I haven’t posted to this blog for quite a while, and I apologize. Part of the reason is that I haven’t been at the sewing machine for several months (except for a workshop by Linda Halpin, and even that I haven’t followed up on). Instead, I’ve been trying to decrease my work area, both office and creative space, by more than half. It’s funny, I thought I did pretty well not accumulating clutter, but it has been an eye-opener to go through every box and every drawer. I keep finding things I didn’t know I had (and they aren’t much use if I don’t know they are there), and things that I wonder why I ever kept. A lot of it is also from previous interests, that I don’t think I’ll pursue any further.

Then when I decide what I don’t need any more, there is the question of what to do with it all. I’m not very good at tossing things that might be useful into the trash (although I could take lessons from Marv) so I try to find ways of blessing others with what I am giving away. I’ve been slowly reducing the number of quilts, donating to the Quilt Museum, my church, the Salvation Army, Habitat for Humanity and other worthy organizations. This last week, I’ve been going through drawers and boxes of notions, threads, lace, etc. About a third of my no-longer-useful-to me stuff will be offered to friends and guild members, a third (not quilt-related) will go into the Salvation Army pile, and a third just gets tossed.

It’s funny, though. I’ve been a member of Flylady.net for probably 10 years, and always thought I didn’t have a problem with clutter, but, by golly, she’s right. It’s way more peaceful with less stuff. It’s just way harder than I thought to get there.

I’m not sure when I’ll find time to post again, so please be patient. Our plan is to finish decluttering and painting in February, spend March in Tucson, then finish up preparing for sale in April and get the house on the market in May. I’ll update our progress whenever I can.

I  promised I would show you how I am quilting Sue’s Legacy quilt. Many years ago, I learned to Big Stitch from Jo Walters, and it has been a favorite technique when I want to have the stitching be a major design element. I use size 8 pearl cotton, and the stitches are about 1/4″ long, with small spaces between them. Both the color of the thread and the weight of the stitching line add another dimension to the quilt top. For this quilt, since the fabrics were so bright, I also chose very bright thread colors. Here is a closeup of the stitching. I really like the the stiches in the orange checkerboard squares, inspired by Ann Johnston.

The back, of course, looks quite different, since the stitches on the front are long. Here is a photo of the back.

I am donating this quilt to our guild as a fundraiser, many of the members remember Sue and might like to have a bit of her work.

I’ve been trying to publish this description of how I made Yum!, but it’s fighting me all the way. I may have to break it up into even more pieces, but this is the continuation of the previous post. The photos seem to want to go with the wrong paragraphs, so you’ll have to figure out where they SHOULD be.

I photographed several baskets I had in the house, one of which I made, and started playing in Photoshop. I was working in CS4, which I hadn’t used much. Oh, look how easy it is to change the color, and to posterize the image!  I got a little carried away, I’m afraid. There wasn’t enough of the challenge fabric to do a practice piece, and the baskets printed darker than I wanted them to. (Since I wanted to use the Cotton Lawn for raw-edge applique of the veggies, I ironed a stabilizer to the back of the baskets so the fabric wouldn’t ravel. It helped a little.)

Photo of one basket

After playing in Photoshop

Then, on my regular visits to the nearby Wheat Ridge farmer’s market, I photographed lots of lovely vegetables to fill the baskets with. Again, I had too much fun playing in Photoshop, posterizing the colors and adding edges. One challenge was sizing the veggies so they looked like the right scale.

Original photo of beets

I had taken several photographs of wheat fields in Wisconsin this summer, thinking to use one as a background for this piece. I used a neat program called Image Tricks to modify the photo for the background, and printed it on four 13×19 EQ regular fabric sheets, then pieced it together.

Original wheat field photo

After playing in Image Tricks

The next step was to play with the arrangement of baskets and vegetables on the background. I soon realized that I needed to have shadows cast by the baskets to add a little “realism” to the images. I tacked the baskets and veggies in place with droplets of Elmer’s Glue, then used Derwent pencils to add the shadows. The next step was to quilt, I used mostly King Tut variegated thread, and outlined the colors on the veggies. I did a sort of “scribble quilting” on the background.

About this time, daughter Shannon Osorio in Ohio sent some photos of the harvest from her garden. They were wonderful, and I decided to include them as mirrored images for the borders. As I was coming near the end, I took a workshop from Susan Cleveland on her marvelous piping technique, adding piping to both edges of the border was the final touch the piece needed. I am really pleased with the result, here is a detail. (Check out the previous post for a photo of the whole quilt.)

Detail of Yum! A Farmer's Market Fantasy

Yum! A Farmer's Market Fantasy

Making a new quilt is kind of like planting a garden for me. I don’t seem to able to plan a quilt out ahead of time. A seed of an idea gets planted in my brain (which may or may not be fertile ground at the time). It has to lie there under the surface for a while, accumulating the energy to sprout and poke its little head into the light of day. A little feeding and watering (or maybe a lot, depending on the challenges), and in due time, I can harvest a finished quilt.

My newest quilt is called Yum! A Farmer’s Market Fantasy, and the seed (idea) was a challenge fabric for Columbine Quilt Guild. It was a tone-on-tone beige fabric, and I wondered what would happen if I printed on it. The theme of the challenge was “Seasons of the Year,” so I thought maybe I could print some baskets on the beige fabric and the texture would show through the baskets. I could fill the baskets with veggies, and do a harvest season theme. More in the next post about how it developed.

Habitat for Humanity is one of my favorite causes. I’ve actually pounded nails and hung drywall in a couple of houses. Now that I’m slowing down a bit, I look for other ways to support them. One regular activity is Pumpkin Patch sales (fortunately, I signed up for yesterday, when it was lovely, and not today, when it was rainy and windy).

When Shelly Burge came to teach at our local guild, her workshop was to be on string piecing, and I had seen her quilts using house blocks. I talked several members of our small church quilting group into taking the workshop and making the house blocks, suggesting that we could make a fund-raising quilt for Habitat. Of course, group quilts are always a challenge, and this one was as well. When we had all the blocks finished, we began to consider how to put them together. Since we had eight of them, I suggested we use them around a central block. One of our group designed a sun-like Mariner’s Compass on the computer to use in the center, and then we decided to make small tree blocks to surround it with. The size of the border was determined by four small log cabins donated by another member.  Of course, then we needed to figure out corner blocks, so it was back to the computer. I volunteered to put all the pieces together, and I’m happy with the result.

I think we are almost done with the top, although it might get another border before a local long-armer quilts it for us. We’ve decided to call it “Home at Last,” because one of the Log Cabins has part of the Habitat logo on the door.

Almost finished Home at Last

As an update to the last blog, my photo organizing project is not going that well. When I upgraded my Mac operating system, the tech set it up so that everything is automatically backed up. Unfortunately, the back-ups have the same names as the original files, and I haven’t figured out how to open the right one, so I’ve lost some photos and some of the organizing I’ve done. I’m hoping I can get the problem solved soon, so I can get back to work on it.

Next blog, I’ll tell you about a really neat new tool we got.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve been putting a lot of photos on my computer in the hope of being able to find ones I want fairly easily. At this point, I’m up to about 16,000 (at least that’s what the computer says, but I have my doubts). I’ve tried several different programs to organize them, and none of them seemed to be very intuitive. When I upgraded my computer operating system last month (I went to Snow Leopard on my Mac), I invested in the latest version of iPhoto and resolved to work with it until I mastered it.

One thing was clear - I have one library with 13,000 photos in it, and that was extremely unwieldy. As I had loaded the photos, off of CDs mostly, I had gone through and put most of them in albums. Unfortunately, not all of them, though. I needed to come up with a new plan, so this is what I’m going to try:

First, I am going to set up five or six libraries; such as Clip Art, Nature, People, Architecture. (You can do that in iPhoto by holding down the Option key when you open the program.) I intend to limit each library to about 5000 images. It’s possible to scan that number fairly quickly, and they can be further sorted into albums for easier retreival.

Second, I will go through and add appropriate keywords to ALL the photos that are currently in the huge library. I will then export them, and import them into the appropriate library. (I’ve tried out this process and it works.)  I’ll let you know (in six months or so) if this process works.

Last fall, on our way home from the Mancuso show in October, we stopped at the Grand Canyon and met two of our daughters and one of the their partners for four days of sightseeing, relaxing and hiking. The original thought was to hike Bright Angel Trail to the bottom, but we couldn’t get a camping permit, which was probably just as well, because we probably would have had difficulty making it all the way. However, we did do a day hike down to the first rest stop and back, and that was great.

Of course, we took lots of photos, except that my battery went out just as we started down the trail, so all the photos I have of below the rim were shared by the kids. I discovered that I was fascinated by the tree skeletons. I was inspired by Charlotte Zeibarth’s book Secrets of Digital Quilting (on our website) and wanted to try some of her techniques, so I decided to do a Grand Canyon quilt with the trees. I found out something very interesting about myself in the process. I can’t work the same way she does. More recently, I read Barbara Olson’s Journey of an Art Quilter (not on our website) where she talks about styles of creating, and now I understand a little more of why I can’t.

Background image

Tree 1

Tree 2

At any rate, I used the three photos above: the rock image as a background and the trees as overlay layers. I played with them in Photoshop as a small image, then printed the entire image in enlarged sections (eight total, quilt measures 48″ x 36″). I continued trying out the bamboo batting (which I decided I love, by the way), and began to quilt.

Holy cow! This quilt demanded a LOT of quilting. I’d guess I quilted about every quarter inch. The trees are just outline quilted, to make them stand out, but the background is fully quilted. I used about 10 colors of thread, some of the variegated, some machine embroidery, and some very fine polyester. It was really a matter of playing, and seeing what worked. I am happy with the final result, though, and it has been accepted into the Trees exhibit at the NQA show this month. (We’ll also have a booth there, more info on the website.)

The finished quilt is pictured below. The next time I post, I’ll tell you how I faced the edge of the quilt and figured out how to deal with the sleeve.

Canyon Sentinels, 48" x 36"