Cool quilt

Annette's quilt looks so cool - I mean in temperature.  I'll take cool however I can get it in this heat wave!  She wanted an edge to edge design in the center and something pretty in the borders.

The inner kitties get their outside fix by going out on the porch.  Here is Lily on the porch looking in at Elsie in the house.

My committee and I finished the top for our guild's Opportunity Quilt and it is gorgeous!  It goes to my friend Siriporn for quilting - I can't wait to post a picture here, but we keep it under wraps until we can show our guild the finished quilt.

A birthday quilt and a hot program

I finished this big quilt for Carol.  She started it years ago for her daughter and wanted to finally get it done for her  40th birthday this fall.  She wanted me to do simple custom quilting so I tried to not use my rulers so much - but I have a hard time putting them down.  I just like the way the quilt looks so much better with some stitch-in-the-ditch and straight line quilting.

Jeez, it's still really hot in Wichita!  I hope our air conditioner doesn't conk out or we will have to move into the studio with all four cats. Mr. Rohrschach refuses to come inside during the daytime, even in triple digit temperatures.  He hides behind the rain barrel in a spot that stays shady all day long.

Our speaker for Prairie Quilt Guild last week  was David Taylor and he was wonderful!  He had everyone laughing and admiring his amazing work.  I recommend him highly as a speaker and a teacher!  Here is one of his quilts, front:

and back:

That's a lot of quilting! At the end of his talk guild members swarmed around his quilts to admire them up close.

I also took his workshop and picked up some interesting tips and information.  His style of hand applique is different from traditional applique.  I'm determined to try and finish the class project using his method- it certainly works well for him!

111 degrees in Wichita yesterday

Still hot

It's STILL hot , but after all this is Kansas in the summertime.  How did those pioneers survive in their long sleeved dresses, long skirts and petticoats? 

I finished this quilt for Emma Creek Quilt Guild, it is their Opportunity Quilt.  It is a Lori Smith design with added borders to make it bed-size.  It will have a curved edge, so I designed the border to compliment the curves.  I think the curved cross hatching looks nice here.

Peter and I are working off calories by scratching our mosquito bites. Fortunately for you I did not take a gallery of pictures of them as documentation.  Kansas has several mosquito species and one of them is huge and hungry.  Today I wore one of those mosquito repellent devices with a little fan in it - and it worked!!  I love that thing, I'm going to wear one around my neck for the next two months!

Little quilts and Final Friday

Leslie brought me three little quilts and I only remembered to take pictures of two of them.   She said they had been sitting around for years all finished and unquilted.  The one up above is a small signature quilt.  Leslie likes dark quilting thread so it is a little hard to see the quilting.




This flying geese quilt is miniature size - very cute. 

The Wichita Art Museum contacted Prairie Quilt Guild about doing a demonstration at Final Friday; a monthly art walk through Wichita art galleries.  They were honoring Kansas Arts as part of the 150th birthday of Kansas as a state.  This is ironic since our current governor apparently puts little value on the arts.  I'd better not get started on that subject - this is a quilting blog!


I asked the board of the Guild for someone to demonstrate hand quilting and the two Paula's volunteered.  Here is Paula on the left doing hand piecing and hand applique and Paula on the right doing hand quilitng. 

I thought we should also show machine quilting, so I brought my sewing machine with me and made a small quilt to demonstrate machine quilting.  I got my machine all set up and started to quilt and I heard  "thump thump CLUMP, thump thump CLUMP!"  Something was clearly wrong but I couldn't figure it out.  My machine is going to the repair place and I guess I just proved one of the advantages of hand quilting!

We are having a heat wave and I am ready for it to end.  I don't like it when it doesn't cool down at night - I find it hard to sleep even with the air conditioner going. We have lost our bedtime cat companions too - they aren't in the mood for snuggling.

Yes, my wife quilts

This is Rita's quilt which will hang in my LQS, Charlotte's Sew Natural, as a sample.  Rita hasn't been quilting that long and did a really nice job on this quilt.  I think it is the first time she has had custom quilting on a quilt so I wanted it to be pretty.  I made templates for the designs in the setting triangles and quilted feathered wreaths around the sampler blocks. 

I love the Japanese fabrics Debbie chose for her wall hanging and I love the way it turned out !

At MQS we saw a quilter's husband wearing a shirt like this.  We asked if we could copy the
idea  because Peter REALLY wanted one like it to wear to guild.  Can you see the stray threads glued all over it?

I did the lettering and outline stitching, Peter glued the threads on. He was especially pleased when he wore it to Charlotte's and Mary started automatically picking a thread off!

Hot here today and we had our first corn on the cob for the summer - yum!  Can't wait for the first real tomatoes.

More of Eddie's quilts

Here are the rest of Eddie's quilts.  This one had lots of room for quilting - of course I chose feathers!  They are fun to do and so pretty.

This one didn't need a lot of fancy quilting.  I paid attention to the borders and did an edge-to- edge design in the center.  The fabric is so busy that any fancy quilting would have been lost.

It's really easier to see on the back!

Hot and humid here now.  I'm trying to get the garden mulched and Peter is working on repairing the backyard fence which is suffering from the strong Kansas winds!