Lots of quilts

This is Renee's cute Halloween quilt.  She did a great job on the embroidery and I had fun quilting it.

 

 

I quilted spider webs in the setting triangles:

 

 

 

And pumpkins in the background pebbles.

Lori used some really wonderful African fabric in her quilt.  I didn't want to clutter up the  blocks so mostly followed the lines in the fabric. 

 

 

 

 

 

It's hard to see in the photographs on that dark fabric.

In the border I quilted a zebra skin design.

 

 

Barbara said she had been working a long time on this Piece of Cake design. 

I love all the plaids she used in the applique.

Today I went to Salina for the auction of the estate of a quilt shop owner, Shirley Wolf who owned the Quilting Bee.  She was quite a collector of many things: fabric, quilts, linens, patterns as well as matchbook covers, advertising art and 19th century restaurant china.  I spoke with a woman who used to work at the shop and she told me that Shirley had them cut three yards from new bolts of fabric for her own personal stash.  There was a LOT of
fabric.

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It was sold in stacks about 1 1/2 tall and they mostly sold for $50-60.  A bargain, with fabric selling for $12-13 a yard these days.  I didn't buy anything, amazingly enough.  I can't find the time to use the fabric I do have but there were a lot of other people beefing up their stash! 

I think it is appropriate that my quilt appears during the week of my birthday in the AQS Quilting Arts Calendar. 

In need of sunflowers

Barb is redoing her sewing room with a sunflower theme so brought me five small sunflower quilts to quilt.  She will definitely have the best dressed sewing room around!

 

 

When she brought me the quilts, the pieces had started to fall off two of them - probably from sitting in her car and getting hot.  She took those back to re-iron the pieces back on.  It was hard to get them to stick so I told her to use Elmer's School Gluestick to keep them on long enough for me to quilt down.  I don't think we lost any little pieces!

The fun challenge of quilting fused applique is stitching around all the little pieces.

This has been an unusually cool and damp summer in Wichita this year with lots of rain.  Sedgwick had it's share of flooding and I have had a damp basement to deal with. 

This was taken before the water rose high enough that the road had to be closed.  Usually the water level is far below the bridge, far enough that you can't see it very well as you cross.

This is taken from the other side of the bridge - you can just see the top of a fence in that field. Welcome to Sedgwick!  Bring your boat.

The Magnificent Toby

 

 

 

Cheryl requested no flowers, leaves, hearts, puppies or anything representational in the quilting of this wall hanging.  I stuck to my trusty ruler for the most part. My incredible photographic skills have distorted the shape a bit.

 

 

 

It will hang on a dark blue wall and will look smashing there!



I delivered the quilt to her house so that I could meet, at long last, her amazing Maine Coon cat.  This is Toby.  He looks almost normal here - but he is enormous!  He weighs 27 pounds and is absolutely magnificent! 

Here you can see him in relation to a normal sized human (Cheryl) and you can see he is quite large.  If I didn't already have four totally psychotic rescued feral cats I would have kit-napped him.

This morning I got up early and headed to the Farmer's Market in Wichita.  It opens at 7 am and I got there 15 minutes early because today was Tomato Day and a total zoo.  There were already 20 people in line at the Tomato Man's stall and when I turned around and looked at the line behind me I saw this:

 

 

It was worth it though - other vendors sell tomatoes but his are THE BEST.  I brought home quite a haul.  Yum.

Catching up on my quilting

 

 

 

 

It's been a while since I last posted because I have been having problems with Blogger and they have been less than helpful.  I just finished this quilt for Renee - she wanted lots of quilting and plans to enter it in her guild's show. 

It was a challenge to choose a thread color that didn't totally disappear into that vibrant green fabric.  Green blended in too well and became invisible.  I ended up with a medium turquoise blue.

This is Judy's quilt - it's a BIG one.  You can see it hangs off my design wall in the photo. 

Judy is a quilter after my own heart - she loves sparkly stuff!  The snowflakes are all made from Fairy Frost fabric and the stripe has lots of gold metallic.  I discouraged her from using gold metallic thread over the entire quilt because she does want to use this on her bed.  I did use some but mostly used Glide  thread in gold - it gives something like the same effect as real metallic thread.

 

 

 

 

 

I wish I had picked all the threads off this before I took the picture - they drive me crazy! 

 

I  carried the snowflake theme into the blocks as well.

I'm almost caught up on my quilting list!

A good day for Jan Z.

I was happy to hear from Jan Zimmerman that the quilt I had quilted for her a while back won Best of Show at the Oklahoma City Guild Show.  She sent me this picture from the show.  I'm not surprised it did well - she hand pieced this quilt for accuracy and the workmanship is impeccable. 

Another one of her quilts won Best Hand Quilting. It was a good day for Jan!

I'm hoping this posts okay - my blog has been misbehaving.

Bunny Hill snowmen

If you can't see later posts than this one, try refreshing this page.  Click on July in the archives. 

This Bunny Hill pattern was made by Mary, who always does an impeccable job on her machine applique.  She also lets me use wool batting - my favorite.


Love the red truck!

I was afraid a heavy background fill done in light thread on the blocks with red background fabric would look messy and distracting - so I just stuck with straight lines in those blocks.

 

 

Mary hasn't finished putting eyes and smiles on all the snowmen - so some of them only
have noses.

They come in threes

I finished another appliqued quilt, this one for Trudy.  She wanted a leafy vine so I did a leafy version of feathers around the border.


I considered using metallic thread but Trudy said she likes green and it looks pretty dramatic on the dark blue background.  I like the way the crosshatching softens the blocks from a distance.

Trudy did a lot of three-dimensional applique and beading which looks cool up close.

I have another appliqued quilt on my longarm now, they must come in threes -  just like my orange cats!