Appointments, Planners, Scraps & Quilt-Cam!

This little goodie arrived from Karen yesterday!

Or more like, I was home so I could OPEN it yesterday. 

She had emailed me quite a while ago asking me if she could submit her Celtic Solstice quilt for inclusion in the 2017 Quilt Art engagement calendar published by AQS.

Of course I said YES!

I am always thrilled with your finishes and please feel free to display them at your shows, enter them here and there, you did the hard work in putting it together, PLEASE share your quilts!

With something like this there is a release form that has to be signed and permission given by the designer which I am happy to do.

And I got a big smile when opening the calendar and searching for Karen’s page:

She signed it for me!  YAY!

Didn’t she do a beautiful job?

Yesterday felt much like I was spinning my wheels.  Eye doctor and hair cut took up my whole morning.

Book orders and computer work to get me back on track were taken care of post-hair-cut.

I have submitted my contract for teaching at the Empty Spools Seminar at Asilomar in Pacific Grove, California in March of 2018!  It’s 5 days of one project and we are going to have a great time with that one.  I’m limited to 24 students, so save your pennies.  Our project is Wanderlust and it’s going to be a great week.  Visit the website to learn more HERE.

Evening stitching yielded this!

But certain things happen the moment you want to isolate a certain shade of something from the herd of strings in the string stash.  I found myself dumping out the burgeoning neutrals string bin. (Imagine a mountain of strings burying me on the floor!) and pulled all the toasty shades from the lighter ones.

Now there were two piles.  And one container.

I was soon climbing into Moby and on my way to Walmart to buy another tub.  LOL!  I joke and joke about this….why is it that more containers DO NOT make me any more organized?  But still..this is much easier than trying to dig for dark neutrals from the confines of the light neutral bin.  Make sense?

And this is how another category in the string stash is born.  Dark Neutrals. Separated from the Light Neutrals.

Of course…on the way out of Walmart you have to duck into Chick-Fil-A for an ice cream ---it’s SUMMER!  i enjoyed that sweet treat all the way home and got down to business.

Same sample as yesterday.

Questions have arisen after yesterday's post asking things like “Do you always cut across the strings?” No.  Sometimes I cut up the center of the middle string, as in Tulip Fields:

Tulip Fields from String Fling.

Or as in Zuckerwatte:

Also from String Fling!

If you look at the pink and neutral string triangles in the center you’ll see that they are cut WITH the center string, not across the strings.  It changes the look of how the blocks come together.

This one used BOTH directions, cuting some across the strings, and some up the center:

Blue Skies from String Fling.

The blue strings are cut across the strings, the yellow ones are sliced up the center string and this puts the strings going in two different directions which is fun.

So it just depends on how I want them to look in the quilt.  

I LOVE string blocks.  I have a gazillion ideas for how they are going to come together. Often times I’m looking at quilt blocks wondering just where I can incorporate strings into the piecing.  So it should come as no surprise that there will be a lot of string quilts happening in my near future as I get ready for the next book down the pipeline coming after Addicted to Scraps is released.  I’m working on the sequel to String Fling!

One thing I am often asked when I show stuff like the blocks above ...”Where can I get the pattern.”

And my answer is “In the future!”  Quilts come first, then patterns are written and like several other recent finishes, be it the H quilt, the pinwheel version of the H quilt (that is going in the machine tomorrow to be quilted!) and the Wanderlust table runner that I just finished…there is no pattern until I write one.  I’m not working from a pattern myself, just from my head.

Most of the time when I show stuff, things are still on the drawing board and when the quilt is done, then comes the pattern.  How boring life would be if I only showed stuff that was already available as a pattern? I wouldn't be able to share what I am working on behind the scenes at all.

The writing of the pattern is the "not so fun" part! I would much rather be at the machine sewing than facing a computer, but I am planning some pattern writing days for when I have more time in between trips.

I need about 40 more of those toasty string blocks to do what I want to do with them.  Hopefully there will be more time to do those before I fly off to Kentucky on Sunday.

About the eye doc appointment.  The left eye has held stable, but the right eye has marked change, not for the good.  I stayed for extra testing.  I need to go back in 6 weeks.

I don’t know what all of this means, but close detail work is getting harder and harder to do.  Magnifying things does not help, it just makes things more pixelated.  Look at it this way…if there is a black hole in the middle of something you are reading, and you make it bigger, it is just a bigger black hole. It doesn’t get rid of the hole. I even notice it when I’m stitching hexies.  It will be fine for a while, and then all of a sudden I can’t see what I’m stitching.  I close my eyes, put my head back, rest for about 30 seconds and try again.  Sometimes my vision clears, sometimes it doesn’t.  I am on a tear to finish this hexagon top for my son before I can’t see to do it anymore.

It also is effecting my writing.  Sometimes when I come back to a blog post I notice that there are so many typos I swore were not there before.  And don't even get me started on auto-correct on my phone.  I'm missing quite a bit of those lately, because it is CORRECT until the phone decides to change it to something else just about the time I hit send.

I am staying positive.  Rarely does MacTel 2 progress to legal blindness.  I just want to be able to see well enough that I can still piece and quilt and teach and enjoy doing what I do.

Emmy Lou last night.

She always looks miffed when I take a photo of her.  but she was a great comfort last night when I crawled into bed.  She is always there plastered up against my right side, purring so loudly.  A cat purring is very soothing at the end of a busy day when you’ve had not so great news.  I am not going to let this news dictate how I feel about my life.  I will work with this, in spite of this.

I just may segue into more and more improvisational piecing where accuracy is not required!

So.  Let’s have an up beat good thing happen:

Let’s do some Quilt-Cam!

The Hubster has a tennis tourney in Raleigh this weekend.  I’m going to be home alone tomorrow!  Let’s do an AFTERNOON Quilt-Cam, 2pm Eastern time, so that those in Europe can join in on their evening time!  It’s been a while since we have done this and I’m feeling the need!

The question is….do I work on strings? Or keep going on the Garlic Knots blocks?

I’ll see you HERE on the blog, tomorrow, Saturday, June 11, 2016 at 2pm Eastern.

Quiltville Quote of the Day!

Don't let the opinions of others consume you!

Vintage hexagon quilt top shared during our workshops in Illinois last weekend.

Happy Friday, everyone!


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