Dualing Blogs!!

Well, maybe I will be the first one to get some pictures out from our day at Marcia's. The dualing blogs refers to the fact that Priscilla Kibbee (Priscilla.kibbee) and Marcia (DeCampStudio) both have blogger blogs as well as me and we are always putting up similar pictures from our days working together.



It was a great day. Marcia is on the home stretch with her jacket (and we nagged her that she HAS to have it done by the next time we see her in a couple of weeks). It is down to her much disliked hand stitching (a lot of whining there).

Priscilla is at the very beginning of an ice cream treat jacket that has a mola on the back with a pelican giving an ice cream cone out. I didn't get a picture of that so hopefully Priscilla will have one on her blog.



This is the Yellowstone 2 piece totally quilted and bound. Photographing it in Marcia's studio shows up the stitching nicely. Double click on the picture and you can see the stitching closer.

I did take my Yellowstone 2 piece out for show and tell as Marcia hadn't seen it finished and I did start it in her very studio last fall. I primarily worked on the slash and burn project which is very different from the original concept.



These are the first pieces. I have since moved all the light green pieces up to the upper left hand corner. I am envisioning some sort of abstract flower images in the lower right. It is at the point of deciding what it want's to do and I just follow along guessing at the direction it is taking.


The best part of the day was Marcia's "show and tell" of her two weeks at Nancy Crow's barn. You MUST see her blog(http://www.decampstudio.blogspot.com) to see some of the pieces she has been working on. She shared her progress plus personal pictures of some of the class pieces (which she can't show in her blog). It was just great!

Remind Me Never to Complain about Rochester Weather Again!

Another beautiful day but it never gets boring!






Well, after much struggling, I decided that I had to hand quilt my 30's "extreme" sampler, so I began last night. Because of rotator cuff problems the last time I did a massive quilting effort, I am taking Jane Townswick's advice and using very short threads and additionally I am propping up my quilting arm and using forceps to pull the needle through the tough areas. I may regret this as there are soooo many pieces and the quilting will be in the ditch for the most part! I just couldn't bring myself to machine quilt it even though it would be a lot faster. It just didn't feel like the right thing to do with this quilt. Now to just figure out how to get the sashing quilted in equal distances without pencil lines.....masking tape just doesn't seem to be doing it!




Well, due to my schizophrenic nature, I am also working on finally finishing the piece I started in the Pat Pauly Slash and Burn workshop from a zillion years ago. Of course, it is taking a very different course than originally. It all looked like background to me and I have already slashed from what I had. I have gathered a grouping of fabrics that I think will form the nucleus of the new piece which will be a bit representational (as usual) but pretty abstract (I am thinking, but who knows what the fabrics will tell me to do once I start reassembling).

This is the biggest piece I had done. I have actually already cut that into about 4 pieces as I didn't like the big blocks of the light color -- just wanted them smaller.
This is the pile of fabrics that I took from my stash to "enhance" the idea. The oranges will be my foreground somehow.



Weight Watchers is going very well. I went to Applebees for my favorite meal for which I had budgeted quite a few "points" (Sante Fe Chicken Salad). Upon getting there, I looked at the WW's menu and discovered a dish with lo fat cheese and no fat salad dressing. So I got them to substitute those in my regular salad (which was not on the WW menu) and reduced 5 points out of the meal (for anyone who has done WW, you know this is a huge reduction!). I was very happy to say the least as it tasted just the same to me!!



Weight Watchers is MUCH easier than it was 20 years ago when I last went. Besides the program being more of a learning experience, the food that is available now with the new health consciousness is fantastic!! It has taken some concentration to shop with my little points converter but as I said a "learning experience".


Of course it just wouldn't be my blog without a few flower pictures!!

These are our azaleas which we moved from the shade to the sun last summer and for the first time, we have blazing color!!


These forget-me-nots actually cover our front lawn now and Warren won't mow the knee high grass until they are starting to droop (much to the neighbor's dismay).


These were also "volunteers" like our forget-me-nots. Our neighbor gave us the seeds from many of her columbine last summer. I do love the flower!!

I Finally Finished It!!

Well, the weather has been wonderful again! After spending much of yesterday and today working on quilt club paperwork, I decided it was time to unveil my latest finished project for the year -- the batik "extreme" sampler. The blocks in this quilt were made as part of an online exchange I participated in a number of years ago. It was called a Dear Jane exchange as the blocks were all in a book by Brenda Papadakis called Dear Jane. We were supposed to do all of the blocks but the exchange ended before the blocks did so they were languishing in a box waiting for the rest of the blocks to get done. I declared them done earlier in the spring and sashed them together and then added the Seminole border to jazz it up a bit. I didn't want to spend too much time finishing this one.

It was machine quilted by me on my faithful Bernina 170 by using invisible thread and just free hand stitching in the ditch around each piece. It really only took four or five days to finish. It is about 67 x 85 so should fit nicely on a queen sized bed or smaller. Now to just do something with the remaining 500 blocks made during my Dear Jane OCD period! Double click on the picture to see it larger!

May Genesee Valley Quilt Meeting

Karen K. Stone was our speaker today at quilt club and I can't say enough positive about her as a speaker!! She was fun and funny and I look forward to having an evening with her tonight!! (I actually had the gall to go back to our program person and ask to be reinvited as I had turned her down when she asked a few weeks ago because of being such a new Weight Watcher).

This is a quilt top made from silk tie pieces that Karen accumulated from various thrift shops.



Besides having Karen as our speaker, there were some especially luscious quilts at our show and tell today as well. I have included a couple of those but unfortunately can't give credit to the quilters for all of them as I couldn't read the names on most of them.

This was a particularly beautiful quilt made by Toni Foster and exhibited at Paducah. Toni has an incredible talent for color and design in traditional quilts as well as being one of the finest craftspeople out there!!! What a talent!

This was a quilt using embroidery designs (machine) that was going to be used as a class sample in one of the local fabric shops.
This was a particularly nice applique quilt which a couple of the ladies in the quilt held up for me so I could take a picture!
This was one of my all time favorite "stack and whack" quilts. I have made so many of these myself but though this was an extremely nice one and made me want to do still more!
This was a very nice sampler quilt in some of my favorite colors. I really thought it was a particularly nice one. Again forgive me for not having the quilters' names for all these quilts!


The above are really nice examples of Karen K. Stone's designs. Her color palette is wonderful and the designs are so vibrant. She trained as a musician (piano) and I had really expected a rather conservative and serious person. Boy, was I wrong! She had lots of pets, lots of funny stories and was extremely personable. It was wonderful to spend the evening with her and others from the quilt club at Pat Pauly's wonderful house.




I did go to Weight Watchers for the first time in probably close to 20 years and my how it has changed!! I found I can easily incorporate my own way of living into their way of doing things without feeling deprived at all -- just have to break a couple of bad habits (like having your favorite foods EVERY day!) So I went out to dinner last night and ate just about what I normally would have eaten -- just skipped the rice and ate fewer tortilla chips than I normally would have. I am going out again tonight and taking a nice chicken caesar salad with me and some diet pop! No problem there!!

Beginning of a New Week

Or the end of an old life as I start Weight Watchers for the first time in about 15 years tomorrow night! I am not feeling too confident but will try as I have gotten into some awful habits lately!



Today was another of our beautiful spring days so Warren and I took the opportunity to explore Durand Eastman Park. This park is located right on Lake Ontario and is about 1000 acres and includes many paved and dirt paths to explore. What a treat. One thing about dull old Rochester, when there is color, there is COLOR! This is just a view looking out over Trott Lake one of the two of the larger lakes in the park.

We have been trying to get around and continue the exploring we did in the area two years ago when Warren first retired. Last year we were in Colorado at this time at the beginning of our "great adventure". When it rains, I work furiously on machine quilting the quilts I have lined up. I finished the Yellowstone piece and am now working madly on the batik sampler. I am trying to keep quilting time down to no more than an hour or so at a time. When I did the big sampler quilt, I lost use of one rotator cuff for over a year and I don't want to go through that again!! So far, so good. I am beginning to think it was the hand quilting that did it, like Jane Townswick warned. I am now also more careful with this and keep a shorter thread which is what she advised. The batik quilt will have no hand quilting though -- batik is not fun to quilt through!

Just took a few pictures and put them up on a Picasa album but will share a few here as well.

This is more of the magnolia blossoms. Because Durand Eastman is so close to Lake Ontario which is still very cold, trees bloom about two weeks later than further inland.


This is one of the many turkeys that Warren always sees going to the park. We only saw two but he says that this group of 10 or so seems to be hanging out at this south end of the park -- this time in someone's driveway.
This one of the many white dogwoods in the park
This is one of two sets of nesting pairs of mute swans we saw on our walk. The males are very attentive to the female who is very sleepy in this picture.
This is our one lonely rhododendron that we have in front of the house. It doesn't bloom all that often but we were treated this year.

Thursday at RAFA Meeting

RAFA stands for Rochester Area Fiber Artists. We are a group of about 45 women who meet monthly to share and promote our love of fiber arts - primarily quilting but certainly not limited to quilting as we have wide diversity of interests from doll making and felting and wearable art to knitting and hooking rugs. A number of us are also heavily into surface design techniques of all and any kind!

This is Barb Magin's quilt from Pat Pauly's Slash and Burn class. This was one of my favorites from the class! (I love the colors)
This is Nancy Hicks' quilt from the same class as above. Nice use of neutrals and line.
This is Linda Bachman's which I also liked a lot. Let's face it -- I really liked all that was done in this class -- much better than my previous attempts!!
This is actually a quilt done from a kit that Nancy Hicks purchased. She was happy that she did as the investment for the individual fabrics would have been enormous -- it looked like it was all batiks.

This was an example of faces that Nancy Hicks has done. She taught this class down in the Binghamton area after some people saw her work!



The above chartreuse abstract is another of Janet Root's fantastic pieces.

This is another of Linda Bachman's quilt. This one was from the 4-Patch class that Pat Pauly taught in January. This has certainly changed since the last time I saw it up on the design wall!
This is a kind sized quilt that Sarah Terry did -- quite stunning!

I am only sorry that I didn't get pictures of everyone's pieces but some just didn't hold them up long enough for this aged photographer to get a shot. I especially would have liked pictures of Pat Faulkner's horse and Donna Patrick's beautiful Nuno felted scarves -- I was too busy looking at those to snap a picture!

A Day at Highland Park Before the Lilac Festival

Well, we decided we should get to the park before the Festival begins as we had heard that the lilacs were in bloom. For those who are not familiar with the park, it was designed by Frederick Ohlmstead who was also the designer of Central Park in NYC. It is a wonderful place to walk around on a cool spring day (or most anytime for that matter except when the Lilac Festival is in full swing and it is crowded). Just old and a little cranky about crowds!

The amazing thing was to see magnolias, forsythia and the lilacs all out at the same time. Usually, there is an orderly progression with the forsythia coming out first, then magnolias and then the lilacs a bit later. Because of all the warmth the last couple of weeks, it was a profusion of color with forsythia in the foreground and lilacs in the background.
A beautiful white dogwood in full bloom.
Japanese weeping cherries are one of my favorite spring sights!
This is the path through the brilliantly colored magnolias -- everything from creamy white to dark rich rose color.


This was Mr. Cardinal who was singing his heart out trying to capture a lady friend. He was certainly bright colored and melodic!