Getting ready to make merry

Our Combined Federal Campaign at work scheduled an arts and crafts silent auction on December 15, so i made two little zippered quilted bags and two embellished grapevine wreaths. Here are the bodies of the bags...they're tiny crazy quilts that i made with fabrics from my stash and some of the cool fancy stitches on my sewing machine.

And here are the two finished little bags. There was a "bidding war" over one of them which was very gratifying! (and sort of amusing, because there was only one bid on the other bag, and they look so similar, you'd think the bids would have been spread between the two bags)

Here's one of the wreaths...purchased grapevine wreath, with paper punched snowflakes, satin ribbon, chipboard letters, and a few rhinestone brads. I loved how they came out...yet neither of them was bid on. Oh well, will just have to give them to friends!

Here's the second annual card i made for the Red Truck Bakery, our local purveryor of everything delicious, from hearty Harvest Bread to sinfully delicious Double Chocolate Moonshine cakes. They have such delicious baked goods (all baked from scratch on the premises) and they are really nice folks...a great addition to Main Street.

My quilt group's annual holiday party was this past Tuesday. I've been working very full days at work, plus taking work home on evenings and weekends, so have fallen even farther behind than usual in holiday preparations. So i took annual leave on Monday and Tuesday and quilted like crazy. I made a miniature table runner for my Secret Santa, which i was so pleased to actually finish, i forgot to take a picture of it!

Each year we have a challenge block for the party, with the design chosen by the previous year's winner. (Each person who wants to, makes a block and then at the party we put our names into a basket, with one chance to win for each block that we've made. The winner gets all of the blocks!) This year the theme was "Christmas tree ornament" and the club provided an 8" square of fabric to use as the background, so all of the blocks that everyone makes will have that in common. I knew i wanted to make a ball-shaped ornament, and of course it had to have a cat on it. I found the perfect pattern in Quilting Arts Gifts magazine for actual ornaments made out of fabric. They didn't show them made up with cat fabrics, but the "cathedral window" construction was perfect to make a kitty peek out of. I made two and appliqued each one to a background block. I was so thrilled with how they came out, i made two just to be actual ornaments.



"Chairs: A Conversation"... Quilts and Paintings in October

I heard about this fascinating quilt show from my friend Sue, who has a family tie to the family that owns the  RH Ballard Gallery in Washington, VA...paintings of chairs by Robert Ballard, which inspired his quiltmaker daughter Alethea Ballard to begin her own series of quilts of chairs. Her approach to quilting is unconventional, painterly, exuberant, and fun. C&T Publishing have actually just come out with a book of her chair quilt patterns (i'm waiting for my copy to arrive). Here's the postcard that the gallery sent out to invite people to the show, plus a special handmade, chair-shaped sugar cookie that was one of the goodies served at the show's opening.

I wasn't able to attend the opening but went the next day and spent a couple of delightful hours talking to Alethea, getting a great running narration about each of her quilts. I'm looking forward to getting my book next week!

Current Quilting Project

Last year i purchased a quilting pattern designed by Sheryl Mycroft called Cobblestone Crows from my friend Karen Sue's booth, maybe at the QU show. At any rate, it was one of those projects that really stuck in my imagination and i knew i was going to make it sooner rather than later. When i went to the Vermont Quilt Festival this summer (yes, i know, i still have to post stories and pictures from there!), i took a bunch of fabrics from my stash with me to see if i could pick the ones that would go in the quilt. I knew i wanted to change the color scheme and had the perfect print with metallic gold accents and moon-like patterns as the focus fabric. I found the perfect background fabric at Yankee Pride Quilts, picked up a few fat quarters of batiks at a few other booths, and got the high thread count black Kona cotton for the crows after i got home from my local quilt ship, Kelly Ann's Quilting.

It went together fairly fast, but now it needs to be machine quilted, so that i can embellish the heck out of it. It will finish approximately 28 inches square, and is actually fairly straight, but since it was blowing in the breeze, it looks like it's got a bit of a ripple.

The crow in the foreground will be holding a shell bead in its beak and there will be a line of four shell beads down the tallest strip in the background. I have some great assortments of small beads that should be perfect for the embellishing.

I find crows and ravens to be fascinating creatures...so curious and observant, and living in complicated social communities. When i was walking around in Sitka, Alaska, i realized that a couple of ravens were following me all over town. Raven and Eagle are traditional adversaries in Northwest Coast Native American mythology, and Raven is the Trickster who stole the Sun from its guardian (but by so doing, brought light, and possibly even the miracle of human birth, to the world). Then, this Spring while i was avidly watching the eaglets at the Norfolk Botanical Garden grow from tiny chicks into healthy fledglings through the cam pointed at their nest, we got news that a raven had stolen an egg from the eagle's nest on Vancouver Island, British Columbia. It was recorded on that nest's cam....you can see the mother eagle leaving the nest for a moment, the raven flies in, snatches one of the two eggs in its beak, and flies off! It was a devastating moment for fans of that pair of eagles. If the raven had any fans, they might possibly have been cheering it for outsmarting the eagle.

Front cover of The Ice Bear by Jackie Morris, available now from amazon.co.uk

Finally, with great synchronicity, Jackie Morris, one of my favorite authors and artists,  has just published The Ice Bear, about a raven who steals one of the Ice Bear's cubs and leaves it to be found by a childless hunter and his wife. Both the mother bear and the human parents suffer great loss, [spoiler alert!] the child bridges both worlds, so while it seems as if the raven has done a terrible thing, he sets in motion some very important events and relationships, and at least in this telling, he helps keep one side from killing the other.  

"Quilting Past and Present" at Sky Meadows State Park

It was hot on Saturday. And humid. But i had agreed on behalf of my quilt group that we would do a presentation about quilting at the historic Mount Bleak House, built in the 1840s, which is on the grounds of Sky Meadows State Park. The parks department likes to have events that reflect life at the time the house was lived in...crafts, music, history, etc. We would do a talk about quilts from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and then demonstrate quilting from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.

I recruited my friend Diane to do the presentation because she's very knowledgeable, has a lot of experience making quilts including some out of reproduction Civil War era fabrics, and is very confident in a group situation. I brought a bag full of quilting books and several quilts, Diane brought two baskets full of quilts, April brought a quilt rack and several quilts, and we set up on the lawn behind the house. And waited. And waited. We thought things would be slow, but had no idea that only a handful of people would come for the program.

I thought we'd be standing up in front of a crowd, talking, showing quilts, refolding them, answering questions...instead, we sat on the rocking chairs and had a fabulous day getting some quilting done. Diane had fun reading my books! April worked on a coiled rope basket bag, i did hand quilting on my fortune cookie quilt and on the bunny quilt for my sister, when Dee arrived she sewed the binding onto a Christmas kitty quilt, and when Jeanne arrived, she had a binding to put on a Christmas quilt as well.

Diane, April, my rocking chair, Dee

Jeanne

Afterwards the ranger/volunteer coordinator said that next time they would make the program shorter--the afternoon only, when people are more likely to have finished a day hike or to be in the park for a picnic. I don't think any of us felt the day was wasted...it was amazingly peaceful sitting under the huge hickory tree, looking out across a misty valley that didn't look much different than it would have looked 100 or even 200 years ago.