Chinese Frogs, a little late

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.

Not my favorite of the the ones I've made for this project, but at least it's done. Now on to Peace and I'll be all caught up.

Snowflake

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.

My first idea was to do a sunprint of snowflakes, inspired by a quilt in "Quick Strip paper Piecing" by Peggy Martin. I took a week long seminar from her in late August/early September. However, things got crazy when I got home. Had to get ready for Quilt Fest, and then we left town in our RV for a month. When we got back (a week ago), the sun-printing season was definitely over!

The quilt I ended up making is one of the blocks in Peggy's sun-printed and paper-foundation pieced quilt. I wanted it to evoke snowshoeing in the Uintas on a sunny Sunday morning, right after a snowstorm. The sky is so blue it almost hurts, and the snow just sparkles.

Kolob Canyon

When we got "the word," I immediately got an image of what I wanted to do and how to do it. I wanted to make stack n slash blocks, or what Sylvia calls EZ Crazy, but decided to sew two fabrics together with curved piecing before I started slashing and rearranging. When I went to my fabric stash to pull fabrics from my orange bin, I found leftover strata from my Beach Party Strips and Curves class that I took from Louisa Smith at Empty Spools last spring. The colors were perfect, so I paired them up with batiks. I had some pictures of what they looked like before I started slashing, but they got lost in the camera or something. I added some deserty green browns for the canyon floor, and a few bits of blue because I love the sosuthern Utah combination of water and desert. The blocks ended up being quite small, so the curved piecing doesn't show up as much as I had envisioned. So I curved the outside edges of the quilt instead. And then added some blooming desert plants.

Ellie and Tex

"Comfort" was a little hard for me initially. I immediately thought of comfort when sad or grieving. Since I'm an upbeat person and pretty much never sad or depressed, it didn't really seem to apply. I then started thinking about what keeps me happy and "comfort"able--friends, family, my pets, and the outdoors.

I first envisioned my quilt with me in the center, surrounded by a circle of friends. Didn't like it. Then I started working with the concept of a row quilt--a row of girls, row of flowers, and a row of dogs. The blocks (and thus the pieces) ended up being really tiny, and since I only have two dogs, a whole row of them wasn't right. So I simplified. Just me and my dogs, with the flowers representing being outside. I designed it in EQ6, using flowers from one of the Sew Precise libraries, modifying one of their paper-pieced dog patterns to more closely resemble mine, and copied a "big sister" block from an old Jean Ray Laury book called "Incredible Quilts for Kids of All Ages." I printed everything up, pulled fabric from my stash, and took it along with me on our 2 month long Arizona trip. I wish I had made my dress red instead of purple because I wear red and usually not purple, and I think it would look better, and I'm still not sure about the polka dot binding, but that's what I had with me. But overall, I'm pleased with the result.