20080413 - Quilting

I am going to take a break from the South American trip to talk a little about the present. I have been pretty busy with quilting the last few weeks. I took a class in free-hand machine quilting. I still wish I had access to a long arm quilting machine but in the meantime I decided I need to get better at quilting on my standard sewing machine. The primary thing seems to be practice, practice, practice.
I also took a class on quilt embellishing with beads. Some time ago I made a Ricky Timms Convergence quilt. I decided to take that quilt to the class to work on. I had in my mind that after the class I would have a beaded quilt. Tee hee hee was I mistaken. Beading takes lots and lots of time.

Here is my quilt.


And here is one of the beaded sections.


And this is another technique used to add something like a cabochon This beading is going to take a loonnngggg time


I have been working on making quilts from leftover scraps in my (and others quilting stashes)

This is a quilt top I made from scraps from a quilt a friend made.


This is a quilt top I made mostly from scraps from baby quilts I have made.


This another quilt from scrap blocks from a friend along with fabric from my stash.



This a quilt top I made from 4 Noah’s Arc blocks I got from friends. I decided to add the Ocean Waves blocks. It has taken me a while (almost a year since I got the original blocks) to finish this top. Took some time to get the inspiration, and some more time for it to float to the top of ‘My Work on Me Now’ list.


All of these last four quilts are going to be practice, practice, practice for my machine quilting. It is much easier to practice quilting on smaller quilts.

In addition to actually quilting I am co chair for the Program Committee for the Valley Quilt Guild (our local Guild). Right now I am learning about our job by writing a Job Description for the Co Chairs as well as Policy Statements, Procedure Documents and various other forms we need to do our job. It is a lot of work but it is getting me involved in the Guild which is a lot of fun.

Additionally, I joined the Out of The Box Bee at the guild. We are currently working on a Crayon Challenge, something very different for me. I will share some photos as time goes on. It’s due in October. The Bee is going to start working through the book ‘Art Quilt Workbook’ so I just ordered the book. We are working the first chapter on our own and then will work as a group. It’s pretty exciting and way out of my box.