Assorted quilty news

This is another little quilt for LaVerna.

My quilt Tree of Life - With Bugs came home from Quilt Odyssey yesterday with a third place ribbon on it.  They are slow to post the results so I didn't realize I had won anything until I unpacked the box. That was a nice surprise!

Wichita quilters had good news yesterday, MQS will be held here in 2013-15!

A beautiful quilt made from silk ties

I love this quilt that Renee made from red silk ties - unfortunately she wants it back!  I used Superior Bottom Line thread which usually gives me no problems.  Arabella (my longarm) did not like the combination of Bottom Line and the fusible web used behind the silk ties. I had to go v-e-r-y slowly for her sake. She is not usually so tempermental.

The hot weather continues.  The weird thing is that you kind of get used to it after a while - it is supposed to actually dip down into the 80's for the next few days so I will probably freeze.

This is a picture from our quilt show last month that I forgot to post.  These are my friends Lynn and Connie at the awards ceremony - they swear they did not plan this!

Christmas in July

I tried to think of nice cool Christmas-y temperatures as I quilted this for LaVerna.  She does beautiful embroidery and will sew beads on now that it is quilted. I look forward to seeing it all finished!

Why should I expect July in Kansas to be anything else but hot?  And it is - HOT!  100 degrees and humid, it's another day to hibernate indoors in the air conditioning.  I sneak outside only in the early morning when it is a mere 80 degrees or so to water and check for tomatoes. The basil is happy but the tomatoes are waiting for cooler temperatures to set more fruit. We had our first BLT of the summer a few weeks ago - YUM!

Hot and quilty

I finished up a small (33 x 33 inches) quilt for Marsha the Thimbleberries lady. She fooled me this time and used Kansas Troubles fabrics and a Miss Rosie pattern.

My guild, Prairie Quilt Guild in Wichita met this week.  Our speaker was Pam Bono and she brought lots of quilts to share.  Sometimes pattern designers bring quilts that look like they were quilted as quickly as possible but the quilting on her quilts was spectacular, done by longarm quilter Mary Nordeng.  I chose the pictures that showed her quilting the best (and feature also the back of some heads!)

It's hot hot hot here - combined with the humidity it definitely feels like summer.  How on earth did the early pioneers manage, wearing long sleeves, long skirts and lots of undergarments?  I bet they were pretty fragrant! 

A quilt with a good story

Here are two more quilts from our Common Threads Quilt Show from two weeks ago. Nancy Staton won a blue ribbon for this wonderful quilt.  I knew she had entered it in the Hoffman Challenge and wanted her permission before I posted.  It is three dimensional and it is VERY hard to resist squeezing the caterpillar!

I had to find out who had made this quilt before I posted it - I knew it was quilted (beautifully!) by my friend Siriporn and she told me the quilt was made by Barbara Moore.

Now for a quilt with a wonderful story.  Cathy, Leslie and Jozelle went to England last year and had a four hour layover in Chicago.  While waiting they met a nice little English lady and chatted with her.  It turns out that in addition to being a nice little English lady she is also a baroness and member of the House of Lords!  She offered to give them a special tour of the Houses of Parliament while they were in London.  They ended up getting a full tour including a seeing a chapel with a spectacular tiled floor.  While everyone else stared at the impressive walls and altar, the three quilters were fascinated by the floor!

They came home determined to make a quilt based on that design.  I quilted it for them last week and now they will be returning to London later this month and plan to present the quilt to that "nice little English lady".  The design made a wonderful quilt - such a strong, graphic design.

I received good news in the mail recently - my little Sugar Plum miniature quilt was accepted into Houston!

Balloons and mosquitoes

 

I quilted this pretty French Braid quilt for Judy last week.  Peter loves this pattern (Judy was lucky to get her quilt back!) but it's one I will never make - too much piecing.  Sorry Peter!  The colors are even yummier in person.

After all the rain last week, the yard is still damp and, as I discovered yesterday, full of mosquitoes!  I sprayed my arms, legs, neck and other parts of me that I could reach with insect repellent, but I the mosquitoes discovered a large part of me that I missed - my butt!  I guess I presented a target too good to miss when I leaned over to pull weeds, so this morning I have about a dozen mosquito bites on my butt!  Don't worry, there are no pictures to document this.

Instead, here is one of our still-surviving balloons from the quilt show over two weeks ago!  We released one and let it go feral, one shriveled up and died and two are still bobbing around the ceiling of the studio.  This little guy is still  hanging around but has definitely lost his oomph.  We have decided a bouquet of balloons beats a bouquet of flowers any day!

A soggy 4th

Here is a quilt I just finished for Joy- she is making quilts for each of her 14 grandchildren and I think she said she bought the embroidered blocks at a garage sale.  The backing is hot pink also!

We had a very wet 4th of July with 7 inches of rain - it was coming down at a rate of 2 inches per hour for a while.  I looked out at the backyard and it had 2 inches of standing water everywhere: the lawn, the roses, my poor tomato!  Luckily it had been dry for a while before that storm so by the next day the water had soaked in. There was flooding locally with roads closed and fields flooded like this one - it had just been planted.  Our phone also went out and we couldn't get it fixed until a few days later because of the holiday, so it was an eventful day.

After the quilt show we brought home a "bouquet" of balloons that were used as decoration.  We have had fun with them - first we released them in the studio where they have been bobbing around in the drafts from the ceiling fans.  I drew faces on them all to give them some personality and Peter posed in an imitation of The Scream.

Quilts and apricots

Here are a few more quilts from the show.  The quilt above is from an Elsie Campbell pattern made by Karen Tombough - it's really eyecatching!

I love the red background Mayleen Vinson used on this quilt made from fabric selvedges.

Karen Morrison made an interesting pieced border for this quilt.

Tammy Gross won Best in Category for this quilt made from a pattern in McCall's Quilting. It has a lot of special handwork that took a long time to do.

Lynn Sandoval's quilt is the first one below and I consider it sort of my step-quilt,or maybe my grand-quilt.  She used as inspiration the article in Quilters Newsletter from several years ago about how I made my quilt (below Lynn's quilt), It's Turtles all the Way Down.  Lynn says she had everyone in her family design a different turtle shell.  I like it!

The other day I went apricot-picking at a local orchard with my friend Betty.  We went early in the morning while it was still cool. If I had to pick apricots all day long it would be work, but walking along the trees (which were loaded with fruit) and picking a few buckets full with the birds singing was just about perfect.

 Today I will make freezer jam with my bucket full.