Cspoonquilt

I'm back home!  I had a wonderful time at QUILTCON and my head is full of lots of ideas and information.  I have so many pix to share! This first category of quilts was my favorite and (to me) the most interesting!   There were well over 50 quilts in the Charitable Challenge.  Modern Quilt Guilds from all over North American and some from overseas responded to the challenge to make a Charitable quilt (to be donated to the Charity of their choice) of an original Modern design using this limited palette. One was more spectacular than the next! The juxtaposition of so many large quilts from such a wide spread number of groups all focused on the same basic challenge was fascinating!  It was an interesting visual commentary on both the talent and charity of quilters in general. Here is a sampling of about half of what I saw.  In most cases for the sake of Brevity I have included only the name of the group and the title.   But I did take pix of...

Christine H. from the UK sent me this picture recently to share yet another application of the boat block!  In the original quilt the blocks were set with no sashing and a half block drop.  Christine set her's as a quarter block drop.  I think this setting works really well.  It makes the space around the boats more interesting!  Christine is donating this quilt to Project Linus!  Thanks for sharing your pic of this lovely quilt, Christine! I will be posting pix of Quiltcon.  but I'm having difficulty getting the photos downloaded from my iphone to my computer.  Grrrr!  Anybody have that problem? Well I'll get my IT (my son) right on that and get back to you. Have a great weekend! cheers, CW

When I'm working on a big quilt top sometimes I make a small version of the top to experiment with the quilting.  The big top isn't finished yet but the basic idea looks like this only bigger with lots more squares and colors. I saw somewhere on the internet (sorry I don't remember where) a quilt that had been quilted with this kind of pattern.  So I thought I'd try it out on my sample quilt.  The good thing about this kind of straight line pattern is that it can all be done using the channel lock on my long arm.  A channel lock blocks the long arm from rolling back and forth so it only moves from left to right across the top in a straight line.  It's really easy, but it does require turning the quilt and re-pinning  it on the frame in order to get straight lines in both axis.  And it takes a bit of fussing to get the straight lines going parallel.  But once that's done it's a breeze! This was a small quilt 36" x 48".  I might be si...

Well, there not quite finished.  Both these quilts need to be bound but I can't do that right now 'cause both my sewing machines that have walking feet are in the shop!  They managed to break down  in rapid succession in one afternoon!  The nerve!  Fortunately I have several back-up sewing machines so the sewing goes on!  Just no bindings.... That's part of the reason I have gotten these two quilts quilted.  When I get tired of sewing I'll go to pin another top on the Longarm,  kind of like an intermission;  something brainless I can do while waiting for the muse to reboot.  And then of course once a top is on the frame...it must be quilted! Any who this first quilt was made with Orphan blocks given to me by a fellow guild member as thank you blocks after my first year as BOM coordinator.   I think these must have been left overs from a much earlier BOM winner, 'cause some of them were signed and dated.   It was ...

Trolling around blog land I've seen a lot of good ideas about how to manage one's UFO's.  'Finish 'um up' challenges seem to be very popular this year (or maybe I'm just finally taking notice, lol).  In any case I thought I'd share my strategy in case there are people like me who shy away from getting to committed but still want to make Some progress on their pile of UFO's! Because I am a visual type thinker I keep a folder on my desk top titled "Finish 'um up" and in this folder are pictures of (not all, but) a fair number of projects that I Think I would like to work on in the next year or so.  One reason this works better for me is because as I mentioned I am more of a visual thinker and I find when I write a list I tend to just ignore it or forget about it altogether so it really does not serve as a very effective reminder.  I do this with grocery lists too.  I dutifully write things I need from the store with the best of intenti...