LOL!

Check out Forest Jane's blog, she has pictures from our retreat too. She was nice enough to feature me as well. But, I had to just ROFLOL!

You can sure tell that I got up rilly irly that morning! My picture was taken sometime after breakfast and I had already been up since 5 am. That is the face of crazed.

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Oh! And...

Oh! And I realized that I really want this quilt to be right so I am planning to sew up a few mock ups of the top to practice on and hopefully I will make them big enough to make pillow shams out of them.

Do pillow shams go on the pillows you sleep with or on special pillows that never get used? I never quite understood exactly how the multiple pillow thing on the bed arrangement thing works.

Well, off to find a design web site or book that might tell me the mysterious ways and habits of bed pillow arrangement

Quilting Ideas

I went out to my car at lunch yesterday and listened to Tool/Lateralus really loud and sketched on ideas for the center of my quilt. I really like some good thump to draw to sometimes. My iPod gets me through my sketch sessions at work too. This is the best one that I liked from that hour in the car. While I was there it rained and looked so amazingly beautiful coming down, and then cleared up just as fast as it came so I go back inside to work.

This is the best one of about a dozen ideas. Free motion, of course.

oh, hai!

This is the sketch I did once I made the pieces for the center. What do you think? I came pretty close to my original vision!

I'm Back from Retreat!

This weekend's weather was perfect. The retreat is in the woods and all the leaves were colorful and everything felt like a perfect fall day!

I accomplished my biggest goal this weekend, to finish my large bed quilt top, back and bring it home basted. It was a miracle that came true!

I arrived with the top and the two side boarders to finish, so I got to work on Friday:


Once those two borders were finished and sewn on I realized that I had a big gap at the bottom and had to extend the bottom border so that it would be even.


I finished the top just before dinner on Saturday and me and two of my friends took it outside to photograph it from the back stair case. It measures about 105 x 110 inches! A monster! Here it is hanging side ways:


Can you see some of the lovely setting we had to work in?

So, after dinner is when the "real" quilters get busy. It is our last night and everyone wanted to sew on their projects. Myself included. I got busy with the back and managed to keep working on it until 1 am. I am such a pansy! Many of the other ladies were still going strong when I walked around to say good night. My roomie worked until 4:30 am!

Well, I woke up this morning around 5:30 and realized I might have a chance to finish that back in time to baste the quilt before we had to leave at noon. So I got busy again. Just about everyone had stayed up late and were fast asleep when I crept out to my work space. I got the back finished just before breakfast! I had enough time to spread it out across 6 tables put together before I ate. I don't want to miss the meals because that is when I get a chance to chat with everyone and we do fun things through out the meal.


Miracle, Miracle!
Several ladies volunteered to help me baste after breakfast and I worked on it steadily through the morning and just around noon I finished basting it. But, I couldn't have gotten it done with out so many wonderful friends to help me.

Here is what the back side looks like:


We basted a few wrinkles at the edges, but the center is together and that is where I will start quilting. So I will just adjust the errant basting later on. I've figured out the quilting for the long vertical sections, but not yet for the two center regions.


Well, I'm beat. I've already napped this after noon and I have to go back to my day job tomorrow so, probably no more quilting until next weekend.

Moving On from Martha

I took "Crazy Martha" down off of my design wall and carefully folded up the pieces and packed it away in a box. I hope that seeing a blank design wall will be more inviting now.

Thank You....

Thank you to all of your encouraging words. You have offered a lot of great ideas that I hope to encorporate into my process. I am still working through this *thang* and am looking for *that* project to jump start me. Bu-leeve me... I have no problem stuffing those pesky dud projects into the bottom of a drawer! Oh, how many secrets do I have already, oh... wait, I listed them all on my Stashbusting site. No escaping that, no secrets...

>>>>>>To something NEW and BEYOND! er.... lets hope so....

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doldrums...

You may have noticed from my lack of posts these last few weeks that I seem to have lost my way. My quilting mojo has packed up and left. My voices have been quiet. I go into my quilt room, look at what I have going on with my projects, what I want to work on, pick up a piece of fabric, pet it, put it back down. The only action that room has been getting is I will occasionally iron some clothes for work. Pretty dull, huh?

So, what do you do when you find yourself in the creative doldrums? I am really hoping that next week's quilt retreat will light a fire under my butt and I will get going again.