Fox and Flowers

I made a couple more flowers for the Quick Brown Fox. I haven't finalized the layout yet. I'm thinking of a row of flowers between "jumps over" and "the lazy fox."
I also tried making a fox. I'm not thrilled with this, the white is too bright, and the fox is too big, and I have decided not to use it. The quilt is about the letters, not the animals.

Flower For Fox

I tried another of Mary Lou Weidman's flowers. (still haven't got the book yet...) Here it is near the letters for the Quick Brown Fox. I'm not sure about either it or the idea of adding a fox and a dog. But I'm going to keep working to find out for sure...

Flowers

i have long admired Mary Lou Weidman's wonderful, whimsical creations. I particularly enjoy her flowers, as seen in this quilt in her new book, Out of the Box. I ordered it by mistake, but I won't return it, because it's got a lot of great ideas. I really wanted the book about the flowers, which I have ordered.
In the meantime, I tried one of the flowers last night. It looked simple enough, but I think it would have been a bit easier if I made it bigger than 6-1/2".I can see a lot of flowers in my future.

Cleaning Up

Whenever I make anything wonky, my sewing room gets really messy, with fabric strewn all over my worktable.For the last few nights, I've been ironing and folding fabrics. I'm almost finished.I've got to make a Gizzy Quilt for a special cat in "Fur-ginia" and then I want to get going on the fox and dog for "The Quick Brown Fox" quilt. I also have to finish "Devon Town" by the middle of March.

Inspiration

Inspiration pops up in the most unusual places.


Yesterday, it showed up in my bathroom.

As you know, my bathroom is painted school-bus yellow. My bath towels are a brick red, maybe a burgundy. this particular hand towel is a purple. The washcloth is an orange sherbet.* I tossed the damp washcloth up on the shower edge to dry, but I missed, and it fell down and landed near the towels on the rack.

WOW! What an eye popping explosion of color! I can't wait to try it. It reminds me of some advice I read in a book about needlepoint once. The author wrote that she never sorted her needlepoint yarn by color, because this allowed colors to fall next to each other and create color combinations she would never expect.

The intense colors don't even show up in this photo. The orange is too light, the purple too blue.

Anyway, these colors excite me.


*I hate color names because they're subjective. The bath towel is really a dark warm red, the hand towel is a dark blue-violet and the orange is a light, bright orange-yellow.

DQS8 & Me

My little quilt for Doll Quilt Swap 8 is all finished.

Now I get to hang it in my house and enjoy it until I have to send it to its new home.

Yesterday was sunny and mild (for January) and I decided to take a drive out to my favorite quilt shop, Quilted Threads, for a little retail therapy.

I didn't need anything in particular, but I decided I could buy up to ten yards of fabric. I was looking for things that were a bit out of the ordinary.

I bought half yards of these, a purple, and two blues...I bought half yards of each of these tweed looking fabrics, a brown, green and blue. They are hard to photograph, but very beautiful.
I bought fat quarters of these yellows.
I bought half yards of these two very different pinks.
I got three yards of this batik, to use to finish up the Quick Brown Fox.
I also bought half yards of four different WOW (white on whites), and I bought my sister (who came with me) a yard of batiks she was eyeing.

I'll finish up the Four Seasons Doll Swap Quilt later today, while I watch the tennis at the Australian Open.

Four Seasons, Quilted

Here is my Four Seasons, the quilt I made for Doll Quilt Swap 8, all quilted. I did the quilting myself. The quilt is about 17-1/2" x 26-1/2". I'll add the binding later today (it will be the same blue as the border), and then I'll add a hanging sleeve on the back, and lastly, the label. In March, this little quilt will fly to... (sorry, no hints!)

The back of this quilt is pretty neat too, but since it has several HUGE hints, I can't show you until it has been received at its new home.

Yes, Clare, Trish, I did machine quilt it, and I did wing it.  However, I tried to quilt it more tightly and have the wavy lines overlap more in the winter and autumn sections than I did in the summer and spring panels.

Blue Sky

I've added a border to the Four Seasons quilt top for Doll Quilt Swap 8. I'll trim it down after it is quilted, and the binding will be the same blue.

Time for bed, and to clean the studio!

Four Seasons

I have to figure out what to use as a border, then I can assemble the top and send it to Chris to be quilted... This little beauty deserves better than my clunky quilting!

Audition for DQS8

I'm auditioning the "ground" fabrics. This is generally headed in the direction I want it to go. The rows are currently 16-1/2" wide and no more than 5" tall.


My copy of "Liberated Quiltmaking II" is due tomorrow....

Before And After

BeforeAfter
Yup, my Letters From Home quilt is stuffed in that little box (actually it's a large flat rate box from the USPS) and on Tuesday it will be flying its way across the US to a publisher. If it passes muster, and fits into an editorial need, it may be included in Tonya's book about the free-pieced letters I love making so much.

Bon Voyage!


Now I gotta finish The Quick Brown Fox... I need something to put up in that empty space!

A Mini House

The little house is 4" tall.

More Trees

The inside dimension of this blue tape square on the floor is 24", the maximum size for the quilt for the Doll Quilt Swap. I'm still working out a plan.Then, while driving to work yesterday, I looked at the trees along the sides of the road, and got an idea. So when I got home last night, I made some more trees. The tallest one here is about 4-1/2" tall.
I live in New Hampshire. It was 15 degrees F when I went out this morning. So these are winter trees.

I'm getting there.

As if this week at work wasn't bad enough, the voicemail system went out yesterday.

(Sigh.)

The Forest Grows

I've added a few more trees to my forest. They're getting a little crazier, but I want to keep the backgrounds lighter. I'm not finished, and I'm having some fun.

Doll Quilt Ideas

I should be working on a kitty quilt for a friend, but after three working days of hell dealing with SMTP, DNS, SPF, RBL, SURBL, IMAP ,POP, Spam, filters and assorted JUNK, I deserve to do whatever the hell I want.

So I went into the studio and started sewing up a forest.

I had this idea of a little quilt full of tiny trees, with maybe a little house somewhere. I wanted something that had a foot in tradition, so I used a light background for them. My plan was to make them really tiny, about 3" tall, but these are a bit bigger. I hate to trim them down before I sew them up, so they've got a lot of space around them now.

I was originally going to make them all green, but I think they need a little piss and vinegar.

A Fine Ending

When you've had a day from hell at work, can anything be better than coming home to a package of fabric that you bought on sale?No.

Busy

I've joined the Doll Quilt Swap, and have agreed to be a Swap Mama again. This will be my fifth Doll Quilt Swap, and second round as a Mama. As Mama, I received the names of 18 swappers, and I had to match them up. It is a not a one-to-one swap, or even a round robin swap. It is a secret swap, where nobody knows who is making a quilt for you, and you only know the name of the person you are making a quilt for.

It's a fair amount of work at the beginning, but my matches are all made. The emails go out later today, and then the real fun begins.



Thanks for all the suggestions about free-piecing the fox and the dog. I am excited about doing them! As for "Follow Your Bliss", I fell out of love with it, and have set it aside. But working on it succeeded in getting me back into the sewing room!

Got Fox?

Peggi wondered yesterday if I could make a free pieced dog and fox for my The Quick Brown Fox quilt. I had been wondering the same thing.

I can find dogs (Tanya made some great ones in her stunning free pieced quilt about a year ago), but not foxes. Anybody got any suggestions?

I think it's a great idea.

over

I think the final layout will look like this. Now I just have to fill in the empty space.

Jumps

I've almost got the words sewn together for "the quick brown fox..."

I'm really happy with them. The small a's are about 2-1/2" square, and the small m is 3" wide. The o in "dog" is upside down from the way I originally planned it, but I like it better this way.
One other funny note, the d in "dog" was actually a p but the two letters looked better when I switched them.

quick brown fox, part 2

The reason you could see the "W" in the photos yesterday was because of the flash. If you looked at the letters in natural light, the dark hues disappear on the black, so I remade several of them, specifically the "b," "f," one of the "t's," the "w" and the "y."

I have also started sewing some of the words together. This is going to get interesting, since I do not have enough of the backing fabric to finish it off the way I would like.

The other thing I find interesting is that although these are simply lower case letters, I think I like these better than Friday's "Blue Moon Alphabet"

the quick brown fox

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

I typed this phrase over and over in typing class when I was 14. The phrase uses every letter in the alphabet at least once. I don't know if it is still used.

These are the lower case letters on black backgrounds I made in October 2008. I had to make a few more letters. (There are four o's and three e's...) Although they are easy to see in this photo, in reality, the w and f are very hard to see, so I will make new ones.

Blue Moon Alphabet

I made this small quilt top (19.5" x 25.5") from the letters with the black backgrounds I made in October 2008 at the same time I made the letters I used in "Letters From Home."

So why is it called "Blue Moon Alphabet?" Because the full moon on New Year's Eve was a Blue Moon, and I was assembling the top while watching the New Year's Eve celebrations on TV.

Happy New Year!