Recovery Projects

While I'm recovering from foot surgery, I have quite a few projects to keep me busy. I've been working on one today: cutting and pricing some of the 50 or so yards of fabric that I dyed over the last two weeks. The dining room is the cutting and pricing area (as well as the pressing area)...

After the fabric is pressed, it is folded over the backs of the dining room chairs until I have time to cut it.

Here is this week's tally of cut and priced fabric...

We're testing to see if we like this piece of fabric as a curtain for our front door. It has been up for a few days. What do you think? Is it too much? When approaching the door it looks as though there is a mural on the glass. For now, anyway, it's keeping the sun out midday. I'll have a small project of making it into a curtain if we decide that it's "the one".

The Latest News

Here's another sample (before it was sewn together) from the String Quilt Blocks workshop. This has a basic log cabin layout, but the dark side has an added twist. Can you see the difference? You can get this look by making a large string block and then cutting it with two diagonal slices; the cuts will yield two quarter triangles in which the strings point to the corner and two quarter triangles in which the strings are "horizontal" to the corner. Does this make sense? My medicine is kicking in, so I'll check the wording later.

This is a journal size (8 1/2" x 11") rust dyed fabric by my husband. I started quilting it but have not finished it yet. I just love those rust dyed golden-browns.

Here's my little scooter that Bill brought home yesterday. This is so much easier to use around the house than the wheelchair following foot surgery.

Here's the subject foot. Poor baby.

Pastel Layout

You saw these pastel blocks a few entries ago when I was preparing for the Stretching the String lecture. Before sewing them together I gave them a geometric layout for more interest. What do you think?

My reconstructive foot surgery is scheduled for first thing Monday morning. I've had two previous surgeries on the other foot which each had 10-12 month recovery times, so this 3-month recovery should be a piece of cake. As an added bonus, I'll have time to finish quilt tops, quilt them, work on making beaded necklaces and beading on fabric, clean out drawers and fine-tune my studio. Hopefully I'll even be able to find a Power Point class to take online, and I can review some of my class notes for Dreamweaver, a program for creating and updating websites. I'm actually looking forward to this break in my daily routine.

String Quilt Block Workshop

Asheville, NC was wonderful as always, and the lecture and workshop at the Asheville Quilt Guild went well. If you are a quilter and and plan to visit western North Carolina, make that visit on the third week of the month so that you can enjoy a Tuesday AQG meeting. Better yet, if you're visiting in the summer, make it the first full weekend in August for the AQG annual quilt show.

Here are some photos from the String Quilt Blocks workshop...

This was the quietest workshop I ever put on. The ladies were hard at work right from the beginning and came up with some lovely blocks. This is a closer view of Fran's blocks...

These blocks are 8" square and can be used "as is" or cut into smaller squares, triangles, strips, or other shapes.

These are Sharon's blocks...

Can you see the tiny yellow string pieces that Sharon sewed into the blocks on the left? Click on the photo to get a closer look. My friend Ann would call these "tee-niney".

Ladies, you did a wonderful job!

Off to Asheville

This week I'm presenting a lecture and workshop to the Asheville Quilt Guild (NC) called Stretching the String. I learned string piecing from Agnes A. some years ago in Pensacola, FL and have developed some of my own ideas for this wonderful quilt-piecing method.

This is one of my absolute favorite pieces; it's a soon-to-be tablerunner and will get a border soon. It means even more that many of these blocks were made in that first class with Agnes.

Later this week I'll post some photos of the other samples from this workshop.

Pastels

I finished all of these blocks last week but chose another layout before they were sewn together. The finished quilt top is a secret until my Asheville Quilt Guild lecture and trunk show next week. It's been years since I last worked in pastels and now I have two pastel quilt tops done in a few weeks.

Machine Quilting

Here's how I decided to quilt this tiny (12" x 12") quilt to jazz it up a little bit. This photo color is not right. The border is deep black.

Current Events

For weeks I have been creating samples for a lecture and workshop for the Asheville Quilt Guild (North Carolina) which will take place on June 16 and 17. I've shown some photos, but many of my samples will be unseen until the day of the lecture. Here's one, though, that I've shown before. I'm planning the quilting right now. It's a tiny piece, measuring in at approx. 12" x 12".

And here are a few blocks I'm working on...

High Tech

Three weeks from today I am scheduled to have the toes of my right foot reconstructed, which means that I'll have some recovery time when my foot will need to be elevated most of the time. Not a bad proposition, since I have plenty to catch up on...cleaning of drawers, transferring to a new address book, machine quilting several quilt tops (if I can master the machine pedal with my left foot), reading all the quilt books I've bought this year, and I may take an online college course on how to use Power Point.


Right now I'm using the Pencil Point presentation system...

with this high-tech flip chart, straight from the 1950's. Oh boy.