Summer Fun

This past Wednesday my DD and I drove to Boston where my cousin Lisa drove us to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In 1903 Isabella Stewart Gardner opened the museum she built to house her collection of paintings, textiles (tapestries and lace!), sculpture, and on and on. The museum contains many famous works of art including illuminated manuscripts and much religious art. The building is four stories high and at the center is the courtyard shown above. The galleries or balconies are on all four sides of the courtyard going up the four stories with a glass roof at the top. Oh, how I wished I could walk in that courtyard!

After a delicious lunch at a pub in Charlestown, Zoe, the GPS, and I made our way northward to Maine once again. We stopped at "Knight's" in Cape Neddick, right on Route 1 so it wasn't too far off track. I bought these fabrics and an Eleanor Burns book called Radiant Star Quilts. I've been busy designing my own "radiant star" for the living room. I want to use teal blue and red violet fabrics. My living room walls are a buttery yellow so I think it will look nice. I just bought a new loveseat and sofa so I need something new on the wall.

I've been working on a new applique piece. The original picture is from a fairy book published by Dover. The parrot is just a solid piece of fabric but it is a batik so I tried to take full advantage of the color variations. The flowers are made from "sky" fabric, well a sunset sky. I will make a couple of flowers out of a yellow print for a little variety.

I recently bought a laptop computer and it was fun to sew on my piece this afternoon while watching "The Quilt Show." Life is good!

Have you noticed how dreary the weather has been? I think we have two seasons now: Winter and Dreary. Well, the good thing is my sewing room is comfortable instead of 90!

Enjoy the Dreary!

One thing leads to another.....

Was it really only last weekend that I sat out in the sun sewing the binding on my hanging? This weekend we are back in the drizzle.

Art Quilts Maine challenge for this year's Maine Quilts show is to create a wall quilt using a favorite children's book for inspiration. I was going to make an Anne of Green Gables quilt, but decided to use "Louhi Witch of North Farm" instead. That book by Toni de Gerez and illustrated by Barbara Cooney was a favorite when my children were small. In it Louhi steals the sun and moon and hides them behind nine iron doors, which is what inspired my quilt

Yesterday was the big reveal of our quilts. Wouldn't you know I did not take a photo of mine? You will have to look for it at Maine Quilts this summer!

You know how one thing leads to another? Yesterday my DH and I went out and bought some new furniture for the living room. We are getting a new sofa and loveseat to replace our 20 year old sofa. They will be delivered next Friday, so when I got home I thought how we will have to move some things out of the living room to make way for the new things. Not wanting to deal with that just yet, I went up stairs and decided to weed out some books from my bookshelf and that's when the major de-clutter and clear out began.

Totes full of fabric and half done projects....

everything sorted into piles on my table......

several hours later-one tidy bookcase (the bookcase with books is on the other side of the room)....

and labeled totes tucked under the table. I divided fabrics according to color-whites, browns, yellow/orange, blue, red, purple, and green. One tote already had mostly reproduction fabrics and I left that as is. One has large lengths of fabrics, pieces of batting, and panels. Several UFOs got tucked in, too. Two more totes are not in this photo.

It's a good thing I didn't take "before" photos, it would just have been too scary. See the long basket? I like to put my current project in that. I can clean up the worktable and put everything away in the basket.

I threw out about four bags of stuff! I have a pile of things to give away, but not much. I threw out all those little snips of fabric that have been gathering over the years. Gone! Whew, does that ever feel good!

I don't think I've shown you this little applique piece. I got the image from a Dover publication of fairies. She's the Queen of the Fairies! I've been reading Suzanne Marshall's applique books and was inspired to make this. Just a little practice piece. Now that I have my room cleaned up I am ready to tackle a bigger applique project. More on that in the future when there is something to show.

Can you see the image on this wall quilt? I made this quite a few years ago. The center image is a photo transfer of my Grandmother when she was a young woman. She's sitting outside with a straw hat on her knees. The panel above her is a straw hat which I rubber stamped on muslin. The one below is a little girl in a pinafore with a straw hat, too. See what you find when you clean up?

Enjoy!

Electric Quilt!

I've had Electric Quilt 7 for some time now, but have not been able to use it. I tried running Bootcamp on my Mac, but EQ7 kept crashing. It was so frustrating that I finally gave up. Recently my son found a good laptop on Woot and suggested I might buy it and I did! My first pc ever. The laptop is a refurbished HP with Windows 7, works like a charm. I did go buy a mouse yesterday and that makes everything much easier.

EQ7 comes with a series of 10 short videos to get you started. Also, you can print out lessons to learn all that the program has to offer. I enjoyed watching the videos again to refresh my memory. I haven't gone through the lessons yet. One tip I read in a quilt magazine is very helpful. The tip is to find a quilt in a magazine or book and try to recreate it in EQ. This is what I did with the Double Nine Patch here. My inspiration came from Diane McClun's classic Quilts! Quilts! Quilts!

The quilt in the book is made with lovely brown and cinnamon fabrics with a very dark blue accent color throughout. I changed the alternate blocks from brown to blue. The blocks measure 9 inches and the finished quilt is 40x40 inches including the 1 inch border. Enjoy!

P.S. Looking at the McClun book later, I realized her quilt does not have the alternate solid block, so I haven't really duplicated her design, just made my own variation. I do like the on-point setting she used, don't you?

Mystery Trip!

The long awaited Back Road mystery bus ride has come and gone for another year. It was really fun. I haven't ever been with the group before, but this year may well mark the beginning of an annual event for me.

We met at a Park and Ride in Gardiner at 7a.m. I got up at

4:50 am and was not tired all day. In fact, when I went to bed at 10pm I couldn't go to sleep. Our super leaders planned a wonderful day for us. They met us at the bus with a goodie bag Ann made which was filled with a bottle of water, granola bar

, and an apple. Of course chocolates were passed out at intervals throughout the day.

See the blue woolen flower pin? Each one of us got one! Cut with the "go-cutter" which our chapter owns. In fact, the pin was a clue to our first stop, but I don't think anybody guessed where it was......

We sped out of Maine, over the Piscataqua River to New Hampshire. Our first stop was the Dorr Mill store in Newport, which is near the Vermont border. Some people like to make table mats and little things with wool and embroidery. I haven't tried it, but there were lots of beautiful things to see in this shop. Rug hooking and rug braiding supplies and patterns galore. Lots of wool fabric, large and small pieces and by the yard. Several dolls and patterns by Gail Wilson, who is the doll designer of my doll that I just made. Very tempting, but I didn't buy anything. Also half of this shop was lovely women's clothing, all stuff that we would wear. And jewelry. Again, I didn't buy ANYTHING! Amazing.

Nena did a great job with the itinerary. We had plenty of time at each stop to browse and shop. Next stop: Henniker, New Hampsire...

Next stop was Henniker, NH to Quilted Threads, a beautiful big quilt shop in a house that was featured in Quilt Sampler magazine recently. The shop looked very spiffy because it takes a lot of work to get it ready for a magazine photo shoot. I shopped til I dropped here! I had to remind myself that we had other quilt shops on the itinerary, pacing is crucial, right? This shop has beautiful batiks, fabrics for children and babies, modern prints, reproduction prints, Asian fabrics, a wall of fat quarters, lots of supplies, and most interesting of all Japanese fabrics. The Japanese fabrics are those taupe and brown and gray fabrics they are known for using in their quilts. Most of these fabrics are linen like, they have a texture unlike our cotton quilting fabrics. I have not been a fan of these taupe quilts, but when I saw them in person I really appreciated them much more. Very soft and calming. One quilt was simply horizontal strips of these fabrics. Another was made of blocks done in a gradation of color from brown to light taupe again in strips, one block vertical, the next block the same but turned horizontally. Beautiful.

From Henniker it was a short trip to our final shopping destination: Concord. We stopped at the Golden Gese and then walked a couple of blocks through a lovely residential area with trees in full bloom and tulips and daffodils looking bright and cheerful to the Main Street and Peggy Anne's Quilt Shop.

We had time to browse in a few shops and stop for a much needed coffee in a little courtyard cafe. Then it was back on the bus for dinner at the Common Man Restaurant in Portsmouth. Our homeward journey included watching "The King's Speech." I had watched it before, but it was every bit as good the second time.

Lovely day with lovely friends!

Some of my purchases....

potholder pattern ....Christmas sewing!

thread

Sort of boring choice of fabrics, but I was looking for tone on tone fabrics for applique.

Some lusciousness from Quilted Threads....Japanese fabric with strawberries, sale batik and sale red dot, shimmery blue delicious fabric!

Whew, that was fun, glad it's only once a year!

p.s. sorry about the way this post looks, but for some reason blogger isn't playing nicely tonight.