I dyed one almost like the pink a few years ago when I was still dyeing fabrics every few months.  I do not know if I'll manage to find any time to dye this summer.

These are from Desert Stitchin; Chris and John are from Goodyear, AZ and vend at shows in the Southwest. I purchased these for a "watery" baby quilt for one of my colleagues. The Bali charm pack at the bottom is the door prize I won from their shop at the show.  That has never happened to me before!  Well, at least not since I won my Charlotte doll at Mrs. Beatty's gift shop on December 18--somewhere around 60 years ago.  I guess this could mean that if I live another 60 years, I might win again? I was pretty amazed when my name was called.

I was near the Busy Bee booth when my name was called.  One of the owners exclaimed, "Dora Scheer?  And I don't hear any clapping or cheering?  We'll cheer for you!"

These are for a three year old girl who loves pink and purple and needs a quilt because she's soon going to be a big sister, so I've been pulling pink and purple batiks from my stash. Actually, I picked these up at the shop, not at the show.  The show gave the owners a chance to discover that a lot of people in our area didn't yet realize their shop was nearby.  It's a great little shop with the best service I've experienced in my 40+ years of quilt shops.  They have many ongoing block of the month quilts from some of the best designers.  I most often pop into their shop for a few fat quarters or for yardage to make a special prayer quilt.  The owners and their employees are unfailingly helpful and friendly.

As much as I love the fabrics, these are my favorite purchases from the show.  The stylus is also a set of screw drivers perfect for my sewing machines, and the other is a seam ripper (a belated Mother's Day gift from Sweet Teen).  Sweet Teen had a lovely conversation about engineering with the engineer who was acting as cashier.  Lumenaris also sells 100% wool felt.

Hopefully, this show will return to Albuquerque next year.  It would be lovely if they could piggyback onto the Albuquerque Fiber Arts Fiesta.

Happy quiltmaking...and knitting....

Collection Complete?....Perhaps not...

 Several years ago, we began collecting polka dots and stripes for a quilt for Sweet Teen.
I'm not sure we're done collecting yet; it's certainly possible a few more could be added.

Along the way we did expand the collection to include a plaid and some checks.  And we had to include the fat quarters that didn't make it into her music quilt. In fact, I think she started collecting these before the music quilt was finished.

Update:  Within hours of this post, we'd added three more fabrics.  At this rate, piecing a backing from leftovers should be very do-able.

With her going off to the university in a few weeks, I need to get going on this.  Since she's running off to one of New Mexico's lakes with her boyfriend's family later today, I hope to get some cutting and piecing accomplished.

Weather report:  Over the course of three days we received 2/10 of an inch of rain.  Very, very welcome--and most of us are hoping for more.  One of my [now somewhat envied] friends said it rained for over an hour at her house (about ten miles from mine).
Normally we have hours of fireworks in our town; we have a couple of fireworks factories.  This year the city has said they will strictly enforce fireworks bans.  We'll see.  I may still need to fall asleep with ear plugs this evening.


Happy quiltmaking,...

What's Finished, Today, For Future

 This post features two of the prayer quilts I finished this week (quilt dedication this coming Sunday).  This is the star quilt I picked up from Judy after Sweet Teen's recital.

 I quilted feathery almost-hearts in each of the star points.

 each a different color...and feathery sprigs in the center.

 but the most fun was getting to quilt feathers in all that green space.

 Judy also entrusted her kitty-quilt to me.  Ten different cat fabrics (eleven counting the binding).

 I quilted each set of four blocks differently.

 Judy's cat died a few months ago, and she told me she thinks she'll be ready to get a new cat by July.  I'm wondering if making the cat quilt helped.

Today [since Sweet Teen is at a four-day singing workshop at NM Tech] a friend and I took off for Santa Fe.  Frankly, the reason the pictures of those two quilts weren't so great was that I forgot to photograph them earlier and was hurriedly doing so in bright morning sun, albeit filtered through forest fire smoke.

We also made a stop at Santa Fe Quilting, where I picked up these ducks for a man-quilt.

 I am so drawn toward flowerdee fabrics that I don't make as many quilts for men as I should.  I'm looking forward to putting these geese with some more blue fabrics.

 Sweet Teen has been after me for several years to buy fabrics with food because, she insists, men always respond to food!  I think all these fat quarters are by Timeless Treasures.

 I had searched unsuccessfully both land-based and cyber-based shops for lime green batiks with paisleys--and now I can add this to the quilt for baby Paisley.

The avowed purpose of our trip to Santa Fe was to see the Amish quilts in the Neutrogena wing of the Museum of American Folk Art.  My souvenir of this trip is Rachel and Kenneth Pellman/s 1990-98 book A Treasury of Amish Quilts.  I purchased their earlier book (the one with the fuchsia cover) when I lived in TN, but this one wasn't published until after I moved to NM, and I'd never seen it before.  It's not all that different from their earlier book; it's just full of more quilts to drool over.

Amish quilts inspired quite a few of the quilts and wallhangings I made in earlier years [decades, actually] when I was doing a lot of hand piecing and all my quilting was by hand.  I'm not sure if I've seen an Amish quilt out here in the Southwest, but I continue to love them.  In fact, I have an Amish inspired quilt from the 1980's that I'm hoping to finish this summer.

I encourage anyone travelling I-40 through New Mexico to take a little detour to Santa Fe to see this fantastic collection of quilts.  It's not a large show, but the quilts in the show (excepting a couple) are incredibly fine examples in design and workmanship--with the kind of quilting that inspired me to be a better handquilter early in my quilting life.

We're still having forest fires and smoke out here--but not the devastation causing so many evacuations in CO although we've lost thousands of acres [many square miles] of forests.  The winds have been rough but we haven't had a repeat of the 58 mph winds that hit our little town on Monday.

Happy quiltmaking...

What Was On the Bed

Time for a different quilt on the bed, so before I removed it, I took a couple pictures.....

This quilt was published (minus the borders) in a Better Homes & Gardens craft magazine of some kind in the late 70's.  Quite possibly it was one of their issues of gifts to make for Christmas.  At the time, I was teaching in an inner city school in Peoria, Illinois and having to search diligently to find fabrics that were 100% cotton.

This quilt was completely hand pieced (the old fashioned way) from 60-degree diamonds with two-inch sides. I don't think I had any knowledge of English paper piecing at the time. And, let's face it, traditional piecing was much easier for diamonds this size.

Within a couple of years I had moved to Tennessee, and while I had the templates [made from Shrinky Dink plastic], patches and some fabrics close to me, the pattern/magazine was hidden in a box somewhere.  I remember going to the library at Lee College and looking the magazine up on microfiche to see how the quilt was bordered. It turned out none of the photos showed the borders; neither were they included in the instructions.

I decided this would be my "millennium quilt,"  meaning I'd be happy to finish it by the year 2000.  When sometime in the 1980's, a group of us had founded the Cherokee Blossom Quilt Guild and affiliated ourselves with the Tennessee Valley Quilt Association, the state organization brought Ginny Beyer to Knoxville to conduct a series of workshops.  She invited us to bring quilts for which we needed borders.  Another Cherokee Blossom member and I were lucky enough to attend her workshop.

She helped me come up with a way to finish the edge of the layout with half-stars and helped me design the border that contains the triangles.  I remember working to piece this border section onto the quilt when I was sitting in the Albuquerque airport waiting for a friend to get off work when I came to interview for jobs in New Mexico.

 I quilted it on my hand quilting frame sitting in front of a bay window in the house we rented in Gallup and was quite happy when I finished it twelve years early!

Many of these fabrics were gathered from a wide variety of merchants, including Calfee's Grocery on Spring Place Road on the south side of Cleveland, TN, which had a fairly large fabric department because Mrs. Calfee liked to sew and make quilts.  (At least, that's what I was told.)  So much of the fabric has faded because the fabric companies saw no need for more than a few hours of light-fastness.  Obviously, they were clueless about how many yards of fabric could be sold to quiltmakers for stash enhancement.

I also taught classes at Chandler Fabrics, and remember when Bill Chandler came back from a large industry show remarking how so many fabric merchants were all doom and gloom and that the only happy people there were the people who owned quilt shops.  Compared to the huge numbers of fabric lines today, we were in a fabric desert back then!

Lots of memories in this quilt.

Happy quiltmaking.....

Robin's Song, Fabric Stacks, & Quilting Progress

"At long last," as my grandma and mom would say, Robin's Nest is on its way to the newest member of the family.

If you missed the story of Robin's Song, you can read about it here, here, here, and here.

Here's a glimpse of the border that I posted about here. (I wonder if I'll get an updated picture of the baby with her quilt.)

 I've absolutely had to fill in my stash.  I needed a border fabric for some fat quarters 

and several low volume fabrics,

 and then I ran across some low volume blues that I've needed to accompany the teacup fabric I purchased several years ago that has been languishing on my shelf for lack of accompaniment.

I do hope I have several decades left in which to continue quilting--because I'd hate to see my carefully acquired fabrics end up at a thrift store!  (I do promise not to bury them in the back yard to save my family the embarrassment of acknowledging their existence and then getting rid of them.)

While I'm waiting for more Gold Glide Thread, I'm putting in some time on the Flowerdee quilt.  (Yes, I know I need to come up with a better name.)

 I'm seldom certain how I will quilt something until the quilt is on my machine and starts talking to me.  I love that Shelli put this delicate solid plain pink in the quilt.  It really lets the quilting help it sing.

 I came up with some quick-flowing ribbons for the black, and a simple design that works well in the flowered squares, but it doesn't show up well when photographed.
Yes, I am quilting it on my treadled Necchi BU--although I'm pretty sure I need to use my Singer 15-88 treadle to quilt something really soon, because it's getting lonely.

I do love quilts with great floral fabrics although it becomes a challenge to find the right quilting pattern since the stitches won't show up well anyway.  I'm sure this quilt is going to warm someone's cold winter.

I'm linking to Connie Kresin's Freemotion by the River and Fabric Tuesday at Quilt Story so you can take a look at the endeavors of other quilt makers.


Happy quiltmaking......

Blessings, Busy Bee, I-40

We have had no rain for weeks--unless you want to count the few mud drops that fall from the sky as clouds pass over. For the last few days, while showers were falling over other areas, I've been able to count the raindrops that visited us.

 Today we had real rain.  The storm lasted for over an hour--I'm guessing we may have gotten an inch, or two, at the most. (Our little airport is reporting 0" thus far.) And, yes, I remember that about this time last year we were in East Tennessee and experienced 10-15 inches in about an hour and half.

We still have flash flood warnings out across the state and are concerned for erosion of the scars from forest fires.
For a while today it came down so hard that the buildings across the field weren't visible.
I occupied myself quilting on the treadle near my north window--reminding myself that if I owned one of those expensive computerized machines and/or a long arm, I would have had to unplug them and would have been just spinning my wheels.

 After the rain:  puddles!

 And more puddles! Glad the rain happened today instead of last night during our town's one-hour-plus fireworks display (that was close enough that I watched it from my driveway).

On the way home from therapy, I stopped in Edgewood to help Busy Bee Quilt Shop celebrate their fourth birthday.  For those traveling I-40 through New Mexico, Edgewood is slightly less than thirty miles east of Albuquerque.  There is only one Edgewood exit, and those who drive between two and three miles north will find the little strip center with Busy Bee Quilts.

Busy Bee is owned by a very nice couple who truly understand the  meaning of hospitality and dish it out liberally.  (I did turn down the offer of cake today.) I really don't have a solid plan for these fabrics yet, since a lot of ideas have been floating around in my head for weeks. While I love the idea of charm packs, layer cakes, stacks of fat quarters, jelly rolls, etc., I do love choosing fabrics from across several lines from several manufacturers.

I came home with this quilt inspiration, including the pale teal in the background. I also won a free fat quarter (I was one of three customers in the shop at 2:00; others, kept away by the thunderstorm, I'm sure.)  I think the last time I won something in a store was when I was seven and won my Charlotte doll a week before Christmas in Mrs. Beatty's Gift Shop in El Paso, Illinois!

I also picked up these interesting dots to add to the collection for Sweet Teen's polka dots and stripes quilt.  I really need to work on that design instead of buying more dots!

I was grateful to have only one therapy today, although it was vestibular therapy and was pretty tough to get through (as are the home exercises, for that matter).  Tomorrow includes two appointments and Sweet Teen's return from her mission trip--so I'm hopeful that I'll be able to fit in some visits at thrift stores because I'd like to find a couple more white 100% cotton sheets for a window project.

I did manage to quilt two colliding feathers onto Brent's quilt--so I'm really just at the beginning of that project still!  I'll console myself with the fact that during some of my waiting time I was able to work on tatted lace.

Happy quiltmaking.....