My favorite quilt for the Blogger's quilt festival

I decided to enter a quilt in the online quilt festival.  I needed to write about my favorite quilt in my blog and link it to the festival.  Hope you enjoy the show.

I have two or three quilt's that are my favorites.  They were all made within the last two years.  I joined Minnesota Contemporary Quilter's about a year and a half ago.  I credit joining that group with the spark in my quilting.  I really enjoy the no-rules approach to quilting and am having fun learning lot's of techniques and maybe making a few of my own.

The quilt I chose was for last years challenge.  Our theme was architexture.  I already had a photo of a cottage in Ireland that I wanted to re-create with fabric.  The photo had been on my inspiration board for over a year.  When I learned about the challenge I knew I had to try to make this quilt, even if I didn't feel it was good enough to enter.  I was very nervous about entering something with this group since I was new and there are many accomplished quilter's in this group.  I also had no idea how to make this quilt.  I made a couple of copies of the photo and left them around the house to keep me thinking about it throughout my day.  I enlarged one to eight by ten and used my projecta scope to draw outlines of what I wanted.  I decided to do the stones individually so I could add more texture to them and maybe still have my quilt lay flat when I was done.  I wasn't quite sure how to make them with the texture I wanted but I just started to play with my fabric and my machine.  I think it was one of those middle of the night "Aha" moments when it finally came to me.  Do you ever do that?  Wake up with a brilliant idea in the middle of the night?  Sometimes it works for me and sometimes I wake up in the morning look at the note I wrote myself and wonder 'who wrote that, and what were they thinking!'

I used about six shades of different batiks to make the stones.  I wanted to show the changes in color of the rock along with the shadows.  It took me awhile to decide on the door fabric but I really like the small stripe that I chose.  I added some tulle for the shadow on the door and did a little thread painting.  I tried thread painting the door latch but it looked really flat and didn't fit with the rest of the quilt.  I was thrilled when I found the latch I used.  It's a switch for a miniature train set!  It just looked perfect too me.

I had some trouble finishing the edge of the quilt.  I cut it first and then added the tiny stripe of red.  Well, I wasn't really thinking when I cut it and had trouble getting my little red strip of fabric straight because of the dimension of my stones.  Live and learn! Next time think of the whole quilt and finish out to the edge before applying dimensional aspects.  I did finish it in time and I did add it to the show.  It has been touring with the MCQ exhibit for almost a year now.  Should be home pretty soon. I've added my original photo to the

 bottom so you can see I did change it a little, cropped it and emphasized some of the color tones, but it's close.

I also want to credit a couple of teachers I had around the time I was making this quilt.  Myrna Giesbrecht who taught me to keep going and not listen to what others have to say about what I am making.  It was my opinion that mattered for this quilt.  I also took a class from Susan Brittingham around this time.  I learned how to add the grass at the bottom using her technique.  I took classes from both of these teachers at Quilt University. 

Have a creative day

Janet

Basic quilting skills

Hello,


Monday night was the meeting for Minnesota Contemporary Quilters.  I love those meetings they always make me laugh.  I haven't made it for several months due to weather, health and no meeting in December so it was fun to reconnect.  Our speaker this month was a traditional quilter who was speaking about some basic skills such as binding quilts.  Some of us need to work on these skills just a little.  I know that I am hit or miss with my bindings.  I have trouble with the corners and the edges seem to want to curl.  Not pretty!  That is why I signed up a month ago for a class at a local shop, Bear Patch Quilting, called Binding Perfection.  I am mostly a self taught quilter and my self education is spotty at best.  I knew binding was a skill I wanted to improve.  So it was a little bit of serendipity that this was the topic at our meeting.  My class is this afternoon and I need to take something to bind.  I am trying to finish up examples from classes I have taken (at least the samples I like).  So, I am taking a sample from my Flower Power class taught by Susan Brittingham at Quilt University.  The one I am taking to my binding class is one of our beginning examples for the Flower Power class.  I also need to finish the final project for that class but I'll save that for another day.

I took some show and tell to the meeting the other night.  Everyone seemed to like my blue jean quilt.  I made two of these during a class in the learningfa yahoo group.  I cut out all the blue jean circles while I was watching the election debates last fall.  I'm calling this my green quilt!  I used an entire box of old blue jeans cutting 300 circles for the two quilts, and four yards of flannel that I have had laying around since my children were very young.  It felt good to use up so much of my fabric stash.  I had been saving the jeans to make a quilt 'some day.'  It was fun to make it along with other people all encouraging each other along the way.  The red and yellow quilt is my son's, there is a photo of each side for that quilt.  The green and purple quilt is my daughter's.

 

                                   

I also wanted to post a photo of the header I had on the top of my webpage.  I changed it today because it was hard to read the title with that particular quilt in the background.  This quilt was also made for a class at Quilt University.  It is my own design from the class Points and Curves taught by Myrna Giesbrecht when she was at Quilt U.  She is no longer teaching there you can find a link to her webpage on the sidebar (Creative Conversation).  This quilt is called Pursuit of Happiness.  It was part of an exhibit at the Textile Center in St Paul last fall.  The exhibit was called Freedom:  The Fiber of our Nation and was displayed during the Republican National Convention last fall.  Have a great day everyone! Janet