Jan Z. and her amazing quilt

 

 

This is Jan Z. and her amazing quilt.  It is beautifully appliqued and embroidered with so many little details!  She says it is a Piecemakers pattern from  2003 that she has been working on for a long time.

 

 

 

 

She embroidered around each applique piece with black floss.

 

 

 

 

 

 

My goal in quilting was to stay out of the way of all her work while highlighting it with stitch in the ditch - a LOT of stitch in the ditch.  I used Invisifil and Bottom Line thread for almost the whole thing.  Invisifil is great for stitching around applique; it is so extremely fine and comes in colors, unlike monofilament.

 
 

 

I love the tiny little piglets made out of narrow ribbon.  They are so small they are hard to see in this picture - look for the tiny pink blobs next to the big pigs.

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She added details of her own, like the tractors.

It was fun to examine all the little details as I quilted. 



 

More fruity news

 

 

This is Gail's quilt and it is beautifully hand pieced and appliqued.

I was stumped for a while, coming up with a design for the border.  Unsymmetrical designs are more of a challenge for me.

 

 

Sharon wanted me to finish this in time for her to enter in the Kansas State Fair.  The blocks are from this year's Prairie Quilt Guild Block of the Month designed by guild member Debbie Johnson.  Debbie is a talented pattern designer, you can see her website here

The blocks all have the theme of Fun and Fanciful Fruit, so Sharon made the embroidered fruit tree blocks in the same theme.

 

 

 

 

 

More fruity news: my friend Betty and I visited a local orchard to pick late peaches.  Yum.

 
 

 

 

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.