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!

Reindeer Pizza

After the Christmas frenzy, it's nice to take a break from the business (machine embroidery) to spend some time on my favorite hobby (machine embroidery). Although we put our utmost into everything that comes out of this studio, I personally end up with favorite pieces from time to time-- this Christmas, I am obsessed with the "Up on the Housetops" piece-- I affectionately call it my "Reindeer Pizza" for obvious reasons. Everything in the office has to be "100% finished," but for fun, I like to take a break from time to time and see what can happen when you take one to the 200% finished level.

"Up on the Housetops" is fully embroidered on every square inch-- and originally we just quilted the "pizza" lines--really, was there room for more? After studying it for a bit, I decided some swirly wind would be just perfect in around the snowflakes and deer. Since the piece is so tiny and my freemotion skills tend to favor a much larger canvas (hee, hee), I actually drew and digitized swirly wind around each of the reindeer and the little towns.

That was the easy part! The hard part-- hooping and registering the design to a bound and finished piece-- finished with red pompoms in the edge, to boot. Eight hands of an octopus would not have helped push the fabric into the hoop while simultaneously holding four corners in and tightening a screw and in the meantime making sure it is centered and then just when it's perfect POP! out it comes. After briefly trying to enlist a couple of people milling around the office, paid and unpaid, and even after trying to invite my mail lady in, it became clear I was on my own. Seven hoopings were required-- one for each reindeer and one for the snowflake in the middle. They went well, okay, poorly, well, awful, well, and okay, in that order. So much for thinking that the more you practice the better you'll get. But perseverance always pays off. So does picking a thread color for quilting that really matches. ;-)

So here is my hooping-- and then the finished piece on the back-- it's really hard to get a good picture of quilting, but I am oh, so happy with it! Happy mostly because it's finished, and now I can spend a few hours doing some really enjoyable handwork-- I intend to fully bead, button, and bow the thing now. I already pulled out all of these embellishments-- one perfect snowflake I've been saving for the center, sleigh bells (trust me, the more different colors and sizes of sleigh bells Michaels can display-- I will buy them all, and after all that, plain old GOLD seems to work best) bugle and seed beads, some little pearls, red bows, and then finally Swarovski crystals. Let's hope I Keep It Simple Stupid, but it may be a little late for that already!

I will post a finished photo as soon as I can! I may even enter my little reindeer piece in the miniature quilt category of a couple of shows-- it deserves to be seen, don't you think? But for now it's getting late-- I think we'll order pizza for dinner!

A Quilter's Gathering, 2015

"A Quilter's Gathering" Manchester, NH, 2015

My friend Tere D'Amato and I drove up to pick up her quilt on Sunday (which won a blue ribbon!) to check out the show and see the vendors. A smaller show in general, and to be frank, it was nice to see a more, manageable show instead of a huge national one... to put it simply-- so nice to see what the locals are up to-- and believe me, they are doing plenty!

So, of course we start with Tere, and her fabulous "Liberty Day." Tere does not consider herself an artist, more railing on that some later time, but and after winning the blue ribbon for "Artistry," she still does not consider herself an artist. Go figure. Anyway, Liberty Day won "Best in Show" at the Bayberry Quilter's of Cape Cod show as well and I do hope you will have a chance to see it in the near future. If you do, make sure you have the white glove lady show you the back... San Francisco Stitch Co. is proud to have personally embroidered the label.

Obviously Liberty Day is my number one, but here are some of my other favorites-- I apologize for my detail shots, but whole quilts can get very overwhelming, as anyone who's been to these shows knows!

G. Wong, "I Love, Love, Love" Me, too! Not only a labor of love for all of the quarter square triangles, but the swirls are so perfectly placedand give such an illusion of motion-- almost looks like paints have been smeared! You have to look twice to make sure none of that piecing is curved.

Janet Elia, " Winter Days in Shades of Taupe." This is a kit, I believe, from Crabapple Hill Designs. It has embroidered line winter scenes in the border and stars, or "snowflakes inside. What I love is how this person had so much fun with the quilting-- every shape had something wonderful in it-- swirls, snowflakes, and some really offbeat patterns. She totally made this kit her own.

Alice Means, "Floral Beauty." Beyond the hand embroidery, I was so happy to see many people adding machine embroidery to their quilts. What's not to love about that! The quilt above was just one example of embroidery and piecing, one complimenting the other. I'd like to see the designers get more credit-- you have to credit a quilt a kit designer when submitting, but I really didn't see any information up front on where these embroidered flowers came from.

This is a sentimental favorite for me-- a modern quilt, but the maker put pictures of her daughter's favorite book characters in each white space-- since my youngest daughter left the nest for college this fall, definitely some sniffing was heard. Sorry-- I didn't see the name/artist of this in the show booklet.

Claire Watts, Flowers in Urn with Frame. This little framed piece took my fancy-- simple and sensational. Want to pull out a book and have a read in that chair right now. A gem.

Jody Scaltera, "Ping." And finally, as a cat person-- here's a thread painted one-- amazing. If thread painting was as effortless as this made it look-- we'd be out of business!