Finally, for Michele

Hi Michele,

I finally got this little house panel finished. It will be flying to you soon. I hope you like it!

Houses and Trees, Oh My!

The class at Quilted Threads was a big success.

 There were 13 students, and they did awesome!

They made great houses, and then made wonky trees, and several even made overlapping trees.

All the ladies had name tags, but most were covered by their houses when I took their photos. Sorry I can't tell you all their names.

 Some gals made really wonky houses.

Some made more traditional houses.

 Some made really, really wonky houses!

They had great fun, can you tell?

Heidi's house has bats coming out of the chimney!  Isn't this house great?

Kathy made two houses. This is her second.

Can you see the bluebirds on the top of this chimney?

This house has a dog playing ball as well as a windowbox full of flowers AND a pair of overlapping trees.

Lynn set her house in Hawaii.

All the students made terrific houses. Most found NOT measuring hard at first.  I had lots of "Can I do ...." questions, and my answer was, "It's YOUR house, you can do anything you want.  There aren't any rules." 

 By the end of the day, Juanica said, "I can't believe it. I'm not measuring, I'm not using a template, and I'm not worrying about a perfect 1/4" seam.  This is fun."

Great job ladies!

It's in the Bag!

 About a year and a half ago I was showing off a quilt I had made to a fellow quilter. I had put the quilt in a tote bag I had made over 20 years ago. It was made in brown calicos and was a traditional block. My friend said, "Lynne, you need a new bag. This one does not represent you."  You can read about that exchange here.

So I went home and did a lot of thinking. My new bag had to have letters, and it had to have something bright and fun. What I would make was easy. Figuring out how to make my letters fit into a very small space was much trickier.

 This crazy party house (the Red-Eye) did not make it into a quilt I was working on at the time. I loved it's wildness, it's wackiness and it's complete disregard for the rules.  It HAD to be on the bag.

Since a bag has two sides, it was obvious to me the other side had to be a "daytime" house. And of course, Millie had to be included.

Here are photos of both sides of the finished bag. It draws comments wherever it goes.

Red House

I love this red house. Love, love, love.

Orange House

I made another house last night. In this one, I was really trying to use fabrics that really pushed the envelope a bit.  None of these fabrics is exactly a shrinking violet, and it can always be tricky to work with several big prints. 

Here I've got three big batiks - the sky, the ground and the house itself along with big prints in the door, the windows and the roof.  The roof print is very traditional, but here it's used rather un-traditionally, as roof tiles. I'll use this house in my class next week, to encourage my students to use fabrics in different ways.

The big sky print (it's the same fabric I used as the outer border of the Four Seasons quilt) makes me think of a very humid, rainy, breezy day. Maybe this house is in Seattle.  Or maybe it's someplace in the Mediterranean.

Yellow House

I'm making up a few sample houses for my Houses and Trees class, and taking step-by-step photos so I can show my students exactly how it's done.

Omigosh, is it a PITA to do something, stop, take a picture, etc...




(This house looks like a face to me. The mouth (door) is too big. It looks like it's embarrassed about something.)

Ideas

Have you got a friend who gives you terrific ideas? The ideas are always good, and you just have to go for it?

My friend Tracey is like that. She doesn't quilt, but she is very creative, smart and funny as all get out.  When I was working out my Four Seasons Quilt, she suggested make the scenes at different times of the day.  In the end I decided not to do that, but the idea has stayed with me.  Last night I arranged these eight fabrics, ground on the bottom, sky on top, as showing not only the four seasons, but four different times of day.

I wouldn't arrange them all lined up like that, but more like this, reading clockwise.

I had always liked this little sketch I did back then,

with the houses in the middle and the trees around the edges. I thought this way the trees could blend from one season to the other in a much more interesting way.

I have a lot to think about. I cleaned the sewing studio over the weekend, so I am ready for a new project.  I also visited Quilted Threads, which had a big sale, and I confess I added to my stash. I also swapped out Nine x Nine for The White Cat's Rules.  My Four Seasons quilt is being quilted and will be on display at the shop when it is finished.

My House

 My house is kinda boring. I have lived in the bottom floor apartment of this house for over 25 years. I thought its boring-ness was a negative, but when it comes to free piecing your own house, it turns out to be an asset.

 I wanted to include a house in my alphabet sampler quilt, but I hadn't done many houses back then, and I didn't want the house to take over the quilt.  So I took a picture of my house, and then drew it out to scale. 

 

As you can see, it took a couple of tries. I had to eliminate the elements that would make the house look three dimensional, and I had to work out the scale. The windows would be one inch by two inches. I thought it would end up smaller, but the finished house panel is about 14" x 18".

I actually added the cat in the window after I finished the house, but I think it totally makes the quilt. You can read more about my thought process here.

Surrounded!

I sewed the borders on to the Four Seasons quilt last night. The finished outer border won't be quite so wide, but I do think the binding will be the same batik-y blue.

With a little luck the weather will be mild enough so I can take the quilt outside and get a really decent photo.  Now I have to prepare the how-to's for the quilt-along.

Oh boy, you should see the barns that Julie is making! She's going to put me to shame!

Border Wars

That's an exaggeration, of course.  It was more like Border Auditions.  I always knew I wanted a blue around the edges of the Four Seasons quilt, to make you think of the sky that is common all over the world.  So here is the blue.  Lovely color, lovely fabric, but it's definitely lacking something.

My good friend Julie suggested a thin inner border of a darker blue.

 That didn't do anything for me either.  I thought, "It needs a purple inner border."

So I tried a reddish violet, and immediately liked the way it looked.

Here is what it will look like.  I am thinking the skinny border may be about a half inch wide, and the outer blue will be about 3-1/2" or so.  I haven't sewn anything down yet, I've just laid the strips around the flimsy to see.  Looks like I will finish this flimsy before New Year's!

Four Seasons Panels

Here are the panels for my Four Seasons Quilt. They haven't been sewn together yet. The panels are about 37 - 39" wide and about 55" tall.

The quilt-a-long will begin about mid-January.  Happy Holidays!

Four Seasons Panels Complete

I have finished the four panels of my Four Seasons quilt. They aren't sewn together yet. I brought them to Quilted Threads to find a fabric for the border. Here I am auditioning a few of them.  You can see the discards at the end of the table. I did find a fabric, and it wasn't any of these.

Summer Cat

You really didn't think I wouldn't have a cat in the Summer panel, did you?

Summer House

Here's the finished Summer house.  I've had a guest visiting for the last couple of days so I haven't done any sewing. I hope to have the Summer panel done by the end of the weekend.

The Hammock

A great place to while away a lovely summer afternoon is swinging from a hammock in the shade of some trees.

The hammock is made from fabric with letterscript on it because when I think of lying in a hammock, I think of reading a good book. 

To get an idea of the size of the hammock, the space surrounding it is about two inches tall by about three inches wide.  The tree trunks are about 1/4" wide.






***As for Freecycle in this city, I signed up on Friday morning, got an automatic reply telling me to read the rules and respond. I did so Friday night, and now, three full days later, I still haven't heard one word.

The Side Porch

Here in New England (in the Northeast USA) many houses have porches.  The house I grew up in had a  screened in porch along the front side of the house. It was a great place to watch the world go by, to watch the lightning during a thunderstorm, and just so sit on the swing and do nothing.

I decided the house in my Summer panel needed a side porch.  The small white rectangles in the photo above are 1/4" x 1".

Yvonne asks a Question

Yvonne asked a question when I was talking to her last week and it really got me thinking.  She was talking about the Four Seasons panels and she asked "Do you draw them out first?"

It caught me totally off guard. I hadn't drawn the Spring panel, and I didn't like it. I had done a drawing of the Winter panel and it had come out well. 

I was working on the Autumn panel,

 and I had drawn that one too. 

I really had to think about it. Why do I draw sometimes, but not all the time?


Now it sounds silly, but you've all heard the quote by Yogi Berra, "If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else," and it's a lot like that.  

I don't always know where I'm going when I get started, but once I do get going, I get a pretty good idea of where I want to go.  The details will change, but that's ok. I don't need to have a complete idea to get started. Sometimes I don't have ANY idea at all, but getting going gives me a point at which to start - it helps me figure out what I like and what I don't.

I draw because it's a way to get an idea out of my head and down on paper so I can remember what I want to do.

It's also a way for me to work out an idea when I can't sew.

And this give you all a peek into what the Summer panel will look like!

If At First You Don't Succeed...

When I finished the Spring panel, it didn't thrill me.  I liked the elements, and the colors, but to me it was a little boring.

I tried inserting an "overlapping" tree, and thought it would help. It did, but the house still looked a bit stiff and un Spring-like.

So I set it aside. I made the Winter panel, and I made the Autumn panel. I liked both of those. I knew I wanted to fix the Spring panel without starting from scratch, so I took the pieces apart and remade the house.

That was better, but it was only when I started rearranging the trees, (and adding a small pink one) that I really started liking it a lot better.

So now I'm happy.