Large Custom and Small Sampler

The last week was a bust for stay-at-home parents.  We had a snow day (yup, only in Maine do you get 18" in March), a day off from school for conferences, and I even had one day that a kid stayed home.  It was not my most productive.  I did get a sampler for an upcoming class pieced together and quilted though.  This Narrow Border - Big Designs class will debut at Quilt Odyssey in July, and will also be taught at MQX Midwest in September.  I still need to do another sample for the class, but this is a good start (of course quilting this required that I drew no less than 10 pages of designs first!).  I am not sure if I will have the gumption to get a book together on these designs before July but it is in the back of my mind.  Recent issues with my AQS book leave me wanting to run as far and as fast away from books for a while.  It's not an issue that is insurmountable.  Its just that I had really hoped that the book would be available before I teach next month, and sadly, it does not look like it will be. My editor has been simply amazing throughout this process; I am truly lucky.  I'm fortunate that so much care is being put into the quality.  Not releasing until it is right is so much more important than any timeline.

Here is a client quilt I spent what feels like an eternity on.  It was on my frame nearly 2 weeks.  Its a large 90" Sedona Star with machine embroidered applique and lots of piecing.  Areas with the embroidery were very stiff and thick, as they sometimes are with the paper-type stabilizer.  The appliques don't, as a result, show as much relief as they could.

The fabrics are gorgeous desert-like shades.  It reminds me of a sunset, especially the fabric at the outer area of the circle.   

 First, the quilt got a whopping 8-9 hours of ditch stitching to stabilize the piecing and applique. Doing this first in a clear thread allows me to go wherever I want with each color thread afterwards, advancing the quilt as needed.  It has quite a few colors of thread used - peach, turquoise, a variegated, green and probably a couple I forgot.

I tried to choose quilting designs for the spaces that would reveal interesting patterns when the entire quilt is viewed.  The turquoise center circles have an unexpected pumpkin seed design because one of the fabrics has this pattern on it.

The pattern put in the large sunset triangles (below) is intended to draw from the shapes in the embroideries.  I made a template, then marked all 9 spaces identically with chalk.

 This is the center star.  The quilt is unusual because all stars have 9 points and there are 9 similar pieces around the quilt.  Typically you see 8, or 12 or 16, but not 9.

Update.....
Thanks to all of you that posted about my soon-to-be released books.  The second book set arrived this week.  I am all ready to make the link on my website live.  I am just waiting on delivery of some mailers that were ordered.  I am anxious for them to go onsale.  For those of you attending MQX in 2 weeks, I will have some there to sell.  I will have them in my classes, unless you purposefully flag me down or email ahead of time to let me know you want to buy one.  Unfortunately, I won't be at the Ice Cream Social, which would be a great time to have these available to students not in my classes.  I will be in Manchester Wed thru Saturday, and I am not teaching on Saturday.  If you are interested, and don't want to pay shipping, send me a private message with your email and I will message you from the show.