A title...

I never got back to you with what I decided to call this quilt!   Thank you so much for all the wonderful suggestions.  I combined some of them and have decided on "Warm Winter Night".  I like the juxtaposition of warm and winter :)

Also, sorry the posts have been a little sparse lately!  I was crazy busy getting ready to vend at the quilt show last weekend (lots of fun and great people) and now my older daughter will be graduating from high school in a few days.  As you can imagine, there are many places to go and things to do associated with this milestone.  Things should calm down a little after this week and I'll be back with some quilt content.

And the winner is...

Christina of Christina, Steve, Clara and Elena!  I've sent Christina an email and I hope to send her pillow cover to her very soon.

Thanks to everyone who played along.  I hope you all had a good time visiting all the great blogs during the Sew, Mama, Sew Giveaway Day.

I'll be back soon!

(P.S.  My apologies for not including a picture of the Random Number Generator, but I messed up and lost the image.  And, as you can imagine, it is pretty hard to re-create the right number generated randomly!)

Sew, Mama, Sew Giveaway Day

Welcome to everyone from Sew, Mama, Sew Giveaway Day!

I'm giving away this pillow cover I made.  I love the grey and off-white - so clean-looking, serene and summery!  I used Kona Medium Grey and Snow and it fits a 16" pillow form.
Sew, Mama, Sew Giveaways are open until May 25.  I will be happy to ship internationally if that is where the winner lives :)  So, to enter, leave me a comment and tell me whether you are a beginning, intermediate or advanced quilter.  I'll select the winner randomly after midnight US EDT on May 25.

For those of you who aren't the lucky winner - if you really like this pillow, there is a free pattern download in my sidebar :)

Good luck to everyone and thanks for visiting!

A new quilt... back

This shot is part of a quilt back that I will be pinning and quilting today.  I am vending at a quilt show this weekend and am hoping to use this quilt in my booth!  I"ll show you the front as soon as I can :)

For those of you in the area, the quilt show is the "Going to Pieces" show put on by the Capitol City Quilt Guild in Lansing.  The show will be at The Summit at the Capital Centre, 9410 Davis Hwy, Dimondale, MI  48821.  Show hours are 10-5 on Saturday and 12-4 on Sunday and admission is $6.00.  I hope to see some of you there!

For the non-locals, don't forget to plan some time to look at many of the amazing quilts that are part of the Blogger's Quilt Festival.  BQF runs through Friday and there are over 450 quilts entered!  All the quilts show up on the BQF page in a thumbnail form so you can see an image of the quilt before you click over to the blog - a wonderful idea!

It's Blogger's Quilt Festival Time!

Ephemeral Elegance

It's time for Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival again! It is so much fun to participate in the BQF and see all the wonderful quilts everyone shares.  Thanks so much, Amy, for organizing it all!



Welcome to those of you new here.  My quilt for the Blogger's Quilt Festival this time is Ephemeral Elegance.  I hope my regular readers will forgive some repetition here, but this quilt has meant so much to me this year, that it had to be my choice for BQF.

I made Ephemeral Elegance in response to the Project Modern Challenge 1 contest to make a quilt with a photo inspiration.  Sometime before, I had taken a photo of a glass vase filled with white tulips on my glass kitchen table.  While I did use this photo as my inspiration for Ephemeral Elegance, I included some other ideas that had been running around in my head for a while.

Traditional floral applique quilts are some of my all-time favorites!  I really wanted to find a way to make a floral applique quilt that reflected my modern minimalist style.  Additionally, I also enjoy working with bias strips and have made a few Celtic applique quilts.  Again, I wanted to find a way to use bias in my own style.  These ideas and the transparency of the glass vase on the glass table in the photo merged to become Ephemeral Elegance.

Another reason this quilt is special to me is that it came out the way I thought it would :)  That doesn't always happen when I make quilts.  That isn't necessarily a bad thing - just part of the creative process.  But Ephemeral Elegance felt right from beginning to end.  After the Project Modern Challenge 1 concluded, I decided I wanted to share my quilt with a different audience.  So, I entered it in the American Quilter's Society Quilt Show and Contest in Paducah.  I'm thrilled to say that it won first place in its category (1st Entry in an AQS show/Small Wall Quilts)!

I hope you enjoy my quilt and all the other wonderful quilts and quilters in the Blogger's Quilt Festival!

Not much sewing...

I've been busy doing a lot of useful things, but not much sewing.  You may notice that I changed the font on my blog posts and titles.  I've wanted to do that for ages, but it's the kind of thing I tend to put off for things I think of as more productive.  It feels good to get it done.

Today I've spent a lot of time struggling with various ways to do curved templates for applique.  I spent a fair bit of time with EQ5 this morning reminding myself how it works.  I managed to get the shape I want, but the quality doesn't seem to transfer when I export it so I can put it in a pattern.  PhotoShop didn't provide me with the results I wanted either.  I sent a question out to an online group I belong to and one of the members suggested I try Inkscape, so now I'm working my way through a few tutorials to see how that will work.

I also spent time yesterday adding some alternate sizes to one of my older patterns.  I'll let you know when it is ready to be re-released.  I want to have some testers give it a try to make sure the new instructions make sense :)  I plan to add additional sizes to several of my older patterns as I can get to it.

In sewing news, I am almost finished with a new quilt top - a little more machine applique and then "all" I need to do is quilt, bind and it's done!  My fingers are really itching to get working on the "No Prints Allowed" challenge that the Ann Arbor Modern Quilt Guild is doing too.

More soon...

It might really be Spring!

Everything in Ann Arbor is blooming this week!  We have had a lot of rain but several beautiful, sunny, warm days too.  My neighbor gave me these tomato plants she grew from seeds.  My garden isn't ready for them yet, but it will be soon.  I am not much of a flower gardener, but I do enjoy vegetable gardening.

Happy Mother's Day to those who are celebrating today!  My Dad and his wife are in town visiting and a group of us are all going out to lunch soon.  I hope you enjoy your day :)

The Bee's Knees Finished!

While I was on my retreat what seems like months ago (really two weeks), I quilted my Bee's Knees quilt.  This poor quilt has been waiting for me to get it quilted for WAY too long.  I pinned it last June, thinking I would quilt it while my daughter and I were on our East Coast college tour.  Well, that didn't happen :)  It is hard to see the quilting in this photo but I echo quilted inside the houses and quilted diagonal lines in the background.  In the first three columns of blocks, the lines go from upper left to lower right, the next two columns go from lower left to upper right, and then back to upper left/lower right for the last three columns.

I love the way the quilt turned out!  The black and white houses and background and all the different doors to the houses contributed by my fellow Bee's Knees group give me the feeling of a cheerful, snug community on a snowy night.  I still need to make a good label to be sure I can remember who made which blocks for me, but I can't really do that until I decide what to call this quilt. 

I cannot come up with a good name for this lovely quilt!  It is driving me a little nuts.  Everything I think of sounds either hokey or snarky.  I'd love a name that incorporates the community nature of a bee quilt, the winter night idea and the fun of so many nearly identical houses with different doors.  Any ideas?

A new place for patterns

Have you heard about the new venture by the folks from C&T Publishing?  It is called PatternSpot.com and will be a marketplace for downloadable quilting and sewing patterns.

Downloadable patterns provide such instant gratification I think the idea of having many of them in one place is fantastic.  My understanding is that you'll be able to search on the type of pattern you are looking for whether it is for a quilt or clothing or other sewing projects.  You will also be able to follow a designer so that you are notified whenever they upload a new pattern.

The site is still under development, but you can sign up to get their newsletter and see how things are coming along at PatternSpot.com.  They are expecting the site to go live and be open for business around mid-May, with the official launch in June.  Take a look and let me know what you think.