Retreat Results

Nothing like 3 days of intensive quilting to finally make some progress. I spent a long weekend at a rural retreat center close to Princeton IL with about 30 other quilt buddies from the guild. I brought more than I knew I had time to work on, but worked on my priority projects and got them to where they needed to be.

This is the first one to show off, a quilt top for my newest grand-nephew Brady. The pattern is from a magazine clipping from Quilter's Newsletter, October 2005 that wanted me to use templates for the fabric cutting.The designer is Kelora Lee Goethe and she called her original quilt Stars from the North and the South. Her design finished with a border of background color and applique flowers sprinkled around. With 10 1/2" blocks, it took some math and trial and error to get the star points to work out using an easier flying geese piecing technique. The color fabrics are the same as the ones I used for Brady's big brother's quilt, but I changed out the background for a gray and cream piece. I also left out the final border of flowers.

I don't know where that pink glow in the center is coming from. Maybe a flashback? In real life it doesn't have that pink glow.

I have a long weekend ahead of me. DD Amanda is getting through three hard finals today, and will have more on Tuesday after Memorial Day. Those won't be as intense, but she'll still stress. But I won't so much with her physics, pre-calc and AP history behind her. So I plan to sew again.

On my to-do list: 2 project bags to sew to donate to the guild quilt show boutique; layer Brady's quilt and plan the quilting design; quilt a crazy cat quilt and bind it, and embroider one more cat block (which will mean I'd have 4 of 9 done, or 5 of 9 done?). Somewhere in there will be movies and DVDs to watch. I will also do a sample sandwich of batiks with some fusibles and practice thread painting in preparing my mind for work on Mitchell's cat.

Marilyn

Chicago inspiration

So while in Chicago in April, visiting UIC with my daughter, we roamed downtown for a quick feel of the city streets. How cool it is to drive between the towering buildings-a perverse sense of being in a brick, glass and steel forest. I was driving, and this building and it's reflecting windows caught my eye. Don't know why it screamed quilt inspiration when I later saw the image.

 But then I put it into some software and simply cropped it down to what really caught my eye. Kind of a random variation in values. Not real wild about the dark colors, but this may merit some more tinkering in the software. Vary the colors maybe, maybe repeat a window or two to get some consistent patterns.

So I realized these needed to go to the blog so I can visit the idea again in the future.

photos too?

so i got to wondering...

could i post to the  blog via my droid phone...looks like i can. next i'll check out photo uploads.