Halloween

I know! I am terrible at keeping current on this blog thing. I really do think about it and check often to see if there are any patient people still watching. Needless to say, there are not many of you, but I love you more for your loyalty and so once more I promise to try harder once again.
Halloween was a fun day here in MO. For one thing for the first time since we moved here six years ago, the evening was relatively warm and we had quite a few trick or treaters. One of my favorites was a group of three young people dressed as mimes who "said " trick or treat in sign language! How cool is that? Of course my very favorites were the children in the neighborhood looking god as Luke Skywalker, Queen Elizabeth, fairies, hobos, and many more. This was our first year to have children driven in to the neighborhood from what I can only assume are poorer areas. I have to say they were sweet, charming and fun. I was able to greet them this year with and old relative of mine. She is a little the worse for wear as she passed in the late 1800's and resides for most of the year in Mincy Cemetery, a half hour south of here. What I know about her is that she was a merry sort of soul and while originally designed to be scary, she does miss the mark because she simply will not stop smiling despite dozens of spiders and a few small mice. Isophenia is simply a great fan of Halloween. By the way, just in case you ere confused, she is the one on the left!!!

Quilt Festival

Quilt festival in Houston this year was wonderful as always. Karen, my wonderful friend from CA was my roommate. Carolyn, also from CA was also there. My husband's cousin Gladys from Louisanna comes every year and we get together to catch up. I never know how many friends will make the trip but it is a wonderful venue for a visit. I am so happy that MaryAnn, also from CA, stayed over after Market so we could connect once again.
As always, there were the most beautiful quilts and I thought I would share a few with you. Three to be exact.
But before I do, I want to put out a call to those of you who are like me, a traditional quilter. You are needed! The vast majority of entries were contemporary art quilts and while I have no problem with Art quilts, out of almost 400 entries there were only 37 traditional quilt entries. We exist, there are a lot of us and we need to share. I dare you!!!
The bottom quilt is called "On The Wings of a Dream" by Carol Bryer Fallert
The middle quilt is "Santa Claus Comes To Kirara's Hometown" by Ayako Kawakama ( My personal favorite
The top quilt is "Snapshot, Shannon's Bantam" by Denise Havlan
I hope you like what you see.

PIQF

Home from Houston Quilt Festival and excited by all I saw! I will share more of that in a few days. Today I want to talk about Pacific International Quilt Festival and my quilt " In My Garden"
I have not had a quilt to enter in competition in many years. Life gets in the way and time flies and suddenly it has been ten years, This quilt has been in the making for more than ten years and frankly I did not expect to do well with it. However, this morning I found it online and so here it is. It will belong to my daughter Kelly, when I have finished playing with it. I think she will be as happy as I am.

More about scissors and thimble

I think this is a really pretty picture of my thimble and scissors and so decided to include another view. I find it interesting that a simple change in color for the background can change the look of the exact same items. It reminds me once again of the importance of color in quilting. However there are so many valid choices that a little experimentation is always in order. Sometimes I know exactly where my quilt is going and where it will end up. More often than not, however, the quilt comes together over time with those decisions made one at a time building on what has come before. Looking closely at the thimble I am sure you are beginning to get an idea of the wear beginning to show.

Moving up we have a closer look at the thimble. Can you guess how many holes there are and how much is simply wear? I guess I am a little weird because I really love what has happened to my thimble. It feels like a coming of age, not that I am not a little old for that. The final picture is very cool don't you think? Two holes and the rest are holes waiting to happen. I told you John is a good photographer didn't I? As I have gone over and over the pictures ( 304 of them ) I realized that I have a possibility of putting together a pretty nice art piece to hang in the sewing the sewing room! I'll share that too sometime whether you are interested or not. Look at this, two blogs posted in a week! maybe something good is happening.

To Begin With

Some time ago my daughter suggested that a nice addition to my blog would be a tour of my sewing room. It is almost clean and orderly enough for that to happen. Ha! At first I was alittle reluctant but then I realized that I could milk this for some time to come! Happiness. I have not been very good at this blogging thing and have wanted to get better so this could do the trick. Journaling has never been my forte. I have had a lot of starts and stops sometimes letting months or even years pass in between entries. I have purchased journals, received them as gifts and nothing seems to keep me going for long. The girls in my family including me have always had a fascination with office supplies, especially the paper ones. I simply forget to write. I don't want that to happen here. I have to say though that I am looking forward to sharing my wonderful studio space with you. Shhhhhh, I have about 500 square feet!!! Can you believe it?
I do feel compelled to make you wait a little though. I will build up to the actual studio over the next few weeks with related stories and pictures.So, to begin, I want to share pictures taken for me by my son-in-law John. He is really pretty good at this and has a light box which makes it even better. I have to say that he took 304 pictures. I know because I counted them my self. Now calm yourself, I plan to share only a half dozen or so. get in touch with me and I will send the whole file! Just kidding.This started when I finished my latest quilt and realized that I quilted holes in the thimble. How cool is that?? I was pretty excited as this had not happened for me before. Of course this beautiful thimble gifted to me by my husband Dale more than twenty years ago had been around the block a number of times so it was bound to happen. When I make a quilt I always feel an almost magical connection with those quilters of long ago and they were certainly not strangers to such things. But this was my first time and I love the whole idea. This first picture is simply my tools. The scissors are also twenty years old and paired with the thimble it is a thing of beauty. I hope you will enjoy my journey. I know I will, Nadine

Baltimore on the Prairie

Last week I spent four days at the Mahoney State park in Nebraska teaching Baltimore Applique. On Wednesday I started the conference with a 412 mile road trip. We purchase a GPS a couple of weeks ago and this was the first real test and I made out just fine. I am pretty excited by that because my family was worried. However no one was available to travel with me so it was nice to have such an uneventful time. On Thursday a number of students and teachers drove to the International Quilt Study Center. This is an amazing place. The current quilt collection is now an exciting 3000 plus! We were fortunate to be able to spend time in a room where quilts prepared for exhibit, etc. The quilt laid out for us to see is called the Lucinda quilt. Check out the web sight for a look at this beautiful piece of art. It has a reverse applique feather border and lovely applique basket and more. In addition, we were able to go upstairs to the gallery for a really incredible look at beautiful crazy quilts as well as some wonderful pieced and appliqued quilts. What a day. Back to the Lodge in time to teach the first two hours of the workshop. In my class students marked the background fabric and began appliqueing leaves so the next day they could applique flowers. Essentially this was to be a three day workshop taught over four days. Students arrived early for class and inevitably stayed late. You can't get better that that. We all came together each evening for show and tell and door prizes. One memorable evening was spent with the incredibly funny lecture by Jan Carlson!! Of course we ate a lot of chocolate I am so looking forward to next year. I hope you are too.

In My Garden

You have seen this quilt before on the frame and coming off the frame. Now it has been been completed and professionally photographed and juried into the PIQF show in Santa Clara CA. I am excited about that as I have not had a quilt I thought would be good enough for competition for several years. This quilts journey has been long, beginning with a group of students pushing for a once a month workshop. We ended up with 12 blocks and for awhile I could not imagine what I would do with mine. Ultimately, I decided on a center medallion with the look of a tree of life and a narrow border. I patterned the center after a vintage quilt picture sent to me by my friend Karen. I found the set in a book by Deloris Hinson called American Graphic. It took awhile to find and decide on the sashing and binding fabric. I quilted off and on for a couple of years, more off than on. the first glitch came when I decided to help our daughter Kelly when her daughter was almost two to take care of our granddaughter while her mom went back to school. The quilt went with me but no actual quilting was done. It might have had something to do with playing with a two year old?? I was about one third done when we made the decision to move to MO. Moving settling in and just getting used to the new situation ate up a lot of time and next the thing I knew five more years had passed and the quilt was like a millstone around my neck. My friends were making up excuses for why I was still not finished. A few even told me I didn't have to finish! I think that was a wake up call. I finally rose to the challenge and it is done!!! Will I echo quilt twice around all motifs again? Not likely.