January's progress

Well, here it is the end of January. What's been accomplished this month? Not as much as I'd like, that's for sure!
First thing off the bat while Floyd was remodeling the guest bathroom in preparation of our niece & her other 2 girls arrival on Feb 6th, I hid in the studio & designed & quilted a little wholecloth quilt. Came out pretty good too!

 

Then I finished cleaning out the fabric bins & scrapping out anything under a 1/4 yard to strips or usable size squares or rectangles. I now have a huge collection of charms, enough 2" X 3 1/2" rectangles to make several scrappy quilts, enough strips to make lots of scrappy things & I can see what I have cloth wise for bigger projects! This project has been on the "to do" board since I put the studio together last March! Glad it's finally done & better organized too as I also did some re-arranging of the studio at the same time.

The New year found a new mystery quilt on the quilting board. This time, Paintmejudy did a quick scrappy. Just 3 weeks worth of clues rather than her usual 6 weeks. Since Dusti now knows how to sew, she wanted to do this one with me. Also my Grandson. So we decided to make 3 of the mystery quilts that were crib sized to be given to charity when finished. Grandson bowed out early on, so Dusti & I decided to turn two into one & make a lap sized. Now she's spending time next door with our neighbor, so will turn it back to 2 crib sized ones. Mine is done & already given to the guild for the local fire or police depts.

I had finished the top for a QOV for a Craftsy class given by Kimmy Brunner on templates. After finishing the scrappy one, I got it loaded up & now is about 2/3 done. A lot of learning curves on this piece, as I've ripped out probably as much as I've quilted! It's not going to be show quality, by any means, but my hubby will love it! Here's a picture of one of the designs.

I hope to have this finished by this weekend, as I have several waiting to be quilted, including a customers quilt! WOOHOO!

So, what did you do this month??

 

 

T

Well folks, looks like a good day to get some quilting done...it's SNOWING! Yep, that white stuff that's a dirty word falling right here in Texas. Sure glad I don't have anything super important to do today!

Well, it's cold here in Texas. Low's in the upper 20's, highs in the low 40's. But the sun is out!

It took me several days, but I got all the fabric bins organized & all the smaller pieces cut into usable scraps. Boy did my charms drawer grow! Also have enough 2 1/2" X 3 1/2" rectangles cut to make another scrappy quilt like I made for Dusti for Christmas.

I think that this blog is going to be an adventure thru the quilting world from my point of view. As some of you know, I retired from driving an 18-wheeler this past March. Our shed had burned down just before Valentine's Day & the insurance company paid for what is now my studio. Also, as a retirement gift to me, I finally got my longarm. I bought her used, but she's a good machine. My hubby, Floyd, is still driving a rig, but hopefully for not much longer. He applied for full disability from the VA & we're still waiting for the approval to come thru for him to give up the road too.  In the meantime, I turned a pre-fab shed into a working quilting studio. All it had was insulation in it when we got it. We had to do all the electrical, walls, carpeting, etc. That took me about 2 months, including moving everything from the house over to the studio. It took me til the 1st of August to get all the kinks out of "Queenie" (my longarm, she's a QueenQuilter18). But since then I've been devouring everything & anything related to longarm quilting. I just love to be creative & really want to do some awesome quilting like I see at shows.

I'll put some free patterns up from time to time that I've found or created. I'll have to figure out how to do that. But, in the mean time, come along with me for what I hope is an interesting ride!

Happy New Year!

Whew! The holidays are officially over! With the kids getting back to school, now I'll get some piece & quiet around here. I don't know about anybody else, but I don't make New Years resolutions because they tend to get broken within a week, so why bother?  But I did set a couple of goals to accomplish right off the bat. When I first got my studio, I had decided to go through my cloth bins & weed out all the smaller stuff & turn it into useable scraps. I've started doing that & over half way through with it. I've decided not to do any quilting til this is accomplished. I also did some re-arranging of the studio that was desperately needed for better convenience. After I finish with this project, it's back to finishing up what's on the design walls now.  Stay tuned for the outcome!

 Here is the latest quilt finished. This was a mystery quilt from Quiltingboard.com. I had no idea what the pattern was going to be til the very end. I think my color combinations came out great!

 Here's a close up of the red Friendship star. All the stars were done like this, but it really stands out on the red ones.

 I know you can't see this really well, but there's a feathered wreath in all of these blocks.

 Here's a shot of the side & border. As another longarmer pointed out, had I done a different design here, it wouldn't have near the impact this one did.

A view of the back. The quilting actually shows better on the back than the front.
I'm so pleased with how this quilt turned out!
While I was hand stitching the back of the binding, I was looking at all that quilting & really feeling proud of myself for accomplishing all of this freehand. Another thought was that a year ago I had rented time on the LQS's very simple longarm & all I could do was meander, & it wasn't even that good! Look how far I've come in just under a year!  How am I going to improve on this? Where will my talents take me in 2013? Well, I think my goal for 2013 is to put a quilt into a major show for 2014! What do you think?

Here is the latest quilt to come off of Queenie. It's a twin size, simple Irish Chain quilt that was started with leftovers from a previous project.  Since I'm always looking to expand my quilting abilities, I took a new class on Craftsy.com from the awesome Kimmy Brunner!
Craftsy.com is a fantastic medium for learning. Once you purchase one of their classes, it's viewable forever! Kimmy's class is one of the newest available on there & well worth the time & money spent for it if you want to do template work. She breaks everything down into "baby steps" so you can understand what you're doing. By the time you get to the end of the lesson, you have more than a working knowledge of how to do the lesson & some confidence to do it.
I've been following Kimmy for awhile now, & have all of her DVD's. If you are new to longarming, her beginning DVD is a MUST have! I'm self taught at just about everything quilting. After getting her beginning DVD & following her directions & suggestions, I find that my quilts are coming off the frame just as square as when I loaded them. I'm not having issues with puckers any longer, nor are some of the other issues I've had cropping up. It's amazing what a little direction can accomplish! And, it only added a few more minutes to accomplish!
This wasn't the original design I had chosen for this quilt, but operator error caused me to rip all of that out & start over. As I said, I've got all of Kimmy's DVD's, & one that I was going for was her Twirly Whirly feathers. But, tension issues abounded for some reason & I had to rip it all out, so I changed to this one instead. Glad I did, because it came out fantastic!

Whew! The quilt show for our local guild is over for another year! What a great time we had, but a lot of work. A lot of beautiful quilts took home some pretty prestigious ribbons too!  Yes, I did get ribbons on two of the quilts I entered. Got a 3rd place ribbon for "French Braid" & an Honorable Mention for "Carpenter Star meets Bali".  Texas's Butterfly Ballet didn't win anything, but the category had so few entries that they lumped them into small quilts, so it didn't fair with the others that were larger.
Now that I can breathe again, it's back to the drawing board, so to speak. After looking at the ribbon winners, & talking to the people who did the quilting on them, I think I've got a bit of a handle on what the judge wants, so I will make sure next years quilt really stands out! What really baffles me is that most of the winning quilts were done with pantographs! Or portions of groove boards! I'm not 100% positive, but I think mine were the only ones completely done free hand! I know the major shows are now sub categorizing machine quilting so that computerized stitching is recognized, but I would think the smaller ones would follow suit. Guess not this year, maybe next year. It's just my opinion, but I think that someone who's done a quilt totally unassisted by other means should get a little more recognition than someone who chose someone else s patten & followed it. To me, that person is really putting their talent & skills on display more than the other.  I know I haven't been longarming very long, & I definitely have a long way to go to become a renouned quilter, but I had the nerve to put what little I know on display for all to see. 

Well, I've got 2 quilts in the UFO pile that will fit the bill nicely for outstanding quilts. One is a Lone Star. That one is definitely going to show this next year. What I originally planned for the quilt & what it's going to finish as, are definitely two different things! Now I'm going to scrap some of the applique that was going to go on it & switch over to quilting instead.

To broaden my horizons with my quilting, I've just ordered Kimmy Brunner's books & DVD's. I've seen some of her videos & really like how she teaches. From what I've seen recently, she also agrees that with practice & ruler work you can have a quilt coming out looking like a computer did it. So, if she can do it, SO CAN I! I will watch that DVD over & over til I get it down pat, practice, practice, practice!  That's why I have a dry erase board! Wipes away those mistakes!