Baby Likes the Quilt

It looks to me like Cooper likes his new quilt…I am so glad it is being used and not just stashed in a closet or drawer. What a cute baby!

Baby Quilt

Wanted to share a baby quilt made for my friend Paula's daughter (Jillian) who was expecting a boy. I could not find a quilt pattern I liked so decided to design my own. I drew out the pattern and cut templates and then selected different fonts for the letters and blew them up to fit the blocks. A lot of stitching, fusing, cutting and a whole LOT of hand embroidered blanket stitching and it was almost finished. I quilted it, got the binding on and sent if off. It was made for John Cooper Whisnant, born February 13. Hope he likes it.

May 2013

May was a BUSY month for me last year. First I flew to Denver to attend my nephew's graduation from college. Enjoyed the visit with my sister and did some serious shopping. Then only three days after I got home my friend Emily and I headed to Wichita for the Machine Quilters Expo. We met up with my friend, Diane, from Burbank and we were lucky enough to have an invitation to stay in another friend's guest house for our stay. What a great time we had taking longarm machine classes and catching up on old times. The friend in Wichita, Donna Waterson, introduced us to her passion...Dress A Girl Around the World. We saw all the work she and her friends are doing and we brought home the idea and since then some of my Dark Quilt friendship group have made dresses for an orphanage in Haiti. Here's a photo of my first dress.

April 2013

Even though I did not post last year, it was a big year in so many ways. I took way more "trips" than usual. My first trip of the year was the first week of April. My sister and I headed to Kansas City for Art and Soul, a mixed media event. We signed up for four classes. Unfortunately, only one of the four was worth the money and the others were pretty much a waste of our time AND money. One fun thing we did is enter the mask contest. All attendees were sent a paper mache mask to decorate. We didn't win but our masks turned out great. The winner was spectacular and deserved it. This is the mask that I made. I covered the mask with grungeboard pieces and went crazy from there. I was going for the "steampunk" look and was happy with it. The most challenging was making the goggles from some little plastic sauce containers.

New Year's Resolution - 2014

Yes, I made a resolution that I intend to keep. It should have been that I would lose weight...but thought it more likely that posting more than twice a year on this blog would be more likely to happen.

It has been an interesting year with my quilting adventure. I did a lot of charity quilts for the quilt guild and for friends. After a lot of practice I started charging people for quilting. I had some disasters and a lot of learning experiences. Actually, I'm still having those learning experiences but I am getting better and doing a lot less "unquilting."

A few months ago I made a BIG decision and added a computerized system to my quilting machine. It is just amazing and the computer loving part of me could not resist. I just love it and hope to get lots better at using it. Here is a picture of it on the quilting machine. It's a complicated setup that is basically a tablet with software that runs motors and who knows what...but you program it and it quilts all by itself. Ain't technology grand?

My First Quilting Job!

A really nice, and trusting, friend gave me her finished quilt to quilt (for pay). I was more than a little nervous about being sure it was done right. I was super cautious and it really turned out nice. The edges in the photo aren't great because all I did was sew the binding on by machine and she will finish it with handwork. Thanks for trusting me Virginia!

First Big Quilts

Well, they are not exactly HUGE but they are twin size and up to now I had just done practice pieces so this was huge to me. It is the same quilt pattern that is a sampler type quilt I designed for my quilt guild last year. We did a block a month. It was going to be "Amish" style but some did not want to do a dark quilt so I made two blocks each month to show it could be done both ways. I am pretty happy with the way they turned out.