UFO Sewing day

What a fun day! Three of my quilt friends came over today to sew. We try to meet every month to work on UFO's, but we also love to visit and catch up, do some show and tell, and of course, EAT! I made a big chicken salad and the other girls brought melons and peach crisp. YUM

This is the project I worked on today. These fun panels are Christmas Flamingo’s. I am putting together a top as a show sample and today I was working on figuring out connectors between all the blocks. I framed them all with black and prints, then a second white frame. They are still on my quilt wall so I will try and finish this tomorrow. It is sort of a challenge since I am making it up as I go along! I’ll post a “finished” picture when I am done.

The other fun thing we did today was go to the Ottawa Piece Maker’s Quilt Show! (Ottawa, KS not Canada). I had 8 quilts in the show, but there were lots of gorgeous quilts there. Here are pictures of the quilts I had in the show.

“Monet Monet” A Bargello Quilt I made in a class with Tony Munoz	“Cats in Candy Land” The blocks are from Claire’s Cats
Color Wheel Quilt – I designed and made this quilt as a teaching tool for my color class	Flamingo Calendar Quilt from a wonderful fun swap
Halloween Bag O Blocks Quilt	In Da Go Sampler Swap Quilt
Vintage Moments Quilt done in 1930’s reproduction fabrics	Winding Ways Quilt made from a John Flynn precut kit.

What a great day. . .Good friends, good food, good fun, and a great quilt show. Ahhhhh, what more could a girl want?

Ok. . . .Tomorrow I will post the next block in the Midnight Posies BOM. There’s something to look forward to!

Kaw Valley Quilt Guild Quilt Show

This Saturday and Sunday, April 25 and 26 is the Kaw Valley Quilt Guilds's annual Quilt Show at the Douglas County Fair Grounds in Lawrence, KS. If you are in the area I encourage you to attend. The theme of the show is "A Quilted Garden", and there will be lots of fabulous quilts to see, vendors to shop with, and free lectures, workshops and demonstrations. There is also a silent auction for miniature quilts made by guild members, with proceeds going to local charitable causes. Hope you can make it.
This was the first public exhibition of my new Color Wheel Quilt! I made its first informal showing at a color class I taught in late March and again April 21 and 22, when I spoke on Color Confidence for Quilters at the Kaw Valley Quilt Guild monthly meetings.

I am debating wether I should bring this out as a pattern or as a kit. I thought some might find it fun to find all these fabrics, but others might prefer to have all the colors supplied. Which would you prefer? Thanks for the suggestions.

Home From Retreat

What fun it is to go to a 5 day retreat! A group of friends from my online quilting group, SewManySwaps, attend a retreat twice a year in Winslow, Arkansas. We have been going since 2002 and it feels more like family than friends each fall and spring when we make the short trek from Kansas to the beautiful Boston Mountains in the Arkansas Ozarks. The scenery is spectacular, our hosts at Sky View Lodge are welcoming and wonderful, and the time with friends oh so precious.

I was able to finish this Merry Go Round Quilt in sweet baby fabrics. Shhhh, don't tell, but this will be a baby gift for my Nephew Corey and his wife Jeniffer who are expecting any day now! Wow, I better get it quilted this weekend! I was so pleased to get my color wheel quilt finished while at retreat. It came out just as I hoped it would. What a challenge it was to find just the right fabrics for each hue, tint, shade, and tone. I ripped out the whole center wheel and replaced it with darker tints, as the first set I had were too pale. I used those 12 tints to make piping around each of the dark shades in the outer ring, making the grayed tones between them really show up.

The outer border has the 3-D effect I was hoping for, altho the dark green is a bit darker than I had hoped. But now it is ready for quilting and I am looking forward to having it completed in time for a quild presentation I am giving this month at the Kaw Valley Quilt Guild in Lawrence, KS on "Color for Quilters." I am going to bind it with a fabulous multi-color stripe cut on the bias.

This wonderful version of my Midnight Posie Block of the Month Quilt was completed by my amazing editor and pattern tester Kathi! Of course she always puts her own spin on the colors and block placements, which I think is great. She also found a major error in one of the later block patterns which I have now fixed. . . yippeee. My sincerest gratitude to her for finding and fixing all my errors. Well, really there was only one, which is pretty amazing. Not that I made a mistake, but that I made only one! (cheesy grin!)

I finished this set of indigo and white blocks for a block swap I am participating in. They really came out nice and were a lot of fun to make. I still have another set to make and then off they go.

I do so love going to retreat! It charges my creative batteries and refuels my soul. I hope each of you have the opportunity to attend a sewing or quilting retreat as often as you are able to go. It will do you so much good. Oh, and get a massage while you are at it. Our wonderful masseuse gave me a "hot rock" massage while I was at retreat. AHHHhhhhh, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

I am working on my next 2 patterns that will be published this summer. I will provide a sneak peak soon, when I get the tops done. Hope you are having a wonderful spring. My daffodils are blooming!! How about yours? Would love to hear what you are up to. Please post a comment and share your spring projects!

Color Class Color Wheel Quilt

I am working on a new quilt. I teach a class in color for quilters and I have been wanting to make a color wheel quilt for a long time. I have designed lots of them over the years but never found one that I liked enough to make, or that illustrated all the color theory ideas I wanted to cover in the class. Here is what I came up with finally, and have been assembling the fabric to start making this weekend. The central ring of points depict tints of each color (white added) and the middle ring of points depicts the hues or pure colors. The outer ring of large points are the shades of each color (black added) and between the shades are the tones of each shade (gray added). The border juxtaposes each hue (larger triangle) with its shade (smaller triangle) to demonstrate how the contrast of light and dark (value) creates depth and three dimensionality.

The idea of color schemes posed another challenge, so instead of making a series of quilts or blocks in various color schemes, I decided to make black flanel overlays I can put on the quilt with holes cut out to reveal each of the color schemes, ie. complementary (across the color wheel from each other), tertiary (3 colors equi-distant from each other), etc. I could move these to change the colors in each scheme by lifting the overlay and pivoting it, showing different color combinations.

The quilt will be large (70" square) so that the colors will be visible in a large guild meeting room. The overlays will be made from foam core with black felt coverings so they can be easily moved and applied to the quilt with velcro dots. I thought it would be easier to move an overlay, than to make the quilt out of foam core and move each color piece. I could just picture myself in the middle of a guild presentation and having all the color triangles fall on the floor! I would love to know what you think of my idea, and how you think this would be as a prop for my presentation. I have done this presentation several times, and use power point slides to illustrate all the ideas. But I thought that a real quilt might make a better visual aid than slides, especially when answering questions after the presentation. Let me know what you think. Thanks in advance for your feedback.