In Loving Memory

My beloved cat Emma died at the beginning of March which has made for a rather sad spring around here. We affectionately called her Big Kitty and she brought so much joy to our daily lives. She was a gorgeous blue eyed sweetie of a kitty and both Adrian and I miss her terribly. I knew from the minute I got her that she was going to be one of those once in a lifetime pets. The kind of pet that is so perfect and wonderful that you know without a doubt that he or she is going to be the best pet that you will ever own in your entire life. Emma was that pet for me. She was the sweetest most loving kitty and I was extremely devoted to her. Her loss has really devastated me, as I knew that it would. She got sick last spring and it has been a year of worry and bittersweet sadness knowing that she wasn't going to be with us for much longer. I tried to prepare for the grief, but in the end there was nothing to do but endure her loss the best that I could. Our house is terribly empty without her and for a while I really lost my vigor and joy for life. But spring has finally arrived here in Minnesota and the migrating birds are flying through and my garden is waking up and it's time to look forward to all of the good things that the future may bring.My sister Sandra sent me this lovely stone a couple a weeks ago. It weighed a ton! She had it made for my garden as something to remember Emma by. I put it by the pond, next to a lone viola plant that sprouted up this spring. I always plant violas in my yard, it's one of my favorite flowers. I am always amazed when one or two little plants pop up in the spring.

I have been bouncing around from one project to the next for the past few months. The first thing that I knit after Big Kitty died was this cute little bunny:My friend Carmelita came over the next week, took one look at Miss Bunny and fell in love. She was having a bad day so I sent the bunny home with her. I then knit a Mr. And Miss Bunny for myself. The pattern is from fuzzy mitten. I love her patterns.

I also knit and felted a few nests this spring. The pattern is by Marie Mayhew. I absolutely love her patterns and if you have been reading my blog for a while, you will recognize many of the things that I have made from her patterns.I also dusted off some New York Beauty quilt blocks that I had not worked on in years. I began this project several years ago and it was one of the projects that got set aside after I broke my neck. I wasn't able to sew for over a year and it's amazing how easy it is to forget about a project when it has been out of your mind for a year or two. My friend Robin was visiting in March and I pulled out the quilt blocks to show her. I decided that it was time to finish up the blocks and get them ready to make into a quilt. Once I got back into making the blocks, I remembered what a pain in the butt is is to make the New York Beauty blocks! They are all paper pieced and some of the arcs were really difficult to sew accurately. I got all of the blocks on my design wall, remade a couple of blocks that weren't working and fiddled around with the block placement for a week or so. Then I had to put it away because I had to get cracking on a graduation quilt that I am making for my high school pal Nicole.

So that's what I've been up to this spring. I did cast on a new sweater last week, I'll share it with you once it looks like more than an orchid colored blob of yarn. I'll have the graduation quilt done soon as well. Nicole wanted the quilt to be the colors of sunshine. I've had fun buying lots of yellow and orange fabrics, two colors I really don't quilt with too often. It's impossible to be sad when you are sewing with such vibrant and happy colors. Have a great day!

Winter Vacation

For me, one of the best parts about living in Minnesota is the glorious winter. The skies are blue and the pale sun is always shining. The snow sparkles and the frigid air takes your breath away. I absolutely love it here in the winter. I wake up smiling and look forward to the day ahead.
Unfortunately, this past week the skies overhead have been gray and dreary. The temps warmed up and the snow was alternately slushy and icy. It totally threw me off my game and I had a really hard time getting motivated. So today I am going to take a break from the gray skies and re visit a quilt that I made last spring.I made this quilt for Alex, one of my most favorite girls, who was graduating from high school last May. I wanted her to have something pretty that she could take to college with her this past fall. I've known Alex since she was a tiny baby and consider myself so lucky to have been able to watch her grow up into an amazing young woman.
Over countless sleepovers at my house Alex learned to sew and knit and be creative. She took her first canoe trip with Adrian and I when she was still in diapers and learned to paddle my kayak on a trip up to the Boundary Waters. We've has so much fun together over the years and it goes without saying that this quilt was stitched with a great deal of love for it's recipient.Because I wanted this quilt to be special, I decided to use my beloved stash of florals from Westminster Fibers. Most of the fabrics that I used are designed by Kaffe Fassett or Phillip Jacobs. The pale turquoise pansy fabric in the above picture in probably one of my all time favorite fabrics. It came in several different colorways and I confess that I bought every single one. The nine patch block is one of my favorite quilt patterns, I love it for it's simplicity and versatility. The blocks are six inches square and alternate with solid florals and nine patch blocks. I free motion quilted a loopy pattern with variegated thread. I finished off the quilt with a hand stitched tag on the back:In December, when Adrian and I went to visit Alex at college and I was happy to see the quilt scrunched up on her bunk bed in her dorm room. It made me happy to think of her sleepy and warm, curled up underneath the quilt that I made for her. Covering up with a handmade quilt is like a big fabric hug from the person who made it.

Journal Quilt Class

Last week I went to my last journal quilt class for the year. It was by far one of the best classes that I've ever signed up for. The class was was taught by Susan Stein, owner of Colorful Quilts and Textiles. Colorful Quilts is my favorite place to shop, take classes and to get creatively inspired. The journal quilt class was held once a month for the past nine months. Each class started with a show and tell, moved into a demo of a fiber arts technique and ended with us playing and experimenting with the particular technique. The idea was to learn a technique and then go home and make a small quilt using that technique. Several class members came up with a theme for their quilts such as castles or stars or leaves. Susan's journal quilts had a wonderful southwest theme that she carried through by using particular colors and fabrics and images. I had no theme and as a result my quilts were all over the place in terms of colors and images and fabrics. Next year I will most definitely attempt to unify my designs. Even if my quilts didn't quite all match, several of them did look pretty good together. The reason for this is my obsession with the color purple and the fact that on any project it's the first color I reach for in my fabric stash. Here are some of the quilts that I made over the past year:I learned how to make silk fusion fabric for this quilt. It involves using silk fiber and textile medium and results in a lovely shimmery fabric like paper. One classmate added feathery seeds from a milkweed pod to her silk fusion. It was fabulous and I must remember to do that sometime.I learned how to print on fabric using texture plates for this quilt. I used iridescent jacquard textile paints for this quilt. I liked the technique so much that I printed up a big stack of fabric and made a long wall hanging that I hung in my dining room.This quilt was made with sun printed fabrics. I used Setacolor paints which are light sensitive. I painted the fabric, laid leaves over it and let the paint dry in the sun. You have to do this on a very sunny day or your images wont be as sharp. The hearts on this quilt are cut out of sheets angelina fiber. Angelina is a shimmery shredded fiber that melts to itself when you iron it. I added a layer of misty fuse fusible web over the hearts and topped it off with a piece of sheer magenta organza. I love the look of organza over fabric. It makes everything muted and ethereal. The misty fuse holds everything in place beautifully. I used the same technique for this quilt:I found a light blue shimmery organza with glittery silver beads in the prom section of the fabric store. I thought it would be perfect for the night sky. I cut out a piece of greenish bluish batik for the aurora borealis and laid it on dark blue batik fabric. I covered the fabric with Misty fuse and the organza and ironed it all together. I cut out the mountains out of the same dark blue batik. All that was left was to quilt the sky and add some snow to the top of the mountains. I love this quilt but I wish that my mountains weren't quite so triangular.We learned a very cool technique in class last week that I haven't worked into a quilt quite yet. This a piece of fabric printed using meat trays and jacquard fabric paint. Yep, you read that correctly. We printed fabric using styrofoam meat trays that hold the ground beef and steaks you buy at the grocery store. You can make all kinds of designs on them using a regular ball point pen or pencil. I decided to use the images and words that were already printed on the trays because I thought it was neat looking and besides, why do work when it's already done for you, right? I scored a few extra lines around the printed stuff so that I didn't look completely lazy and dabbed on some paint. I think it's pretty flippin' cool if I do say so myself. It looks like hieroglyphics or alien writing. I am most definitely going to be playing further with this technique. Dang, I loved taking this class. From the artwork that other classmates shared, to the demos, to the hands on playtime, it never failed to inspire me. I always came home energized and excited to try new things. What a totally fun and worthwhile class this was. I can't wait until next year!

Crazy Chicken

This crazy chicken wall hanging is probably one of my all time favorite things that I've ever created. I made it a few years ago and it has hung on my sewing room door ever since. There's so much joy and color in this quilt that it always makes me smile. I can tell that I was really happy when I worked on this. I am my harshest critic and it sometimes shocks me that I created something that I like so much. The pattern is adapted from one by Sue Spargo who designs the most amazing wool applique quilts and patterns. I absolutely love her style and creativity. My Mom took a class from her earlier this year and she is having a total blast making and embellishing wool appliqued quilt blocks.I hand dyed the wool for this wall hanging in an all day crazy microwave dyeing session in my kitchen. I dyed fat quarter pieces using procion mx dyes and vinegar for the mordant. It was great fun experimenting with colors and I wound up with a drawer full of pretty dyed wool. My kitchen smelled oddly like wet sheep and vinegar for a day or two though!I think one of the things that I loved about this project was that it combined so many fun techniques. I got to play mad scientist with dyeing the fabric and then I got to select all of the fun colors of beads and fabrics and embroidery threads.I absolutely love doing embroidery. Even the simple blanket stitch in this project was fun to do. The feather stitch is one of my favorites as well. I used size 8 DMC perle cotton.I gathered up all of the size 6 and 8 matte beads that I had in my meager bead stash. The beads are one of my favorite parts of this quilt. I am crazy about matte beads. They look like candy and I would eat them if they were made of sugar and not glass. Check out the purple head feathers. Purple is my favorite color. Wouldn't it be great if there were chickens that really looked like this? I'd love to own real chickens, just a few of them. It would be wonderful to have fresh eggs. This chicken would lay eggs in lovely shades of magenta.

September Sunflower

This is another one of my quilts from the Journal Quilt Class that I am currently taking at Colorful Quilts and Textiles. A couple of months ago, our class teacher Susan Stein showed us some really cool samples of what you can do with the cheapo sheets of acrylic felt that are available in every craft store on the planet. The technique involved distressing the felt by melting it with a heat gun. So I went out and bought a sheet of felt and it sat untouched in my sewing room until the day before the next class. This quilt is the result of what I did with the felt.
First, I tore up some random pieces of printed scrapbook paper and glued them onto the felt with watered down PVA glue. Then I glued down two layers of crumpled tissue paper on top. Next I painted the tissue paper with dyna flow paint in shades of yellow and gold. I let the felt dry and then I pulled out some rubber stamps and stamped all over the painted and papered felt. I wound up with a stiff piece of felt paper that looked like this:I cut petal shapes out of the felt using my soldering iron, which gave the edges a neat melted look. For the center seed part of the sunflower I used a tyvek mailing envelope that I painted, sewed and steamed with my pressing iron. Tyvek is cool stuff to play with. It takes paint beautifully and melts easily with a heat gun or an iron. I set a pressing cloth over the back of the tyvek and pressed with my steam iron for a few seconds and voila! The tyvek bubbled up to form three dimensional 'seeds' (or gecko skin in the case of this quilt). I used some fabric that had I dyed earlier this summer for the back ground and leaves. I quilted the blue background first, added the stem and quilted that and then added the leaves and quilted them. The stem and leaves are fused to the background using wonder under. I wanted the sunflower seeds to be dimensional so I layered several circles of cotton batting underneath it before I stitched it to the quilt. Next came the petals. I began laying them down and stitching them onto the quilt, leaving some space in between the petals. After the first layer of petals was stitched down, I tucked some petals under and over those until the flower began to look dimensional. My sewing machine was not very happy with me as I was sewing down the last few petals. It balked at stitching through several layers of glued and melted felt paper.I glued some fuzzy yarn around the center of the flower to cover up the edges of the petals and then added backing and binding. Lastly, I colored the center stitch lines on the petals with a brown ochre water color pencil. I am really happy with this little quilt. I am so glad that I didn't blow off the melted felt technique and not experiment as I was so tempted to do. This class has been very good for me. It has helped me to think outside the box and to try new techniques that I wouldn't have otherwise. Normally, when I read about a clever fiber arts technique in a magazine or a book I'll think 'how cool, I need to try that!'. But then I never do. With this class, I always experiment with the techniques at home because then I have something for show and tell the following month. As an added incentive, if you bring show and tell to class you get to put your name in a basket to win a fabulous prize each month. So there you have it, dangle a reward in front of my nose and I'll try anything! I am the quintessential Pavlovian dog of crafting. Bribe me with a treat and I will perform. It just occurred to me that I have yet to win the monthly prize and the year is almost up. I wonder if Pavlov's dogs turned on him when he failed to reward them? This could get ugly....

Gecko On A Stick

Here's one of the items I entered in the MN State Fair. The category was 'quilt on a stick' which is a tongue-in-cheek homage to all of the goodies you can get at the fair that are on a stick (pickle
on a stick, deep fried candy bar on a stick, alligator on a stick, etc...). There were almost 100 submissions which is amazing because this was the first year for this category. My entry, gecko on a stick, was not a winner but it did make it into the top 25.
The gecko skin was made from a tyvek mailing envelope. I painted it, stitched on it, shrunk it with a heat gun, painted it some more, fused it, cut it to shape, and stitched it onto the fabric. The feel of the tyvek is very leathery and the metallic paints give it a lovely shimmer. I gave the quilt some bling by adding a few of my coveted ceramic buttons that I bought in Prague from a street vendor.














The quilt is finished off with a handle made from an ordinary paint stirring stick from the hardware store. The colors are typical Pam colors of purple, lime green and turquoise. One day, when pigs fly, I will make something in brown. There were some really cool quilts submitted and it was fun seeing all of the creative things that everyone did. My friend Carmelita Fantastica entered a quilt in this category too. She made a beautifully embroidered red heart on a white background. Hers was in the top 25 too. Way to go Carmelita!!!