Long Time, Sew Much News

Wow, summer's almost over and I haven't written a word. Shortly after my last post I had a family emergency. After a cascade of bad health events, my dear Aunt Mary Kaye, my mom's "Irish twin," died. She was only 75 and she was just such a lovely person. She was a music teacher in Taos, NM for many, many years and after she retired, she taught herself how to play the harp. In 2005, she sent me a Christmas card with this picture on the front:

She was one of the best people I ever had the pleasure to know and I'm blessed that she was my Aunt. 

After I returned from Mary Kaye's funeral, my family had a vacation scheduled. Much as I didn't feel like vacationing, we'd had this planned for a long time. So off we went to Nevada & California! I won't bore you with details, but I'll share a couple of gorgeous pictures:

Yosemite

Calaveras Big Trees

Now, for some quilting news. I actually have been quilting...at least once I got back from our vacation I got back to the sewing machine. The first thing I did was finish the hexagon quilt. I'll post pictures of that tomorrow. I'll just say that I'm not thrilled with it. I started out thinking I was going to be in love with it, but by the time I finished it...not so much. And there were some areas I goofed up. I'll go into more detail on that tomorrow, as well.

Once I finished the hexagon quilt, I knew I needed a small project I could finish quickly. And I've recently discovered that I love Dresden plates. I was intimidated by them, but decided if I tried just one it would be manageable. The other thing I thought would be good about such a project would be trying applique, which is a quilting technique I've never tried. So here's what I did the other day:

I had so much fun making this! Selecting the fabric from my stash was fun, deciding on the quilting design was fun, making the binding was fun. I started this on Tuesday afternoon and finished the binding on Wednesday morning. Sometimes making something that goes together quickly is very satisfying, especially after a frustrating experience. Okay, this is far from perfect, but over all it's respectable and I got over my fear of Dresden plates.

Here's a close up of the center, which I decided to "pebble":

This was the first time I tried this, and my technique definitely needs to be refined. But hey, if I waited until I had a perfect technique before I quilted anything, I'd never quilt anything.

And here's a close up of my "butterflies" quilting:

Now, I'll admit something...these were supposed to be flowers. But when I showed it to my 14-year-old daughter, she said, "Oh, I like the butterflies!" So there ya go. Again, they're far from perfect. I was having trouble controlling where they were going, and the spacing. But therein lies the silver lining!

I hadn't done any freemotion quilting since my last "Wiggle Whimsy" quilt back in April. And making this little Dresden made me realize how rusty I'd become, and how much I enjoy it. I'd been working along with Leah Day's Freemotion Quilting Project earlier in the spring, so I decided to get back into it. So I spent yesterday just practicing on samples. This is what I did:

Freemotion quilting along a line is really hard for me. I'm okay at it while the fabric is moving directly away from me, but in other directions it's just really hard for me to keep the stitches straight and evenly spaced. I also tried Leah's cursive f's on the lower right flag and found them to be fairly difficult. I couldn't figure out how to connect them from line to line. When I ended one line I was at the right end, then I dropped down and had to work from right to left. That meant making f's backwards, which is hard! I'm not sure that's the way to do this. Anyway, I was getting tired by then, so I let things get sloppy, signed my name just for fun, and called it a night.

Today I think I'm going to do some work on my Tula Pink City Sampler blocks. I'm way behind on those. Follow the link on the sidebar if you're interested in more information on that project. I'll be sharing my progress on those blocks in the days and weeks to come.