My first craft was crochet. I have wanted to crochet snowflakes for a long time. 
"Cold Margarita"
I love cold weather better than the heat. (I know, I know...why do I live in AZ?!) When I saw the new word, "Cold," I thought not of being cold, but how to get cooled down in the heat. Hence, a frozen margarita! I had a lot of fun picking out fabric pieces. I happened on a sale on metallic threads and bought several. My Mother makes beaded bracelets, so she invited me over to look through her stash. White beads for the salt on the rim of the glass was my first thought. Once I saw all she had, I chose and sewed on more! The straw is made of clear, tubular beads. I had never used metallic threads, so that was an education in itself. As usual with this group project, I learned a lot by doing this one. Cheers!!
By Nancy
I got the idea for the Chinese jacket almost as soon as we got "the word." I had some beautiful silk brocade left over from making a Chinese-style jacket for my niece a couple of years ago and figured that would be perfect. Well, it would have been, IF I could have remembered where I had stashed the fabric. I finally gave up and made it in other colors. In retrospect, I wish I had made the jacket in the red border fabric, and used the floral for the border--the frogs don't show up well. The quilt said it wanted a beaded border, which annoyed me, but it didn't take as long as I thought it would. But then the jacket looked bare, so I added some beads to that as well--mostly little red sparkly ones. The jackets opens up to reveal a fun red cat-print lining. I couldn't find any frog prints in red.
I didn't notice until AFTER I looked at all of yours (and had already started mine), that all of us used a blue background-HONEST! and interesting...
So, this is my COLD piece. I'm not an artist, so the bridge is questionable; thank goodness for titles. My vision is looking under the bridge, so you don't see the top of the bridge. (If you have to explain your joke/art, it isn't a joke/art.) sigh...
I wanted to play with mixing machine quilting with hand embroidery. If I really wanted to do it justice, I would have piled on more handwork over more machine work, but I wanted to keep things simple, and quick.
As much as I love quilting, and especially handwork, I have to repeat to myself always...enjoy the process..., but I'll tell you, working small is great!
Here is my "Cold" quilt, actually finished on time. Now I have to go back and do "Frogs" and "Peace." Sigh. You can't see from the picture, but the white snowflake fabric is sparkly with silver metallic. It's quilted in sparkly thread as well.
When the word was pulled for this month and I heard "Cold", I immediately knew that I wanted to make a snowflake from that word. Knowing that I am still computer challenged, I had my wonderful son, Jer, bail me out again. He took the word, reversed it, rotated it, mirror imaged it, and whatever else he had to do to get it to look like this. We then copied it onto freezer paper, ironed the letters onto white wool felt, and cut them out, and machine appliqued them onto the blue background. The polar bear completes the image I had invisioned. I hand beaded the background with small seed beads, gave it a binding and labeled it. It meets my expectations, and thanks again Jeremy.
Nite Frogs
Finally have Sandstone completed! My husband helped draw the figure, I had technical assistance from Anne with the freemotion quilting.
Well, Here is my Frog quilt, titled: "FROG: What's red & green, & red & green, & red & green?" Yes, I know I'm sick, but I have been going with the first thought that enters my mind after I see the new word. I tried to think of something else, but it just kept coming back to this.
As soon as I saw Maria Elkins' on Quilting Arts TV demonstrating how to make portraits I knew I had found a way to make my frog. And with my children off to school once again I finally had the uninterrupted time to make her happen!
She is made from fabric I dyed and is quilted with rayon thread. I am feeling very good about the quilting on this piece because of all the instruction and practice I received in Lisa B's class. Thank you Lisa!
This was 99% finished for a long time. I wanted a special peace quote for the label. Instead, it is better that I waited, the right words came to me this afternoon. Blue background and tie dye shirt were done in Anne's batiking class this summer. Mini clothespins were courtesy of Kaye. Now to frog.
By Nancy
So, I started thinking about the word “peace” and I saw a peace symbol (of course) and a dove. Ho-hum. . . Then I thought about “white” - the color of peace. Then I just stopped thinking about it - for now.At the same time, I recently received three quilts back from two shows with evaluations. The only criticisms were “uneven stitches”, “irregular stitches”, etc. They loved the fabric, the design, even the finished edges. Frustrating, because regular, even stitches have become the standard now that their are so many stitch regulators on so many machines, including regular home machines. But to me that takes the art out of what I’m doing. I’ve heard that the stitch regulators are even frustrating to those people who care about even stitches. So, it came to me - make a piece that has purposefully uneven stitches. The image came right away. . . To be fair Sylvia and others have not taken these judges seriously for a while. They do what they like and what they want and just laugh at the criticisms. And rightly so. It’s just taken me longer to realize in my heart that it’s just a bunch of baloney. I feel free. I’m at peace. Oh! That’s our word this month! Revolution can bring about true inner peace. So that is why my “peace” piece is called “Unregulated Stitch Revolution.”
Well, did decide not to continue with the "faces" I had thought of putting a 'ho-hum' dove on a hat but was not able to make the 3-D idea work.. then when I started thinking about peace I thought of water. This piece of fabric is very strange... got it from a fabric exchange..it is sort of transparent and very stiff... I thought it would soften after I washed it... well it didn't.... what I did was use two layers to give the feeling of distance and then did some thread play to create the land (horizon) and added bushes to the water... 
Thought Process: When I think of Peace the word seems to morph into "peaceful" and when I think peaceful I think trees, forests, nature and cemeteries. It may sound morbid but let me explain. Cemeteries are quiet places where one can think without much interference. Also my mother and I have always enjoyed going into cemeteries and looking at the names, dates and inscriptions on the tomb stones. We wonder about the people each tombstone represents. Who were they? How did they live? How did they die?
I must say that this 12x12 project has been a real challenge for me. Working "fast" (yes, 2 months is fast for me) and "small" puts me out of my comfort zone. Which is good! I will definitely learn from this experience. I've already learned that I shouldn't care too much about deadlines where art is concerned. Right? Is that a good excuse? And to simplify!!!! I love what Lisa Chin did with the chennile technique. And Leslie's wool roving was beautifully done.
Was the back, now is the front.
Was front, now the back.
Looking at pictures on the internet, I came across a very colorful sandstone picture that I tried to emulate with my quilt block. I used wool roving in several colors and hand felted it on a wool background.
Having just returned from Arches National Park in Moab two weeks prior to our chosen word it was easy for me to paint a picture of one of the arches there. Acrylic paints were applied to muslin fabric and it was machine quilted with coordinating thread. I straight-stitched several times around the edge for the binding.
I really like how this turned out with the curls of the Batik behind the hand dyed fabric but I haven't quilted it yet because after talking with my son another idea kept bugging me. My son told me that sandstone wasn't an image for him, but rather a texture and so I played in my mind with different ideas of how I could create sandstone texture without actually glueing sand to the fabric. I came up with this:
Basically it is the same idea as that used in making faux chenille. I layed a large number of small scraps onto a piece of batting creating about three layers. The scraps were arranged in random directions. I then put a solid piece of fabric on the top and back and stitched lines all over the fabric in a pattern I had seen in many sandstone pictures on the internet. After I stitched, I cut between the stitches and viola! multicolored layers of texture. They are soft layers, so maybe not the rough texture I was looking for tactilly but more visually rough.
Here is a close up of some of the cut through layers.
I don't like this quilt as much as I like the plain sandstone because I used a printed batik for the outerlayer instead of a solid. The underlayers don't seem to show through as well, and the dark outerlayer and dark blue background isn't enough of a contrast in value so the whole thing is reading dark to me. If I decide to do it again I'll change up the values. This might be something fun to try in a bigger size! 
