Tag Archives: quilters

Day 16: What I’m Reading

Yay! The #31dayblogchallenge is halfway over. There are dozens of bloggers participating and I’ve seen some great posts. Here are a few I’ve enjoyed.

Granny Maud’s Girl: Binding Kits
Linda B Cre8tive: Sparkle On
Messygoat: Caffeine Bag for Rene
Dr. Les Kertay’s: Because Parenting Is Not for Wimps
Persimon Dreams: Ugly Sweater Competition
Healthy Joyful Life: When Life Feels Like a Jacked Up Puzzle
Something About Nothing: Celtic Knot Stamp
Mary Walter Quilts: Indigo and Superstition

This one’s from the BadAss Quilters Society. It was published in November but is just too good to leave off of this list. How to be a BFF to your LQS

Day 7: Instagram #getyourquiltywishesgranted

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Here’s another #31dayblogchallenge post. Happy Monday you guys!

Something cool’s happening in the quilting community on Instagram. If you’re on it you should check out the hashtag #getyourquiltywishesgranted and participate. Here’s how it works. Search that hashtag and check out the wishlists. Grant some of those wishes before posting your own.

How awesome is that? I hoped to find some piecing thread and have three people sending me Aurifil. Really! I’m thinking putting another ask out there for tree blocks. I don’t yet have enough for the final border of the turtles quilt.

What’s most exciting for me is the giving. Here’s a photo of the first 12 envelopes going out with tomorrow’s mail.

There’s small prints for a postage stamp quilt, traditional fabrics for an aunt who’s a new quilter, low volume scraps for a background, animal fabrics for a toddler’s I-spy quilt and more. This is for the quilter who’s looking for mice.

Pictured here are 40ish pieces of 16 polka-dot fabrics. The lady making a polka-dot quilt is going to be thrilled that she has more variety. My cost? Time and a postage stamp. If she had to buy these 16 fabrics, it’d be 1/4 yard minimum from a quilt shop. That’s 4 yards of fabric when all she needs is this little bit. How wonderful that this community movement is happening? I’m not the only one helping her out so she’ll receive even more variety which will make her project all the more interesting. That sure makes me feel good.

Isn’t that a great way to kick off the holiday season? Happy Hannukah to my friends who celebrate and happy holidays to all. See you tomorrow.

Inspired By the What-Is-That

What is that? It’s a dog, or a watermelon or a goat, or whatever it is that you see. This is the piece of art that’s the topic of tonight’s conversation with some of my quilting friends.
We have monthly challenges and come together to share our works. I usually sew something. This time I got my camera out to play.

My first idea was a mosaic with buttons. It’s cute and was fun to scrounge up all those pink and red buttons.

Then I went a little more abstract with ribbon, thread, and wound cards of embroidery threads. If you step back, you can still see the shapes from the original piece, especially since I kept the colors.

I got messy. Pepto Bismol is the right kind of pink this and ketchup works for red. Since I finger-painted this onto a white plate I filled in the background. The negative space is chocolate syrup to form around the white shape.
While I was in the kitchen, I grabbed a cup for water. I saw the pink plastic one and went searching for more to complete the picture. The pink cup became the white shape. The round plate mimics the pink half-circle as it’s segmented by the red square-ish one.

It was fun playing around. I can’t wait to see what my friends came up with!

Customer Service 101: Active Listening

It is so very important to listen to customers and really hear what they’re saying. I made a portrait quilt top (not quilted, so it could be hung in a frame) for a customer who wanted to give it to her husband for Christmas. She described it as he’s in the military and she wanted something beautiful and unique featuring this photograph of his squadron.

I heard her… until I saw the picture. Dude! That’s the mountain from Close Encounters of the Third Kind! The one the kids were drawing and the guy made sculptures of because the aliens would land there. How cool that this is an actual real-life landmark! I’m such a sci-fi geek. And my first pattern draft focused on how awesome the mountain is… until I realized that I wasn’t focusing on what’s really important to the customer.

It doesn’t matter what I think is important (or cool!) in a photograph. It matters what the customer wants to feature. So I scrapped my drawing of the mountain in all its glory, which hides the planes quite well… and swapped that for a plain stripped fabric which brings the focus back to her husband’s squadron. I think it’s well done.