Christmas wreath exchange...

There's a Christmas wreath exchange party this afternoon, hosted by one of the ladies from one of my favorite quilt stores, SewFlakes, http://www.sewflakesfabrics.com/. Here's the wreath I made to take. The woody vine is from our garden, something that I made and hung on a branch this past summer.....I think it is the perfect backdrop for the bird house and birdie I stitched and embellished with vintage buttons and glass beads. Attached with red wire, in the lower left corner, is a vintage Christmas postcard from my postcard collection.

 Some close-ups of the wreath.

Had some labels printed for my stitching projects hoping to get serious about an Etsy shop... maybe next year!

"If you want to feel rich, just count all the gifts you have that money can't buy."

Thanks for visiting!

Ahoy matey...

Picked up this quilt yesterday I made for my step-son. He's 40+ years old going on 20 when it comes to his pirates|skulls and crossbones. Had lots of fun collecting fat quarters that would go with the pirate and flame prints. I had it long-armed quilted in a flame pattern with red thread. Yesterday, the hubby and I discovered while holding the quilt up, with the sun shinning behind it, the red stitching caused the flame pattern to glow.... cool! All that is left to do is the binding.

The inset shows detail of the overall quilting pattern.

"Red sky at night, sailor's delight.

Red sky at morning, sailor take warning"

A few current projects...

Spoonflower (http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome), is having a 2 for 1 sale on printing tea towel calendars this week only. I have been thinking about creating some calendar towels as gifts and this offer from Spoonflower cinched the decision for me to get busy and put my thoughts to paper or I should say, pixels. Here is the towel I have designed to have printed to give for Christmas.

This will be my first order from Spoonflower and I am thrilled to see what magic they can do printing on fabric.

I have been continuing to work on the flag quilt for the hubby. Am hoping to get all the paper removed from the back soon, fix any loose seams and get it quilted early in 2012. Meanwhile, I started piecing the back for the quilt. Here's what I have pieced|embroidered for the backing.

I have added a 16" border around 3 sides of the top to make it larger for our queen size mattress. This is a photo of the original size of the top.

The top is foundation pieced and I know now I should have shortened the stitch length and used thinner paper for piecing this top. Once I figured out how to piece via this method, putting the top together wasn't so bad. But it's been a bugger to get the paper off the back. 

We took a quick trip to Tennessee for Thanksgiving. Here a few photos from visiting a dairy|tobacco|chicken farm(s) that belong to the folks we visited. Kentucky is somewhere over beyond the first row of trees.

Wanted to bring this little one home....but there was no room in the car.

Do brown cows give chocolate milk?

And white cows white milk?

Tobacco baled and waiting for auction.

Ready to be baled.

Trying to get chickens to stand still for the camera is like herding cats...

Catching the last rays to a perfect day.

"If you have a good mind be prepared to use it well."

Hope your holiday is full of blessings...

Hello everyone...

It's been a while since my last post. Not sure which excuse to use, so I won't. :)

Wanted to share a couple of small art quilts my friend, Vicki and I pieced while we were in Michigan at Gwen Marston's Beaver Island Quilt Retreat back in early September. It was our first time to attend the retreat which focused on "small studies" this year. We started by piecing small units of solid fabrics with the occasional print added. Sometimes the units were "auditioned" before sewing together into a larger study. Vicki and I decided to engage each other with a "color challenge". It was fun choosing colors we knew were not favorites of the other, adding a print and then presenting the packets of fabric we were to use in this challege. 

Here's the small art quilt (14" x 13") Vicki pieced, quilted and gave to me using the lime green and oranges I love but she doesn't ... I love the curves pieced into the bordered and enhanced with her stitches!

 And, who doesn't like a beautiful Kaffe Fasset print.... I love the back almost as much as the front!

I finally finished my part of our challenge last night with the binding and embellishing of my small quilt  (12" x 8") made using the fabric Vicki picked. If you look closely, you can see the pink-haired maiden I stitched into the quilt.

 Here's the back. Now, I need to pop this into the mail to my BFF.

November is turning out to be a busy month for us which is good. Last week we had a couple of friends, Diane and Joyce, visit us here in northeastern Oklahoma. They had never been here before, so it was fun trying to think of places to visit that was uniquely Oklahoma. One day we took them to Woolaroc Museum and Wildlife Preserve, https://woolaroc.org/home. Woolaroc (which stands for WOOds, LAkes, and ROCks) was the country home of Frank Phillips, oilman and founder of Phillips Petroleum (Phillips 66 gasoline). It's an awesome place to soak up some "Oklahoma" flavor ... there's an impressive collection of western art and the surrounding 3700 acres of rolling hills. lakes and rock outcroppings are lovely any time of the year. Here's some photos from our visit to Woolaroc.

Buffalo....one of my favorite animals...

A herd of American elk roam the park...

Such a sweet young deer...

Thanks for coming to visit us, Diane and Joyce....we loved having you and hope you come back soon! ☺

I appreciate you visiting my blog and want to say thank you for  your comments....hope each of you are having a lovely fall. 

PS: Thanks, Karen for your kind e-mail concerning my absence from the blog world.

Strata No. 1...

The past two years I have donated a piece of "art" to the music department at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, OK. Below is the wall quilt I stitched this past week for tomorrow's silent auction. The monies from the auction will go to benefit the music department where our friend's son is an adjunct instructor. 

It was fun trying out some of the new techniques and ideas I picked up at the recent retreat and then even more fun adding some embellishments to this small quilt (approx. 12" x 17"). I have named it Strata No. 1 with plans to continue this series of multiple landscape themes.

Here are close ups of the fabric and beading.

Thanks for stopping by and hope your coming week is good.

37 Sketches...

This is the cover of Gwen Marston's newest book we used as a study guide along with the original 37 mini wall quilts featured in the book. The size of this small "art book" (8"x 7") keeps with the subject of this year's retreat: Small Studies. 

Here's the design wall showing Gwen's 37 mini quilts. You can see we didn't lack inspiration.

Stay tuned for more photos to come...

Auditioning some fabric...

Attended Gwen Marston's Beaver Island Quilt Retreat (http://gwenmarston.com/index.htm) in Elk Rapids, Michigan last week with my friend Vicki. We had an awesome time both at the retreat and exploring the area around Elk Rapids which included Traverse City, MI, Charlevoix, MI and the Sleeping Bear Dunes (http://www.nps.gov/slbe/index.htm). Michigan has to be one of the prettiest destinations!

This year's retreat focused on creating small wall quilts based on Gwen's newest book, 37 Sketches. We came away with lots of new techniques for sewing fabric together the "Liberated Quilt" way in addition to several e-mail addresses from some of the lovely and talented women we met and promises to meet up again next year. I will share some of the photos from the retreat and trip in my next posting.

Tonight I am working on a small wall quilt donation for a silent auction. The idea behind this mini quilt is to show the earth's many layers and the piecing method(s) was learned at the retreat last week. I have the earth's layers done and am "auditioning" blue fabric for the sky. I plan to embellish the fabric with beads and thread before finishing. Since the auction is this coming Sunday, I better go back to my sewing machine. So till the next time, thanks for visiting and thank you for all your lovely comments.

Another pincushion...

I must be developing a fascination with pincushions. They come to mind when I start to think about making a gift lately. My  friend, Vicki, and I are heading out to a Gwen Marston retreat (http://gwenmarston.com/index.htm) in Michigan next month and we talked about taking her some small gifts representing Oklahoma... here's the "Oklahoma" pincushion I made this week as part of our gift... I attached several pewter charms representing icons from our state: an Indian chief head, a buffalo, an armadillo (right side up), a cowboy hat and a sewing machine (for all those pioneer ladies who settled in Oklahoma back when it was Indian Territory). 

Hope you are enjoying these last few days to August as they roll into September and hopefully Fall. Pretty much all through July, we suffered through triple digit heat here in Oklahoma. That heat was unusual for us that early in the summer... heat like that is a given for August, not July. Guess it's what you call the "dog days" of summer, but honestly, it felt like a whole pack of dog days! Don't know about you, but the heat makes me lazy and not too creative.... lots of naps are a good thing then! Thankfully, we had some cooler weather and a bit of rain to revive the scorched grass. So I'm looking forward to wanting to be more creative, soon!

Couldn't continue sewing on the "disappearing 9-patch" top I am making from my Kaffee Fassett stash, that is until I made a new pin cushion today. I have discovered the need for a pin cushion, needle threader and thimble in every room..... how many of  you feel way?

Spent the day with my friend, Vicki, last Wednesday. We sewed all day except for the couple of time-outs to have a piece of strawberry yogurt pie and take a trip to the quilt store. Vicki shared a new (to me) piecing pattern called "disappearing 9-patch". Here are a couple of great links that explain how to do this fun and fast block:  

http://www.psiquilt.com/2009/03/disappearing-9-patch-tutorial-super.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dEjZOXxPazg

I have been stashing away some of those wonderful Kaffe Fassett fabrics for a few months, but was feeling intimidated  thinking about what to make with them. Thanks to Vicki, this particular pattern seems to be perfect for those colorful fabrics. I am using Michael Miller's solid jet black fabric along with 3 Kona fabrics (a dusty lavender, a teal and a bright orange) for the center block on the 9-patch. If you haven't had a opportunity to use this "rich black", you should... it is lovely and reminds me of the rich black I would build in my computer programs for graphic design projects. Just delicious!

Butterfly|Moth wall quilt finished!

I recently finished quilting the butterfly|moth quilt I started last summer. This quilt was a "collaboration" project with Vicki. We each  appliquéd butterfly and moth blocks using batiks that we selected for the project, then embellished the blocks with embroidery and/or beads, buttons, etc. Before piecing our 12 blocks together, we traded each other 6 of our blocks. Up to this point, we had not shared much of our handwork on this project. So, it was a pleasant surprise at this juncture of our collaboration. Here are the finished wall quilts. This top image is of Vicki's quilt. There is a slight difference in the fabrics and treatment we chose for piecing the borders, other than that, all the fabrics used are the same yet the difference is in how and where we used them.

This is my finished wall quilt.

I'll take some close-ups of the blocks to share later. You can see the progression of my quilt in my earlier blogging:

http://dsavage-threadsthatbind.blogspot.com/2010/08/my-first-attempt-at-blogging.html

http://dsavage-threadsthatbind.blogspot.com/2010/09/its-time-to-embellish.html

http://dsavage-threadsthatbind.blogspot.com/2010/09/butterflies-and-moths-are-growing.html

http://dsavage-threadsthatbind.blogspot.com/2010/09/more-butterflies-and-moths.html

http://dsavage-threadsthatbind.blogspot.com/2010/11/metamorphosis-of-my-wall-hanging.html

It's Sunday evening about 8:50 p.m. here and the temperature outside is 100º... YIKES! 

Thanks for visiting and hope you have a very creative week. 

2.5 lbs of seed...

Am thrilled to find the 2.5 lbs of wildflower seed I planted in April before leaving for the farm actually came up and I have flowers..... lots of pretty delicate looking flowers blooming in the upper garden area. Of course the weeds came up too, but I have been pulling them out so the sun can get to my wildflowers! Here's what this area looked like back in April.

Did quite a bit of stitching while at the farm. Here's the latest quilt top I am working on for the Hubby. He saw this pattern at a quilt show last year and that is all he has talked about since. Trust me, it's a good thing I like him, because I doubt I would piece another top like this.... it's foundation pieced and it wasn't easy. One good thing about foundation piecing is your blocks are more accurate which is important with a pattern like this. The undulating waves are made up of squares, rectangles and triangles, pieced to fool your eye into thinking they are curves. Very clever.

I'm happy to be back!