It is Done - Opportunity Quilt 2009

I finished it tonight and called Regina, my partner, over to see it. We are so happy with it. The precision of a computer and the flow of freehand.
I hope you like it. And I hope we make a ton of money on it.

Here's more of the story.



Regina used her Statler to SID the applique and then ghost the sunflowers in other parts of the quilt. She also quilted bees buzzing, caterpillars crawling, a mouse, butterflies and birds flitting around.

Take a look. I did the background quilting to make the applique, especially the trapunto sunflowers pop. Regina was against quilting in the applique. I wanted to put veins in the leaves but I went with her. You can see which leaves are the applique ones (vice the ghotsted leaves) on the back of the qulit.

My New/Old Studio

We are finally moving my longarm machine back to the original studio. The room (15' x 16') is actually the 2nd master bedroom in the house. It has 2 windows (one east-facing and one that is south-facing) so I get lots of light when I pull up the room-darkening shades. When the shades are down, it's as dark as the inside of a cow.

I have an overhead light on the ceiling fan but it is only good for ambient light not really a work light. I have the Gammill light bar for work lighting. The carpet was the original from when the house was built in 2001 and it did not hol dup to the apple juice stains of my grands or the tea stains from my mother's cuppa. We chose a latte colored carpet in frieze (pronounced free-zay).

And of course, I have my own bathroom which makes it quite handy while I am working.

This first photo is a work in progress peak at the room. The wall-to-wall closet was chocker-block full of batting on rolls and batting bags in boxes.

And here is what the carpet looks like after installation.



It's funny that it only took us a half day to move everything out of this room when we re-located the studio to the living room. Because I have made a bizillion trips from the new studio to the old looking for (snippers, SID ruler, chalk bowl and foam brush, etc) looking for stuff that I need for the totol of two quilts that I have done since we moved the machine. The living room is 15' by 20' and I had so much more room. I also had to deal with the 3 door ways into the living room. Well, 4 doorways if you count the patio slider.

We will eventually (read: when the insurance company gets off their butts and sends us a check) fix the hole in the ceiling in the living room, circa Dec 17, 2008. And after that gets done, then we can proceed to get the wood floors replaced. I know the insurance company is stewing about this. The patch of floor that is ruined is only 6 x 9 feet (approx) but since Pergo discontinued their engineered wood, we have no way to replace the bad part. So the insurance will have to replace all the wood that adjoins the "bad spot". That would be:
-- 15' x 20' living room which joins the
-- 15' x 15' dining room on one side and the
-- 12' x 15' foyer which joins the living room and the
-- 4.5' x 45' hallway which at one point
-- steps down 3 wooden steps to the den 8' by 3 steps.

There is a bit of irony. When we had the floors installed 2 years ago last April, they delivered the wood and put the boxes into the dining room so they could acclimate to the house for three days. The 3rd party delivery people had already screwed up the delivery twice so they were anxious to get this one off their list. So they put the wood in the driveway.

Me: "That wood is supposed to be in the house."
Delivery guy: "No, this is where we always leave it."
Me: "Hello, what if it rains?"
Delivery bubba with eyes rolling: "It ain't gonna rain."
Me: "You need to call the store and get this sorted out."
Delivery oaf pushing a clipboard toward me: "You need to sign this paper that the package was delivered."
Me: "I'll sign when the wood is INSIDE my house."
Then I went inside and called the store and vented with the manager.

The delivery guys sat in front of our house for 15 minutes undoubtedly re-grouping their next move. They must have gotten a phone call relayed to them because they started bringing the boxes of wood up to the dining room.

There were supposed to be 50 boxes of flooring. The invoice said 50 boxes delivered. But my husband, the logistics manager on crutches, counted the boxes of flooring and came up with a count of 52 boxes. Yeah, we had 2 extra boxes. 2 boxes that we had not paid for. 2 boxes that would have been more than adequate to fix that bad spot in our living room. He made the delivery guys take the 2 boxes back to the store. Grrrrr.

Opportunity Quilt 2009

Our town has a social club for quilting. Each year, we have a small quilt show, about 100 quilts and we make an opportunity quilt. Lots of hands work on this quilt. We sell raffle tickets for the quilt and the winning ticket is drawn at the October quilt show. The monies go to local groups like the senior center, quilt show hosting church's youth group (they provide the refreshments for the 2 day show) and to fire victims. Last year, our opportunity quilt made $3,400 dollars.

The group solicits quilt proposals from the local longarmers. There is not an overwhelming response from longarmers since this is a "no pay" quilt job. The quilter does the work and the payment is that her business card is displayed on the quilt everywhere it goes. Anonymous proposals are reviewed by the members of the group and votes are cast for their choice. There are about 8 longarm quilters in our town of 40,000 people. The quilt is queen size with large applique sunflowers and a white border.

Regina, another quilter from my church, Lutheran Spirit of Joy, has a Statler Stitcher. I asked her if she wanted to team up with me and submit a proposal. She could do the computer work and I would do the background free motion fill. Our proposal was selected by the group. There is lots of SID, ghosting, quilted critters like bees, caterpillars, birds and butterflies. She chose King Tut Sunflower #955thread for the ghost sunflowers. The Mc Tavish like background is Superiors So Fine Cashew #405. More photos to follow.

BOM for LQS

It's that BOM time of the year again. There doesn't seem to be as many this year as last. Our LQS did the same block but in different fabrics. You could choose from 30's reproduction fabrics, Fairy Frost or batiks with black points. The owner, Martha, chose the batiks. Debbie pieced it, Marilynn added the borders, I quilted it and it goes back to Marilynn for the binding.

Here is the front. Martha wanted to use black thread. It gives it an edgy look with the black star points. I used a stencil and 3-ruler 4-passes required border treament. Not the smartest design choice for black thread on that batik. I should have chosen something simple that I could have freemotioned. But noooooo, I wanted to show off my quilting skills. That sort of blew up in my face. I did the top border, stepped back and just wanted to cry, it looked awful. Frogging took a while on batiks. Why is it that your tension is always perfect on a design that has to eb frogged?





So I stayed with the same stencil + 3 rulers border treatment but used a PermaCore thread in the orange family. That looked good. Of course, I had thread changes and had to rutn the quilt to do the side borders, sigh. I kept the black in the blocks and sashing. I wanted to do continuous since every wobble and stop/start glares with black thread. I'm happy with what I chose for the blocks, the sashing...no so much, too big. But it is done. And Martha liked it so I'm pleased about that.

The back is red and orange though it does not appear so in this photo. I wanted a secondary design which the curls provided diagonally across the quilt. I couldn't quite see them so I altered the photo in Paint Shop Pro so that the stitching showed.