Progress on Rainbow Stars...

These are oh-so colorful...maybe even too much color for me, but I have to finish it now. The HST's are made as of today - nearly 130 of them I think, in just about a zillion different batik pieces. The ivory half of the HSTs is also scrappy so if you see a variation of color, it is intentional to match the center of the quilt. I am currently working on the 3rd intertwining border section, with 5 more to go. Unfortunately I have no pale orange batik left for one of them, and no local store that caries that approximate shade. I may also make up some more little dots to sprinkle on the quilt strategically. I have one more work day (aka school day) before the holidays...and a giant roll of my eyes at the prospect of having my kids home for 11 days straight. Thankfully, my husband will be home much of that too to front their busyness so I can play.

Wordless Wednesday - my vision in sight

Tuesday is Just For Me

Here is where this was a couple weeks ago...Four stars, painfully pieced. Four corners, even more painfully paper pieced. I hear about people that just love paper piecing, but I gotta say, it is my nemesis. I hate how wasteful it is, so I tru not to waste so much, but then I just end up picking out these teeny-tiny stitches and cursing profusely & in more color that this quilt has. I am most happy that thepaper piecing is done, and it is onto the hand applique.
As of today, two of the art nouveau-esc panels are done. The other two are started, but not put onto the background yet. I will probably add a swirling and colorful appliqued border to the quilt to help tie the vastly different styles together.

My other complete accomplishemt is the completion of my daughter's holiday dress. Albeit, it has been done for more than a week, just awaiting buttons. But now it has buttons and is finito. I guess colorful is an increasing trend in my sewing.

No annoying collars for 5-year olds to just stain. I love the simple red ruffle instead.

It is fancy enough for her, and for the holidays, without being covered with snowflakes or santas so that she won't wear it past January.

Rather than putting a tie in the back, which can be uncomfortable for sitting, we did 2 pretty flower buttons. I did this on dresses 2 years ago and it was a hit with the girls.

It is made to look like a pinafore and jumper, but it is all one dress, and it is edged with tea-dyed eyelet trim. Somehow, the eyelets I like best come in white, and cream is always prettier.

The rest of my week is all about catch up...getting some wool batting pieced in preparation to quilt one of my own pieces, and finishing something that is currently loaded. I have kids home too many days next week so the progress must come this week.

Snow Flakes

Despite today being only Halloween, Mother Nature gave us a good helping of whoop-ass on Saturday night. I have lived in Maine (albeit, Southern Maine too) over 15 years, and I have only seen a few flakes of snow in October. We got socked with 6-8" of very wet snow. The leaves are not yet off of the bushes. They were all laying on the ground on Sunday morning. The remnants of my flowers were burried. And tonight I get to drag by kids (ok, they get to drag Mom) to the houses trick-or-treating in snow clothes. The temps hit the 50's today, but it barely made a dent on the snow on the yards. Sidewalks are guaranteed to be a little slickery tonight for the ghouls and gobblins.
The melting snow turned out to be a not-so-good place for a picture of my star blocks (& block pieces). The batiks started to absorb the water as soon as I layed them down. So much for neatly starched blocks...

There is still much planned that is not evident here, but the bits and pieces are beginning to come together.

To all of the readers that left kind words from the last post (Bloggers Quilt Festival), thank you dearly. It means more than you know. Have a great Halloween with plenty of chocolate :-))

Into my groove

The debaucles of last week with my feathered star measurements are behind me. I have 4 of them done. Not trimmed yet to confirm how close to the desired size I came, but laying flat, with 40 crisp points each, no enormous blaring errors. I am happy. Now onto the layout and the more eclectic applique that will accompany these. I love a traditional quilt, but this is looking too generic. It needs to be infused with some creativity!
I have recently come across a more than biased article, whose source will remain nameless. This article has a highly opinionated view of machine quilting - the author would likely drown on a rainy day like today because her nose is pretty high up there. Simply put, the writer cannot stand machine quilting whatsoever. She cannot find merit in a bit of it. It's a little hard to swallow, given what I do each day, but I know that the biases towards one type of quilting or another can be very strong, as I have been there too once.

I remember 15 years ago going to the Maine Quilt Show with my mom. I was home visiting on vacation. At that point I was an avid sewer, but had only made a handful of quilts, all hand quilted. My great-grandmothers crafted things with their hands like crocheted and embroidered items, and I took great pride being able to follow in their footsteps at a time when none of my other friends did such things. I have always been a bit old fashioned at heart. I remember seeing the many quilts that day and just scowling at the machine quilted ones. I found it hard to even appreciate the piecing for how much I truly hated to see the machine quilting. Now keep in mind that machine quilting has moved forward with leaps & bounds in the last 10 years. Gone is the era of "mattress pad" quilting, and even the number of purely stippled quilts at shows is all but at a minimum. If this is all anybody had ever seen for machine quilting, then a hatred of it is well deserved. But that is not the case.

I don't really know at what point I started really having an interest in it -- probably 4 or so years go. The advent of blogging has made pictures of nearly anything easily accessible. The patterns of stitching were becoming more decorative, and pretty, actually enhancing the piecing, rather than just covering it. Early machine quilting was boring, but it has definitely become a much more artistic medium. I spent a couple years trying hard to machine quilt smaller quilts on my domestic machine. It was frustrating, pulling quilts through such a small space. I also continued to hand quilt at least 5 more quilts in that period. At some point I rationalized that I really did like the machine quilting, and that I wanted to get a longarm. I have hardly looked back since. I remember seeing the work of Ronda Beyer that year (2009) at the quilt show, and thinking how very far machine quilting has become. It was creative, artistic, and lovely. We shouldn't necessarily compare the number of hours it takes to hand quilt versus machine quilting. We all know that machine pieced quilts are infinitely faster than their hand pieced cousins, so the same should be true for the quilting. The value of a quilt is not won or lost on the number of hours spent on the quilting. I spent 75 hours on one of my show quilts. Did it not win because there were others that required 76 hours??

Enough of my closedmindedness daily ranting. It could go on for another 5 pages. My point is that we should all be more open to changes. Embrace different things because it is entirely possible that we don't really have all the facts. I have hand quilted and I have longarmed. Longarm quilting is harder, and requires a significantly greater amount of creativity in the design of the quilting. Taking out mistakes is more time-consuming. Stitch-in-the-ditch is necessary to outline the features of the quilt so that they DO show. I don't like to put these 2 forms of quilting up for a side-by-side comparison as they really are quite different. I like and appreciate each for it's own merits. You should consider this too.

I will leave you with the veining and flowering that I am doing for a couple days as I work out designs for a couple of client quilts that are next up for quilting. The majority of the quilting on this quilt is complete. My primary goal is to add veins on 100 leaves, and do the detail work on the 20 flowers.

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edited...I just got the call from the Georgia Quilt Show!!! My Postcards from Venice quilt won 2nd place in the large wall-hanging division. She then told me my other quilt (Intertwined) was very lovely too. About 2 minutes later, she called back to tell me she'd not done her homework closely, and Intertwined won a 3rd place in small-wall hanging division!~ I am SOOO tickled. This is great news, and they both have $$$$ too :-))

Rainbow Stars

One down, three to go. These are 20", and are taking me a ridulously long time to piece. For the most part, I am able to not tip off my triangle points. The Y-seams are getting old though. I have waffled horribly on whether to piece this quilt or to applique this one. A great comment was that the two designs should marry (or at least date!). I pondered way too long on how to infuse the seemingly Southwestern feathered stars with the more eclectic and art nouveau applique. My other desire was to use background and colored fabrics that I already have. I do have a plan
to infuse this with interesting and unique applique, but the first step is to get these 2 blocks wrapped up. Putting them aside will only make it harder to finish without errors (and trust me, I've made enough!). I cut out the HSTs an inch larger than they were supposed to be, but didn't discover it until I had 128 of them stitched into rows ready to put onto the star pieces. Woops! Pick out, trim down, restitch, repeat.

Here's my ponder for you this week...Have you seen a feathered star design that did NOT have a distinct southwestern feel? I need to see some because I really do not want the quilt to look that way. Send me a link if you do!