Project Iron Quilter - GVQC Style

Priscilla is working on a new long vest with all these beautiful pieces of fabric.

It was a beautiful day yesterday and a chance to get back together with Priscilla and Marcia to discuss GVQC's planned Iron Quilter competion which will be held at our 2011, 75th Anniversay Quilt Show. Ruth White of the Thomkins County Quilt Guild came up with the initial idea for Iron Quilter and Priscilla was one of the participants at their quilt show last year. The idea was wholeheartedly accepted as a fun thing for our club to do. We are hoping to get up to 20 people to participate and there will be surprises and prizes and a lot of fun. We are sworn to secrecy about the theme of this Challenge -- even torture won't let us reveal this!
Look for our announcements in various quilting magazines!

Marcia is seen here modeling a very unusual garment called a "parea" which has a very unusual construction but is super simple to make and very versatile. Marcia was given this piece of fabric by Genie Barnes who made the trip out to Marcia's so get Priscilla's help in deconstructing one that she had so she could make more. Like the bog coat, it is literally a large rectangle (Marcia says this one is too large for her) with a slit and two seams. The only gotcha is that it requires a light weight fabric that looks the same pretty much on front and back. It was really cool and I may try one out!

I worked some more on my lions while I was there and will try to get them to Staples in the next couple of days to have the sketches blown up to full size.

July RAFA Meeting

On an absolutely gorgeous day, I went inside to meet with the lovely ladies of RAFA! It is always a lively group and today was no exception. There was certainly a wide variety of fiber and surface techniques today! Our salmon hibiscus is blooming like crazy!

A downy woodpecker visits next door.

Val's granddaughters brought their hand dyes for show and tell -- the girls were 10 and 13 and did a lovely job as you can see!

Although Pat is our least likely to use a computer, she and her husband whipped up lots of luscious prints manipulating photos in Photoshop and then printing them on fabric. She had some very cool images!

Mary brought this knitted gnome gifted to her from her sister -- it is knitted and very clever.

This was a felted vessel done over a balloon.

Donna Patrick showed two new scarves today that she had dyed and then nuno felted.

Of course, we had a number of quilts. This was Nancy's interpretation of hosta leaves.

This was a quilt top begun in a Freddy Moran/Gwen Marston class -- really fun!!

Janet Root completed this quilt as a commissioned quilt for a baby boy. It is going on a wall of the new fellow's house so he won't get to use it until he is much older!

These last two pieces were Bolivian appliques that Priscilla picked up at the Smithsonian where there was an exhibition of Bolivian crafts. We are all hoping Priscilla bring some of these back when she travels to Bolivia at some point. She cancelled her last trip because of political problems. These were just beautiful and she hadn't seen these before although they were similar to some she had bought in Peru (that were from Columbia).

Distractions...

I couldn't help taking a pictures of our two trapped kitties making friends with Sammy, our next door neighbor's free roaming cat. George loves being outside in his penned-in area while Cheney would just as soon pass on that luxury!


Well, the week started relatively well with getting the heron all put together. However, life interrupted the advances -- both good things and bad things. Bad thing was a much feared root canal through a tooth with a crown already on it. After having had dear husband and closest friend have disastrous results on a similar dental excursion, I was expecting the worst. Fortunately, it was a piece of cake but it certainly distracted me for the first part of the week and I swear taking the penicillin each day is making me extra tired.


The other distraction was clearly of the good kind!! Thanks to the internet, I found my best friend from high school after not knowing where she was for 35 years! She went and moved -- no wonder I couldn't find her!! We have been catching up via email for the past week and I will be seeing her in December when I visit Florida, where she now lives. I was thrilled to find her. And what is even cooler is that we are meeting at her sister-in-law's house and her SIL is an art quilter -- now how neat is that! It is funny what the two of us remember and what we had forgotten! I might add that we met again through Classmates.com.


Despite all that I tested out a new pattern called Summer Tote by Lazy Girl. I liked the clever top treatment but didn't like the exposed seams on the inside so won't make that one again. I finally finished up two Potato Chip bags (you "can't do just one"). These both used a combination of my salt dyed fabric and commercial batiks. I loved the addition of Indian trinkets recently obtained from Priscilla! These bags are clever, very fast and have lots of pockets and room for some creativity.

I have also culled out another 100 books or so from my library and it hardly looks like there are any missing. Will try to sell them locally before I put them up on Amazon. I have a lot of very nice quilting books that I have purchased over the past 30 years -- far too many in some years!

The Great Blue Heron is Ready to Take Flight...

George just can't help himself. He feels compelled to help me complete everything and today was no exception!

I have been extremely lazy since returning from NC, partly because of a myriad of postponed doctor and dentist appointments which have distracted me.

Two nights ago I decided, enough and have been setting myself modest daily goals again. This always works to get me back on track. The first of these goals was to do the little bit of sewing needed to complete the Great Blue Heron which has been languishing on my design wall for a couple of months.

I literally had lopped off a bunch of background before I left to move his position on the piece. He had called out for some grass and land before I left for NC and I finally complied and did some hand applique to finish him up. I then sewed on his border blocks (aptly named Great Blue Heron).

Now to baste him and start the quilting. He is going to have some thread painting to give him his fancy blowing feathers in front as well as some additional grass I think! He measures about 30 x 48 inches and includes a bunch of my hand dyed fabrics. I am relatively pleased with him although reminded that someone commented on SAQA just a couple of weeks ago that they couldn't bear to see one more Great Blue Heron standing in grass! Oops, guess she won't be pleased! However, I like him and he will love residing at the beach house!

A Visit to a Nature Paradise (For Me)...

Very dear old friends invited us out to their house last night for a barbeque. They live out in the country on a rather large piece of land that has coyotes and beavers in residence (their pond keeps getting larger and larger). Now I have never seen these critters when out there, but can see what they have done! I might add that the chipmunks were amazingly abundant -- more so than I have seen elsewhere.


Of course I forgot my camera as I had wanted to get pictures of their miniature horse and goats while I was there. (The goats have found a new home as the miniature horse was not at all fond of the baby.) He seems to be just as happy by himself spoiled rotten by Nola (you could have eaten off the stall floor, it was so clean). I was really sorry that I forgot my camera when I saw their bird feeders and a virtual bird sanctuary in visiting colorful birds!! I borrowed my friend Peg's camera and did what I could (it was getting late and I was not familiar with her camera).

I took this picture of a male Baltimore oriole through a screen at night so forgive the blurriness! What a stunningly beautiful bird it was. They were there constantly feeding on grape jelly in a feeder!!

There was a hummingbird feeder next to this feeder that constantly had hummingbirds at it. These were right outside the living room window.


This was a rose breasted grosbeak -- you can barely see the bright red patch on his chest. They were there constantly also. I saw nuthatches and chickadees and lots of woodpeckers (I think hairy but could have been yellow bellied sapsuckers). There were also some sparrow like birds I couldn't identify. They also have nesting bluebirds -- the eggs haven't hatched yet.

These next two were really beautiful wildflowers, neither of which I could identify although my friend Peg though the second might be yarrow.

I will be returning to try to get some decent pictures hopefully this week but in the meantime...my dear sister will give me credit for these birds as I did get pictures, albeit not good ones! (Her husband claims that if I don't have a picture, I didn't see it!)

We had a wonderful time and played Mexican Train well into the evening -- late for us oldsters who had an hour drive home as well!

GVQC Raffle Quilt for 2010

This is the Genesee Valley Quilt Club raffle quilt for 2010. The lucky winner will be chosen in 2010. The tickets are $1 each or 6 for $5. It was inspired by a quilt I did a couple of years ago with blocks from a batik exchange. I really like their version!

I went to a birthday party for a friend's grandson over the weekend and was absolutely enthralled with three of the other guests. They were a set of fraternal triplets, children of one of Katy's friends. The only difference I could really see between the three little girls (26 mos old) was the curliness of their hair! One had tight curls, one had more wavy hair and one was right in the middle. They were awfully cute as was the birthday boy!

Saturday, our little book club met (actually we were a VERY little group) and I managed to see this cute little toy sewing machine to add to my collection!! I am running out of room on my shelves so the next house will have to have a larger space allocation!

Well, back to actually getting some sewing done!

Class with Cynthia Corbin

My impetus for going to the NC Quilt Symposium was to get a feel for the kind of quilting I would find down there. I belong to a very active guild and art quilt group here in Rochester and want to make sure I can duplicate the experience down in NC for future reference! A nice treat was that I was able to take another class with Cynthia Corbin who is a tremendous artist and heck of a nice lady besides. She is able to gently move you in new directions without pushing you to do Cynthia Corbin quilts. We did a lot of critiquing in the class, all of it very helpful.

I had a very limited pallette (I had NO space in my car driving down so had to skimp on the fabric). Basically I had two gradations -- one of greys and one of red to brown and several random pieces of hand dyed fabrics in miscellaneous colors (whatever I picked up). So I ended up doing my studies using just shades of grey. This is definitely not my pallette so was very challenging. Add to that, forgetting my cutting mat at my daughter's the first day so I had to hand cut everything..... So I just played with grey studies the first day in very geometric shapes (no curves). They were okay and useful. The second day, not being able to stand not having any curves I took a random piece of cranberry colored fabric and added tree shapes into the greys.

This was the beginning of a piece by Patti. She cut up her image that she first made.

This was a couple of iterations later but still not quite pulled together although she had cut up all her smaller compositions.

This was my very first piece after just slashing lines. The goal was to show contrast between each individual section. Told you I had a limited pallette!

Here I have cut into it three times already and need to do more to break up the large sections.

I then went into the shades of grey trying different combinations hoping to get something I liked! I had redone the original drawing by now so there are more lines as well.

This was another classmates first day's projects. She ended up with a very nice horizontal piece at the end of the second day.

These were the many sketches that classmate Diane accomplished within the first hour! She definitely would be a candidate for Iron Quilter as she was fast and accurate!

Here are most of my trees from the second day. I need to do a couple of more to have them facing in a different direction! I also moved from a horizontal to a vertical format. In the first one in the upper right I used a template I had created separately from the piece. It didn't work well. The rest I just cut into and was influenced by the lines already there so that was definitely a better direction.

This was another student's piece cut apart and reordered with the addition of the purple. It was interesting to watch her progress as she tested fabric after fabric for where the purple is. The purple was by far the most successful!

This was another student's first piece (upper right) and then the modified piece below which she then used different fabrics to produce the four square quilt. Lovely luscious browns.

It was interesting to follow Lise's work as well. She felt she had created a boat in her first piece so she split it up and used very dramatic fabrics which worked very well.

This was Patti's final piece pulled together with the black and white with circles fabric.