Lancaster Finalist!

     It's wonderful to start the new year with good news! Yesterday I received word that my Wedding Star quilt, "From This Day Forward," was accepted into the AQS show in Lancaster this year.
For those of you who don't know, besides my day job (sewing), I also have a hobby (sewing). In between thread changes at San Francisco Stitch Co., I started work on this gorgeous Judy Neimeyer kit determined to finish something this time. The bad winter we all had last year really worked in my favor!

      I really have to hand it to Judy Neimeyer who puts together fantastic instructions with gorgeous patterns. It started as a bed runner, but I LOVE turning little projects into big ones, so my "bedrunner" finished off as a 104" x 104" king size quilt. To make the kit my own, I tried a really offbeat coloration with a pink center gradating out to purple batiks-- I've notice with batiks, it is impossible to make a bad color choice, and I was really pleased with the results.

     Then, of course, to add another layer of difficulty, I digitized my own quilting pattern. Since I don't own a longarm, I sucked my internet friend Sara Velder of Acorn Ridge Quilting into doing the hands-on. She faithfully trudged through about 12 pages of my scrawled instructions and photos and produced the incredible result above. Sara was originally a customer of ours, but I am now an even BIGGER customer of hers. She and her husband Gerry even drove away from their house to get better phone reception so she could text me photos at a critical moment. That's LOVE, and I am grateful. I am surely going to enter it in the Des Moines competition, so she can go visit it there-- did you know, Sara and I have never met in person!

     All that remains to do is to embroider a lovely tag for the back, and you can see I've got that covered! When the mood strikes, I am going to ink in some lovely thoughts on my marriage of 33 years-- that's what the quilt is in honor of.

     Hope if you are in the Pennsylvania way this year in March, you'll drop by and say hello!