Here's a wallhanging made by Marsha the Thimbleberries Lady that I just finished quilting. True to form, it is well pieced and made with Thimbleberries fabric!
note: Marsha has confessed to me that this is actually made from Kansas Troubles
fabrics, not Thimbleberries
Last weekend was the Quilt Room Tour put on by Prairie Quilt Guild every other year. It's so much fun to visit Guild member's homes and get a peek at their sewing areas, rooms or even separate buildings in some cases. With permission from the hostesses, I have some pictures to post.
Lynanne has a separate building that she shares with her husband's shop. She is a doll maker in addition to being a quilter, and her studio is full of her creations.
She keeps several old sewing machines set up facing each other to use when sewing friends visit: they can sew and talk face to face.
Jen is a pattern designer and has a super organized studio. She says she moved boxes of stuff out before the tour! She also collects old sewing machine and has a great way to display them.
Susan has a beautiful sewing room in her new home. I took a picture of her at her machine and neglected to get pictures of the beautiful view she faces as she sews and the many gorgeous quilts throughout her house.
Kathy with a K has adopted a sewing area for herself in the basement family room. She says she asked for two big foldable tables for her birthday so she would have a large area to work on.
Kathy also had some wonderful family quilts like this yellow quilt that she uses as a topper on a bed.
Cathy with a C has a new house with a fabulous sewing room. Here are my friend Betty, Peter and myself posing on the porch of Cathy's house which has been decorated with quilts.
She had some good ideas for storage in her sewing room. All of her fat quarters are stored in these little canvas units (she says they are available from Walmart - on line only) I like the way she put a colored button on each one showing what color fabrics are stored inside.
Her ruler storage is hidden by a swinging design wall.
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I was so impressed by her collection of old quilts which she says are all family quilts. Here is an old red and green quilt - the green has faded to beige.
And this one I would have liked to fold up and take home with me. The quilting on it was amazing and it was in excellent condition. She is lucky to have such beautiful quilted family treasures! There was one more location, but we ran out of time and energy to see it.
It's Shop Hop time again! I quilted this for Charlotte's Sew Natural for the Central Kansas Quilt Shop Hop - you can read about it in Charlotte's newsletter here.
Once again they had special Shop Hop fabric designed, this time by Jason Yenter and it features a Kansas theme.
This quilt I just finished for Julie. It's one of several Christmas quilts I have done for her: she must have the best decorated house at Christmastime!
She says she has lots of fun embellishments to add now that it is quilted - little jingle bells and buttons and so on. Should be really cute!
Peter accompanied me to the Kansas State Fair one day last week when I was there to judge quilts before the Fair officially opened. What is it about big machines that fascinates most men? Peter had to have his picture taken with this shiny new combine. It was so huge it makes him look tiny when he stands next to it!
He found out how they got the new tires to look so shiny after he posed with his hand on one: they oiled them.
Evelyn made this as a wedding quilt for a grandchild (who has been married for 6 years - but who's counting!). She thought she would like it quilted with some little circles and since the colors reminded me of the sea, I put little bubbles around the dark blue frames and some sort of kelp-like stuff in the borders. Evelyn is a very neat and tidy piecer: the back of her tops look as good as the front!
Sylvia makes the cutest quilts for her grandkids. She doesn't mess around with easy patterns either! This quilt is small but has many little bitty pieces. I love the red vintage cowboy fabric in the star centers.
Wichita recently broke a weather record for the most days over 100 degrees in one year: 52 so far this year. That broke the record set during the 30's. There are other parts of the country with hotter temperatures, drought, fires, floods, hurricanes etc, so I really shouldn't complain!
Kay brought two HUGE tops for me to quilt for her. She is another one of those over achieving quilters that only makes big quilts with a million pieces in them! This is Tonga Rhapsody which is a BOM being done by Charlotte's Sew Natural in Newton.
At first I was overwhelmed by the bright batiks and busy blocks and couldn't figure out what to do. I ended up ignoring the piecing in the sampler blocks and doing a different curvy design in each one. I drew the design with chalk on each block as I advanced the quilt.
I like the way it turned out and I'm glad I didn't wimp out and do an edge to edge design.
I have served as president of Prairie Quilt Guild for the past year and last night was my last board meeting as president. Traditionally, the president makes gifts for the board members that have worked so hard all year. I made 16 of these cute pincushions (from a pattern called Pinballs by Vanilla House Designs) for my board members.
Don't they look like a strange alien garden? I had to visit every thrift shop in Wichita to find all the old candlesticks!
To beat the heat I have been taking my walk early in the day; when I leave the house the stars are still out. This little guy gets up early too.
This quilt of Ann's is a beauty! It's big and has about a million little pieces in it - just thinking about all that piecing makes me a little queasy. But Ann is a precision piecer and does wonderful work. I love the border print she used around the edge.
I'm not usually a fan of civil war reproduction fabrics but I love these fabrics - in fact I realized I had bought the same fabrics for a quilt I started three years ago. This is how far I have gotten on it:
Peter and I drove to Manhattan to see quilt appraiser Carol Elmore and have her appraise a quilt for me. It was foggy when we left home in the morning and the sun broke through as we were driving through the Flint Hills. I saw this:
And realized it was HUNDREDS of orb spider webs wet with moisture from the fog and glistening in the sunlight.
It was beautiful, but I wouldn't want to meet the hundreds of spiders that went with them!
From our most recent Prairie Quilt Guild meeting: who is that masked man?
It's Captain Quilt (aka Peter) He's everywhere, he's everywhere!
This is such an elegant little quilt! Merilyn made it as a sample for our local Wichita quilt shop, Material Girls. She said the fabric also comes in red and cream but I think the taupe and cream is beautiful.
Merilyn didn't want heavy background quilting so the applique blocks are really just done with SID quilting.
This is from a few days ago:
Fortunately it has cooled down - to only 100 degrees and we have had a good rain. This morning it was 72 degrees out, the coolest it had been in weeks. It felt heavenly! But at the Farmer's Market this morning I heard a little girl complaining about being cold to her mother, so I guess we all have our own personal thermostat.
This was Peter's breakfast recently: I think his tastebuds are dying. (That's a sliced cold wienie on his popcorn)
I just finished this quilt for Judy, I think it is probably the 12th one of this pattern that I have quilted. Luckily, I do like the design! Judy wanted heavy quilting which is time consuming but really my favorite way to quilt. She is new to quilting and did a nice job on this rather complicated design.
Some people are tired of stippling, but Judy requested it as a background pattern. I like it too, although I do think it was overused for a while. Anything gets tiresome if it is used everywhere, whether it is stippling, McTavishing, feathers or the current favorite: curved crosshatching.
It's been so hot here for so long that no one has been able to grow tomatoes in their backyard. I have three big healthy plants that I keep watering but it is so hot that what blossoms they manage to produce just drop off. Peter and I have been driving in to Wichita early every Saturday morning to go to the Farmer's Market. We have to get there early or the Tomato Man runs out of tomatoes. Here is the line at his stall.
As we left the Market the line had more than doubled but I had my bag full of tomatoes safely in my hand. We eat them at just about every meal - YUM.
