Vertical Quilting Curve

It seems everyone is going green these days. Although you wouldn’t think of a quilter as unfriendly to the earth some of the products used may be. If you use polyester batting you are using a product made from petroleum that is the same stuff you put in the gas tank of your car. You can find more about how polyester is made at answers.com. Also, cotton is a lush natural fiber but is hard on the land it grows on and farmers tend to use harsh pesticides to guarantee a good crop. Many statistics can be found at the Organic Trade Association.

Mountain Mist may have an answer to this. They are producing eco-friendly products under the brand eco craft. They are using a product called PLA which comes from corn. They have details on their website. There are 2 battings you can choose from: one that is 100% PLA or one that is 50% PLA and 50% cotton. I picked up samples at the Spring International Quilt Show. The cotton blend has a nice feel to it and retains it shape when I pull on it. The 100% PLA is airy and see-through and feels much like polyester. Mountain Mist also produces batting and pillow forms with the PLA.

I haven’t found the batting in the stores yet although Joann’s is supposed to carry it and I did check their website and it was not there either. I am anxious to give it a try. The samples I have are 2 - 4″ squares which are a little hard to give it a good test drive. Mountain Mist is having a Crafting A Better Planetâ„¢ Quilt Competition where you must make a quilt using all natural products.

I am not saying that quilters everywhere switch to this product but it does give us a guardians of the planet something to think about. Of course this product is still brand new and the real benefit to the environment is yet to be seen. For many quilters the real value of this product is not just the environment friendly aspect but how will it quilt. I’m sure many of you will give it a try. Please drop a line here and let us know how it does.

At least Dario Franchitti will just as the winners have for the past 30 years because one special lady sees to it. Jeannette Holder has made a quilt every year since 1976 for the Indy 500 winners. According to the Indianapolis Star article I read, she has the signatures of every winner of the race except for 1920 and these are placed into the quilt. Another article I found said the quilts generally are 10 feet by 10 feet (Whoa!) and the first winner she presented one to, Johnny Rutherford, has his displayed behind the pace car in his race shop.

That is some prolific quilting. I just wish I could find a photo of one of the quilts. Next time I’m in Indianapolis I’m going to have to try to get to the Brickyard Museum to see if they have any. I lived there for a short time and never made it over. This is the first time I’ve ever heard about the quilts so now I’m more interested. I would like to go during fan day when they open up the Brickyard and let you drive your car around the track.

I don’t know if there’s a person or an event I would like to make a quilt for. Maybe Jon Bon Jovi? Harry Connick Jr? Peyton Manning might like one. I probably should start with my hubby though. I’ve made ones for members of his family but not him yet. Who would your fantasy quilt giftee be?

I love the look of needle punch. It’s like miniature rug hooking but much more portable. What’s even better you can use it to embellish quilts. It’s makes a great motif for crazy quilts, the center of blocks or for blocks themselves.

This weekend, even though we were traveling I was able to finish a piece that I started to demonstrate needle punch at a Chicago Craft Collective meet up. I was able to work on it when my daughter was in the hospital as well. For this one I drew up a paisley pattern and chose some jewel tone floss colors.

My second piece I’m showing is the first one I ever finished and decided it would look cute in a quilt block. After that I wanted to show it off so I attached it to a pre-finished tote bag.

I definitely like to do this technique and I will be experimenting with it more in the future. One thing I plan on doing is some spontaneous designing drawing with the needle and thread as I punch. Have you done any non-traditional designs with needlepunch?

This weekend is probably one of the least likely ones to get any quilting done. It is a time for family, friends, picnics and the official kick-off to the summer season. But it is also a time to remember our loved ones who are no longer with us and those who lost their lives who gave what mattered most for our country. If you haven’t heard, www.ancestry.com now has the military records for personnel going back to the first ones ever kept. You can help remember and celebrate the military members in your family’s ancestry by researching the records. The service will be available free until June 6 on the anniversary of D-Day. I’m going to be checking on a few and see if there is anything I can use for a memory art quilt.

I will gone away from the Internet for a trip to family and will return to the blogosphere by Tuesday. I hope you all have a safe and fun holiday weekend.

This is going to be an ongoing challenge for myself and if you would like to join in just let me know and if you have a blog and post something related to the challenge I will link to you when I next write about the challenge.

First a question. How many magazines do you have? How many of those have you completed a project out of or even tried a technique? I have more magazines than I think I could ever count. I have always had the idea to catalogue them into a computer database so I could search them and find just what I needed but if I take time to do that then I would never have time to do the project. But, if I can’t find that magazine I saw that great idea in then I will never get to do it. In circles we go.

So, I have devised a plan, sort of. My challenge is to go through my magazines (in no particular order) and not only find a project I want to do but to actually do it. Now, I have one stipulation and that is I don’t have to follow the directions exactly as written unless I am trying to master a certain technique. Although I have hundreds of books, patterns and magazines, I find it very hard to make a design exactly as shown. I am one of those people who can’t stand kits to make a duplicate of the quilt hanging on the quilt store wall. Mine has to be different. I like to pick out my own fabrics and colors.

That’s it, at least for now. My deadline for myself is June 15 to find a project and get it started on by the end of June. I would love to start this weekend but we are going out of town for the holiday. Again, just let me know if you want to join in or if you have any ideas.

Ok, I came up with this on a whim and I’m sure lots of other folks have the same exact feature but I’m new here and since I can’t sew everyday I can at least talk about the lucky people who get to do what they love for a living. I’ve chosen Nancy Crow this week because she was one of the first quilt artists I heard of who actually was considered a “real” artist while being a quilter. She was the first contemporary quilter to be exhibited in the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. And I’ve met her and seen her quilts up close and personal although it has been several years. She made me think I could actually be an artist with fabric.

I love what she says in her artist statement about her art:

I identify who I am with my art work…in other words, I love the work, the experience of making each quilt. It’s my life, my life’s work! I feel lost not doing art, unsatisfied, anxious, bored.

I don’t know about you but that last sentence of feeling lost and unsatisfied when not doing what you love really hit home. I left a retail job many years ago and went to work for Leisure Arts and my husband commented that I was a different (luckily better) person than in my other job. Unfortunately, I had to leave that job for my husband’s job but it still gave me a lot of gifts knowing what I really like to do and look here I am!

One of the other cool things she has that I’m jealous of is her workshop/studio. It is a huge barn on a farm in Baltimore, OH, not far from where I grew up. Back then she didn’t have the studio there and I didn’t have the quilting bug quite yet but one of these days I’m going to take a class with her in that barn. She does several classes a year there and they always fill up with people from around the world.

If you have not heard of Nancy you should check out her website. She has a new book cataloguing her quilts through 2005 and you can find her quilts in several art museums. She also designs a fabric line availble in many fine quilt stores which she lists on her site.

Thanks for reading my first installation of the designer of the week. Hopefully I will be able to actually interview some of them in the future. If you would like to see someone profiled please feel free to leave a comment. I would love to hear from you.

I went to the library yesterday to pick up videos for my recovering daughter. While I was there all by myself (which is very rare), I decided to browse the quilt book section and one book in particular jumped out at me. 90 Minute Quilts - 15+ Projects You Can Stitch in an Afternoon by Meryl Ann Butler.

90 minute quilts! Is that possible?

Since I do most of my creative endeavors on the weekend and maybe a free evening, I was very interested. The book is simply deceiving just by flipping through it because the projects are basically squares stitched in rows. Well, I can do that already! But, it still takes more than 90 minutes to cut out the squares, sew them together, add borders, baste it and quilt it. How could it claim 90 minutes? So, I decided I better just take a closer look.

Basically, this is a quilt as you sew instruction book but with a few tricks up its sleeve. You still sew rows of squares together but you don’t sew the rows together until you place them together on top of the batting and backing. Then you do the same for the borders. There are instructions for doing one of those self bindings but I still prefer the traditional binding which just happens to take a while to do. I always hear other quilters complain about the binding and how tedious it is. I on the other hand love this step. It actually is very relaxing for me to do and it means when it is done - I AM FINISHED!

Anyway, back to the book. Although the basic concept is very simple the author has an excellent point. She is really an art quilter but still wants to make quilts for family and friends and she likes to make quilts that people can use. I love this! I am always in a dilemma on the form versus function argument of design and now she just gave me permission to be simple as well as complicated. She explains in her introduction how doing these quick and easy pieces provides a balance to her time-consuming art pieces.

I am definitely going to give this method a try and although most of the projects in the book are very simple, she also shows a few using silk and velvet that turn a very simple design into a very elegant and sophisticated gift. Of course, I will document my findings here but it’s going to be awhile before I really get to do anything new with the holiday weekend coming up.

Another plus for using this book would be for those who like to make quilts for Project Linus or other charities. It would be a quick and easy way to get a few blankets done whether for kids quilts or lap quilts for a nursing home.

By the way, I think I’ve just found a new series for this blog. After finding this book, I decided to look for other time-saving or quick method ways to get that darn project done. I found several books including some older ones. I have a few lying around here somewhere, too. If you have any methods or books you like to use just let me know.

Last week when I accepted this new writing adventure I had big plans to get organized and prepare for the upcoming week’s submissions. I had (still have) lots of ideas floating around my head about the direction I want to take this blog but like many well intentioned plans they got taken off course by the ever changing road of life as my daughter ended up in the hospital for the entire weekend.

She started off earlier in the week with a stomach bug that didn’t seem too bad but since she was missing so much school I took her to the doctor on Thursday. She seemed OK there, of course, and the doctor told me it should run its course in a couple of days. By Friday evening she was expelling anything she drank, even just an ice cube. Then she became very lethargic and off to the ER we went. Her hydration level was about 60% below normal. We’ve been through many stomach bugs that seemed much worse than this one and she has worked her way through them but not this one. We finally were released from the hospital late Sunday afternoon. So far (keeping fingers crossed and knocking on wood) she seems to be getting back to normal and no more violent episodes of stomach emptying.

I sat by her bedside pretty much most of the time. She wasn’t sick much while she was there because of the anti-nausea medicine. Most of her activity consisted of lying still while being pumped with fluids for dehydration while watching videos of movies and TV shows. Since I can only watch so much Scooby Doo and Arthur I made my husband go home and get me a project to work on and a book to read.

I worked on a needle punch project I designed myself and I will get a picture of it when it is more finished which isn’t too far away since it’s a great, quick activity to do when one doesn’t want to concentrate too much. I also finished a great little mystery, Blessed is the Busybody by Emilie Richards, that I picked up at the Spring International Quilt Show in Chicago. I met and talked with the author and she was gracious enough to sign the little paperback I purchased. She was there promoting her books that were based around a quilt design such as Lover’s Knot which is also the basis for a new book Quilt Along With Emilie Richards: Lover’s Knot by Leisure Arts. Anyway, the book I read was fun to read. It is set in a small Ohio town which was neat for me since I grew up in a small Ohio town. If you enjoy little murder mysteries I recommend it for passing time when you can’t do much else.

Now, cross your fingers for me and hope that tomorrow is a day filled with health and happiness for everyone and I can get down to business.

Hi everyone!

I am so excited to be here! I am honored to be chosen to be part of the 451 Press team.

It will take me a few days to get into the groove of things and get a routine going especially since I really was surprised to be chosen for this blog. I love quilting, as well as other crafts, which I think can be crossed over. I enjoy both traditional and art quilting and since I love to try new things I will be documenting them here. I hope everyone will feel free to be a part of the conversation and share your experiences. Also, look for challenges. If anyone has any suggestions, please feel free to leave comments on what you like to do or would like to do.

Here’s to a fun, exciting and creative blog!