Fiber Arts

Meg Manderson gave a trunk show program for the Asheville Quilt Guild on Tuesday. Here are some samples of her lovely work...

Anyone who has been to Lowell, Massachusetts recognizes the location of this quilt's subject. Meg did a beautiful job with this quilt. The colors were stunning.

Meg was working with Angelina fibers in this piece.

I love the colors in this last piece.

What's New

This past week I visited a wonderful new quilt shop in Buford, Georgia (northeast of Atlanta just off of I-985) which is a little over an hour from Athens. I'm hoping to be able to teach there sometime in the near future and this trip was made to "sell my wares". The shop is called Georgia Sewing & Quilting and it's worth a visit.

On the gloomy side...

...tax season is here, and I'm terrible at anything that involves accounting. I rarely make New Year's resolutions, but this year I had to decide to become better at my business accounting. It's slow going. It came as a shock to me when I started my fiber arts business in 2008, that I (promoter of budgets, money-handling whiz, B+ college student in Differential Equations) was a total dunce with business books. Humm.

So, this week I cleared the design wall in my studio to give me some incentive to finish the dreaded paperwork. Progress, not perfection. There has been some progress. Pray for me.

Quilt Show Ribbons

Quilt show ribbons can be quite a lot of work to make, but for our quilt guild show this past weekend, one member made the ribbons on her embroidery machine. They were so cute! Every entrant who won a ribbon got the pin to the left with a button for each win in the color of the ribbon. My pin hand three white buttons for three Honorable Mentions.

For my friend Sandy M., here is a photo of our collaborative quilt with its ribbon (top left). It was in good company, as it hung right next to the Best of Show quilt.

This was the first win for my "Moonlight on Water" string quilt, below...

This quilt is heading to Asheville, NC next week to become the sample quilt for my June "String Quilt Blocks" class for the Asheville Quilt Guild.

This quilt (which you've seen several times on my blog before) did not win a ribbon this time, but you know it's my favorite. This is a photo of my son in Afghanistan, printed on fabric in poster form in four pieces. I painted the lower half of his body and gun, and fused most of the rocks around him. There is a lot of paint on the rest of the quilt too. This quilt is now retired and will hang in my studio.

Vendor Booth Days

We need a little more color here...

We have been enjoying the Cotton Patch Quilt Show (see previous blog for a link) this weekend just south of Athens, GA at the Oconee County Civic Center. The show floor plan is wonderful and we have plenty of fine vendors. I have three quilts (no new ones to post) and a post card in the show and have won three Honorable Mention awards.

Our hand-dyed fabric booth is doing very well. All of Bill's wonderful booth inventions (stands, wall, displays) look great, and his Ruler Racks are selling like hotcakes.

Yardage is selling well, but the best seller has been the basket of hand-dyed scraps, 5" x 18", or the equivalent, for 75 cents per piece. I dyed yardage pieces with an extra 8" or so of fabric so that I could have 5" wide cuts plus string cuts from each piece. The string cuts are for string quilt class kits and for my own quilts this year. It seems to have been a good plan.

One of the other vendors calls that circle piece on the wall the "fried egg" fabric. haha The tiny rolling "desk" we found at the Habitat for Humanity thrift store is working perfectly in the booth.

Here is the next big idea for our booth from my hubby, Bill...

This rust-dyed piece is called "Clam Baked in '68". Isn't it great?! He's placed it onto a frame board and will frame it when his idea jells. Can you tell he's a vintage hippie? He doesn't like the term "old hippie". ;-) He is a social butterfly and is in his element working the booth with me this weekend. More on the show later...

Vendor Booth Prep for Tomorrow

Tomorrow is set-up day for vendor booths at the Cotton Patch Quilt Show, and we have been hard at work for weeks preparing for it. Bill has been very busy making racks and stands for merchandise. Ours is mainly a Hand-Dyed Fabric booth, but we will have several other items for sale: greeting cards, postcards, ruler racks and felted wool pincushions. Here's what the house looks like this afternoon...

This ruler rack will be hanging on the wall above the stand.

These quilt tops will hang on the booth wall; each of them uses a mixture of commercial and hand-dyed fabrics.

The pincusions have been drying in the studio, but these are ready to go...

The multi-colored yardage is so beautiful that I hate to fold it up. I'll find a place to hang it on the hanging racks.

We found this wonderful rolling stand (left) at the Habitat for Humanity thrift store. Bill painted it up to match the other booth components and now it will serve as our check-out stand. The basket on the right has a huge assortment of scraps for 75 cents each.

This rack was a nightstand, but Bill altered it by attaching a pole and "tree" on top (not shown) which will display quarter-yards of fabric. The fabric will hang down over the nightstand and will make viewing much easier. The drawer and baskets will hold fat quarters and pincushions. If you've never seen some of my display racks, here's an unfinished one from months ago. Bill has recently painted this one and attached my booth sign to the top...

...and this is how all of the hanging racks will display fabric. Whew! We're almost ready. Wish us luck!

Deep South Snow & My Work Area

Snow update: Here in Georgia (the U.S. deep south) there are no snow plows and no sand or salt trucks which is why snow is a problem. Yesterday, the power went out for almost two hours. We were set for this kind of trouble in Florida because everyone had a "hurricane closet" where candles, lights, battery-operated radios and actual plug-in phones were kept (phone lines will often still work when the power is out). Anyway, we survived and only got a little chilled. It took Bill three hours to drive 70 miles from Atlanta. We're taking photos because this may not happen again for twenty years...

These are not sissy snowflakes. It was falling like ski country around here! We got about 5" total. We didn't lose any trees, but after five years of drought there were some trees and limbs down all over.

Anyway, preparations for the vendor booth are in high gear as it's only three days away! I've been working in my studio, dining room, garage and laundry room. Here's what the dining room looks like...

Because of the cold, I had to move some of the dyeing process indoors, so yesterday I went to Lowe's and picked up a few more of my mason's tubs and found the MOAT (mother of all tubs)...

This baby is 24" x 36" and is holding about 8 yards of dyed fabric in this photo. The other one is my regular size tub, but it's got about 6 yards of fabric.

Sometime today I have to mix more dyes in the 30 degree garage. Brrrr

Uh Oh!

Told the husband when we moved here that there would be no snow. Humm. That looks like snow to me...and it's accumulating as I type.

Bill is driving our soldier son, Bryan, back to the Atlanta airport as I write and I'm really glad that Bill has driven in the snow a lot in his life. I'm hoping that the roads will be empty all the way to the airport.

Bon voyage, Bry! We're praying that you'll be out of the Army and home in Athens in October 2009.

Bill has been helping me by rubber-banding items to fabric before I dye them. Is is a cool one that's 60" x 60".

Uh, oh! It's getting much worse!