A Day Spent Quilting

I got to spend the whole day quilting. Right now, I can't think of a better way to spend my vacation.

I did some piecing and I quilted the water quilt which now has it's official title. I don't actually put the names of quilts out there until they are done or mostly done. That way I'm sure they actually are what I decided to name them. Anyway, this quilt is named "Middle Passage Mediations". I'll take a non-blurry picture soon.

The fabric is hand dyed. And it is machine pieced and quilted.

I even quilted a ship on it.

I don't really have too much to say about what's going on with this quilt. Or I have so much to say that I don't know where to start. I'm not sure which is true. Suffice it to say, I think every person has something in his or her consciousness that sort of haunts them. It is useful to process these things and meditate on why they grip you. I think it might also be useful to get them out of your head an up on a wall where you can gain some perspective. That's all I have to say about that for now.

Update on the Blair Witch. I've managed to stay one step ahead of her with hand sanitizer and mentholated vaporizers. It seems like she's not going to get my vacation. But I've seen enough scary movies to know that as soon as you let you guard down, something crawls out of the TV and gets you. And yes, I know those are two different movies. Risk is everywhere.

The Best Laid Plans

Yipee! I have the whole week off. I don't really say yippee, but I'm not convinced that I can spell yay. Anyway. I have the whole week off. I really need a vacation. My brain is functioning so poorly that I can't even come up with a proper metaphor to describe how much I need a vacation. That's how bad it is. So I'm off. And the plan is to spend the week making quilts and doing other arty type stuff in attempt to reboot my brain. I'm really looking forward to it.

Of course you realize that my vacation is like those kids that go off into the woods all happy and ready for a nice camping trip not realizing the Blair Witch is behind a bush waiting to wreak havoc. It started with my son coming home with a very low grade fever and a runny nose. Now he's coughing and sneezing on everything. And since my husband is helpless against baby germs, he's gone down too. How will it end? Will we all get away in the nick of time? Or will the whole family be left standing in the corner waiting to be taken out? Stay tuned.

Tell the people at Intownquilters I love them and I'm so sorry.

Proof Of Life

I’ve been a big slacker about keeping things updated around here. And since Kyra was nice enough to give me a shout out on her blog, people have been stopping by. I kind of feel the way I do when I have visitors and realize that I haven’t dusted in a while. It happens to me more than you’d expect.

I have managed to get bits and pieces of things done in between everything else. But I’m not going to show you the whole picture because nothing is at the showing it to people stage. But I think I need to show some proof of creative life.

The water quilt top is done and I’ve dreamed about how to quilt it. I even have backing fabric. But not the right thread. Who has time for quilting anyway?

I pulled a bunch of scraps out of my scrap bin. From time to time, I get to piece them together. I have no idea where this is going. I’m just sewing stuff together.

I’m drafting a pattern for a quilt. It is based on stuff from my sketchbook. I get a minute here and there to ink the pattern.

I’m making favors for a birthday party. There is extreme danger for me anytime I go near the scrapbook section. There is so much in there for quilting and journaling. Forget about actually making scrapbooks. So far, I’ve managed to keep it to what I need for the project.

So at least I’ve managed to do a little bit of something every day. I’ve taken enough piano lessons and art classes to know that you have to practice everyday – even if you only get a few minutes. Everything doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. You just have to keep working.

Coffee Break

I finally finished the coffee quilt. It was actually finished a while ago. But I just got around to binding it.

This quilt was a UFO. It was going to be much bigger than this. But I put it aside and started working on other projects. Every now and then I would piece a few blocks. All the piecing is done by hand so it was easy to pick up the sewing from time to time. I thought it would take me one hundred years to finish this quilt.

But earlier this year I decided to just finish my UFO's or get rid of them. It's hard to explain, but I feel like my work is in a different place now than it was a few years ago. I don't want to spend my time now on a project I came up with when my head was in a different place. Especially since my time is more limited. So I decided to just stop piecing and put together a top with what I had. It is all hand pieced and machine quilted. After the top was together, I thought it was kind of boring. Again - I don't think about my work the way I used to. So I stamped coffee stains all over the piece with fabric paint. The piece is called, "Wake Up and Smell the Non-fat Carmel Macchiato."

I have one more UFO to take care of. It's being difficult. But it's going down.

I Could Be Loosing My Mind

But I'm not because I make stuff every day. I haven't been getting a lot done but I do enough to maintain an even keel. There's nothing bad going on. Just life.

Here's what I've been up to.

I graffiti tagged some fabric.

I started drafting a pattern.

I started a dream studio journal.

My major accomplishment was cleaning my workspace. I mean really cleaning it. Like throwing out 35 pounds of magazines clean. I'm even going to dust tomorrow. It had really gotten to a point where I couldn't even work in there because of all the stuff everywhere. I know that people say a cluttered workspace reflects a cluttered mind. I choose not to believe that. And clutter really doesn't bother me. But things had seriously gotten out of hand in there. So now everything is back in where it belongs and there is space to work.

And if I can manage to go a week without anyone catching a weird virus, or a tree falling, or some other bizarre and expensive problem, I might actually get something done.

Proof of Life

I'm still waiting to exhale but I'm still working too.

See.

I'm painting some background fabric that will be part of a bad luck quilt. The first layer will be stenciled letters. I made these stencils out of freezer paper so they would look like letters I would draw by hand instead of neatly prepared stencils. I'm using an iridescent Shiva paint stick that is very close to the background color. Since it is the bottom layer, I want it to be subtle. This is way too much fun. I could spend all day smearing around this color. Is that weird?

iQuilt

I finished the improv quilt. Since I just made up the cutting and piecing, I decided to just make up the quilting as I went along. It was fun. I got to play with lots of different threads and lots of different stitches. I'm relatively new to the machine quilting thing - at least new to doing it correctly. So this was my chance to experiment. It's almost like a sampler. I'm sure I will refer to it when I'm doing more deliberate machine quilting. The quilt is raw edge applique, machine pieced and quilted. The fabric is hand dyed.

I ended up naming the quilt, "This is Your Brain on Shuffle." I was listening to iTunes while I was quilting and I had it set to shuffle. I have wide ranging tastes in music. The randomness of the songs that were playing was entertaining and kind of like the quilt.

You know what? Quilting is fun.