My African Wall Hanging is Finished!

Just want to share a newly finished project with all of you.  This started off as a handpainted wall hanging that was given to me by a very dear friend when I left South Africa.  It has been sitting in the "gotta do something wonderful with this"  pile since 1994.  Well, I have finally trimmed down the wall hanging, added borders and gotten it quilted.  It will hang in either our dining room or master bedroom, not sure which yet.

The birds are guinea fowl,and they are one of my favorite African animals (along with zebras and giraffes). The original wall hanging was 32" X 48" , and continued 4 " on each side of the present thin black border. But this area did not contain any design element, so it was cut off. The remaining original fabric is now the center of the quilt, and it is 24" X 40".  The total piece is 36" X52" with the addition of the 3 batik borders.

One of the hardest decisions was trying to figure out how to quilt this. My daughter looked at it and said, "Mom, they are African animals - that should be clue."  Brilliant!  The overall background quilting of the center is a meandering back and forth stripe - just like zebra stripes!  Among the guinea fowl and zebra stripes I also added a free motion elephant, and giraffe, and a rondavel - a traditional African hut. I am enclosing additional photos that show close -up images of these last 3 items. The first photo shows the elephant, the second shows the giraffe, and the last shows the rondavel.  You can click on any of the photos for a larger view.

As for the borders, the striped batik is quilted with a traditional African motif - triangles.  Geometric shapes are found in many African art forms, a good example is the art of the Ndebele people.  Their clothing and housing are all decorated in straight lined, geometric shapes.  You can see more of their work by clicking here and here.  I am especially enamored of the Ndebele style - I am fortunate to have brought back a beaded Ndebele apron and a beaded Ndebele doll from my time in South Africa.

The final border is quilted with straight lines, to mimic the shape of a frame around a piece of art.  Can't wait to get this hung.  And, I am happy to say, this has gotten me back to thinking about South Africa and my quilting friends there - it is time to reach out and contact them once again.  If you are interested in seeing some other quilts done by South African quilters , you can click here or else you can always mosey over to the links on the right side of this page and click on the link for the Quadrille Quilters under Other Blogs That I Read and Love For Inspiration.

PEEP, PEEP, PEEP!

Now, I can deal with jelly beans, chocolate bunnies and chocolate eggs - they are like the true Easter candy.  I am NOT particularly fond of PEEPS, however.  The sugar coated, yellow marshmallow chickens were not part of my youth, and they seem like some sort of alien  food - all I have to do is look at them and my teeth start to hurt from the thought of all that sugar.  But my hubby loves them, especially when they get a little old and chewy. No, PEEPS were not part of his youth, either.  But nowadays he just loves the little critters. A couple of years ago a friend told me that you can "age" fresh PEEPS by putting them in the microwave and nuking them for 20 - 30 seconds.  The first time we tried this we ended up laughing our butts off as we watched these critters blow up to 3 times their size as the marshmallow heated and made jokes about the PEEPS that Clayton.

So imagine my joy when I found another novel recipe using PEEPS on the Facebook page of my friend Tina.  This is called a PEEPS Sunflower Cake, and is supposed to serve 12. But the recipe calls for 19 PEEPS, and how do you divide 19 PEEPS in 12 servings?  You can find the recipe here  on the Taste of Home website.

I guess you could change the flower up and make it a dahlia or mum by adding a second row of PEEPS on top to make more "petals" .  Then you could change the color of the frosting and the PEEPS as well, and use the pink or purple chickens.  Or you could just forget about it and make an angel food cake with rainbow sprinkles in the batter - at least that looks like Easter.

Do any of you readers have a PEEPS recipe that you would like to share with the rest of us? Just click on "comments" below and share.

Add This Quilt to the Finished Pile

Well, the quilt that was in my photos from my February 16th post - the entry about basting a quilt - is finally finished.  I so love the colors, although they do not appear to be as vibrant in this photo as in real life. Look at the post from February 16th to get a better idea as to the colors.  It only took a week to get this quilted and bound after it was basted.

The pattern is called Illuminata, and was purchased at The Pincushion Boutique quilt shop many years ago.  This is one of their Pressed for Time Patterns, which are designed specifically for use with their Sweet Treats.  I saw Pincushion Boutique at last week-end's quilt show (Guild of Quilters of Contra Costa County) and spent some time looking at their latest Sweet Treats.  I am madly in love with Crocodile Hunter because it has a very African look to it.  Unfortunately, I am counting pennies right now and had to pass.

Overall, I was disappointed in the quilt show this year even thought I won a door prize from Sew Ewe Quilt in Brentwood.  Nothing really grabbed my attention and made me say WOW! at the show, but a few ideas were hatched for using up some of my batik stash.  I just need to find the patterns now. I was also disappointed in the vendors this year. Fewer vendors with fabric meant fewer fabrics to fantasize and drool over. But I think the most disappointing part of the show was learning that The Pincushion Boutique is no longer a brick and mortar store in Davis, although it can still be found online.

So, back to the quilt.  It was marked for quilting with my favorite stencils for machine quilting - Full Line Stencils. The stencil that was used on this quilt is Loopy Square.  The full stencil was used in all of the blocks, and 1/2 of the stencil was used in all of the triangles.  I then did a mimic of the design in the outside border - tall and short loops).  I love these stencils because they are so easy to mark onto the quilt top using  Pounce Pads.  And the designs will then either iron or wash right out after quilting, depending upon the type of Pounce that is used.

OK, that is it for now!  Hopefully I will stay healthy long enough to keep updating this blog on a more regular timeline.  The cold that I had 3 weeks ago just really took a lot out of me.  But I am feeling much better (except for the stupid cough which is still hanging around), so here's hoping you hear from me over the week-end!

What's New?

Sorry to have been away for so long - life keeps getting in the way of letting me do want I want to do right now. 

But I have finished a few projects to share with you.  A few weeks ago my friends got together to celebrate the birthday of my good friend, Marilyn.  She is one of my best and oldest (not in age, but in years we have known one another) friends.  We go back to the "good days" at Siemens, when it was actually fun to work there and the company was still located in Walnut Creek. 

I love to make gifts for Marilyn because we love the same colors and we like the same style in our artsy-fartsy way.  So here is a look at the gifts I made for her this year.  First up is a coffee cup cuff made of different purple batik fabrics.  It is quilted and then decorated with fuschia rat tail cord and light teal fabric.This "personal coffee cup cuff" is a great gift for anyone who likes to stop and pick up coffee at Starbucks, Peet's or Seattle's Best.  The pattern was made by deconstructing a cardboard cuff from Peet's. There are 2 layers of lightweight fusible pellon batting in the middle.

The second gift was a crocheted bead bracelet in shades of teal.  I am still working on paring down my bead collection, but I ended up having to buy a few more beads in different shades of teal to finish this project.  I know that some of you are crocheteres, so I am going to provide you with directions to make a bracelet like this.

The finished bracelet was 7 1/2" long before sewing the ends together. These are the supplies needed to make a bracelet like this.
15 yards of size 10 Perle cotton
60 each of size 6 glass beads in however many different colors you want - I used 6 different colors
Size 7 steel crochet hook
Wire beading needle
Tapestry needle

DIRECTIONS:  Thread the beading needle with the Perle cotton.  Sort beads and place each color in a separate dish.  You will need to determine an order that is pleasing to your eye and string beads in that order.  The smaller the number of different beads (say, 5 different beads versus 6 or 7 different beads), the smaller the diameter of your bracelet will be.  I used 6 different beads for this bracelet.  They were strung in order - 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and so on - until all beads were used up.

Now, take your crochet hook, and beginning with the last bead you strung (#6), chain 7 and join with a slip stitch to form a ring.  make sure you leave a tail of Perle cotton that is at least 6".
ROUND 1 - * Slide a bead next to work, single crochet in next chain (bead will be on right side of your hook). Repeat from * 5 times. Do not turn or join your rounds, you will continue to work into the next stitch and the beads will spiral on the outside of your work.
ROUND 2 - *Slide a bead next to work, insert hook under the thread that comes out from the left side of the next bead, make a single crocket. As you look down onto the work in your hand, this new bead will be to the left side of the same color bead in the row below. Make sure that you do not make a single crochet in the single crochet of the row below, but ensure that you are making your single crochet under the thread that is coming out of the right side of the bead.  Repeat from * around the rest of that row, until you have a  #6 color bead ready to crochet once again.

Repeat the last round until you have used all the beads, or until the bracelet is the desired length. Cut excess thread, leaving a tail of 12" or so, and pull the thread through the last stitch on your hook.  This will fasten off your last stitch.  Thread the end of this thread into a tapestry needle.  Bring the ends of the bracelet together and turn the ends of the bracelet so that the spirals line up. Sew the 2 ends together,  making sure that you maintain the integrity of the design. Run the extra thread through the center of the bracelet (the "tube") and pull the needle back out to the outstide.  Place a drop of clear nail polish on the thread where it exits the tube, and let dry.  Repeat with the other length of thread from the beginning of the bracelet.  When both drops of nail polish are dry, cut thread as close a possible to the bracelet.

Off to help my daughter study for her SAT exam next week. And finish sewing the binding on the quilt that I gave you a sneak peek of last time - yes, I finished quilting it but forgot to take pictures of the quilting process as I promised.  Will share machine quilting with you in the future!  And I am going to try my hand at dyeing some llama fiber with Easter egg dyes - won't that be a riot?  Stay tuned for a llama update, and you might want to listen to the llama song, at least once!

Basting Does Not Mean That You Are Cooking a Turkey

Megan is away for the week, and so it is eerily quiet around the house.  The weather is warming up, my daffodils are starting to bloom, and Max is spending more time outside.  Brian is spending the days working in his office. THE HOUSE IS MINE!!!!!

So this means that it is time to do some of those tasks that require commandeering large amounts of space.  This week, that means that I will be sandwiching and basting all of my finished quilt tops, and then they will be ready to put on the trusty Bernina in order get them quilted this year.  Now, a little bit about quilting those carefully pieced and colorful quilt tops. My grandmother taught me how to sew and quilt in when I was 9, so I did get a few quilts made in my early days, but finishing them was a very daunting task for me. I kept sewing, but gave up quilting for a long time. I started quilting again in the mid 1980s and learned to machine quilt from Harriet Hargraves, the mother of modern day machine quilting, when she came to give a lecture and workshop at an East Bay Heritage Quilters Guild meeting in the late 1980s.  I loved the fact that I no longer had to do hand quilting, and that my quilt could be finished in days instead of weeks or months. Lots of people send their quilts out to established quilters who use special quilting machines (called longarm quilting machines) to complete the task.  But I have always been a "process" kinda gal, who wants to control the entire endeavor from start to finish.  Since I don't have a longarm quilting machine, I use my regular sewing machine (an old Bernina 1260) to complete my task.  It is not ideal, but it works for me.

Before I can put a quilt under the needle of my machine, the quilt top (the "fancy" part that is made up of colorful fabric pieces) needs to be layered together with batting (the soft middle part of the quilt) and a backing (fabric that is the underside of the quilt).  This is called "sandwiching" a quilt  - think of the fabric as bread and the batting as the filling.  Once you have the pieces layered up, you need to figure out how to hold all the layers together.  I used to pin the layers together with safety pins but have turned to basting since my good friend Dorothy shared Sharon Schamber's basting technique with me.  I find that basting takes a bit longer, but it is fine because the rhythm of basting is almost meditative.  Also, basting holds the layers together better for me and less slipping of layers means the back of the quilt does not have fabric bunching up or forming folds and pleats.

Basting takes up the entired dining room.  After putting all of the leaves in the dining room table I lay the backing fabric (wrong side facing up) on the table, and cover it with the batting.  Everything is smoothed out by hand as I line up the top edges of the backing and batting.  Then I dig out my "basting boards"  - two 8 foot long pieces of wall moulding that came from the local Yardbirds store before it was closed by Home Depot  (Boo! Hiss!!!). One of the boards is lined up even with the previously noted top edges, and the quilt backing and batting are wound tighlty and smoothly around the board with about a foot of the bottom edges left unwound.  The the same thing is done with the quilt top - the top edge is lined up with the basting board and the quilt top is wound tightly and smoothly around the board with approximately a foot of the bottom left unwound.

Next, the loose bottom edges of the quilt top, batting and backing are lined up and the layers are smoothed out against one another.  The boards are carefully unwound, ensuring that the layers remain straight and smooth, until the sandwich covers the width of the table. Using a fine milliner's needle and size 20 DMC cotton, the basting begins in the lower left hand corner and travels away from me toward the basting boards.  When I get as close as I can to the boards, I move the next row of basting over to the left,  and start basting toward me again.  This zig-zag pattern continues until all of the unwound sandwich is basted.  Then I unwind more of the fabrics and batting so that unbasted materials once again cover the table.    The quilt top you see in these photos is 60" X 70", and it took 2 1/2 hours to baste.

When I get this quilt onto my machine, I will share some machine quilting photos and tips with you.

Because Everybody Needs a 9 Patch Quilt!

This is about the final quilt that was completed in the last year. The colorful block is called a 9 Patch, and that is because there are 9 squares (set in 3 rows of 3 squares) in the block. The 9 Patch blocks are set with an alternate square of fabric , which happens to be black with a small splash of gold. All of the blocks are set in an “on point” setting, which got its name from the fact that the blocks are set on their corners (points) rather than along a long edge. This is a VERY traditional quilt block and setting, just the fabrics are contemporary. Why did I choose this particular block? Because everybody needs a 9 Patch quilt in their collection.


Yet another quilt that was begun in the mid ‘90s, this quilt top began when I walked into my local quilt shops and saw riots of bright colors. One of the most influential fabric designers of the time was Patrice Lose, who made his name from his wonderful bright colors. These fabrics were leftover pieces from a baby quilt that I made for Agnes Rodriguez, one of the Applications Specialists at work. And like lots of my quilt tops, the reason it took so long to complete the silly thing was that it took a long time to find the right border fabrics.

The finished size is 56" X 72". The batting is Hobbs Heirloom 80/20 (80% cotton and 20% polyester), which is an absolute dream to machine quilt. The 9 Patch block is quilted with a serpentine stitch along the straight seams and there is a free-motion flower quilted in the middle of the black blocks. The first border is quilted with a serpentine running along the seams and the outside border is quilted in a double swag,

This is one of my favorite quilts because it is so bright and happy. No, wait, let me be honest – all of my quilts are my favorite quilts! Each one is lovingly pieced and quilted, with fabrics that are chosen to go together in a specific design. All quilts are truly labors, because they don’t “just happen”. But they are all labors of love.

It Is Not a Freddy Quilt, It Is a Pineapple Quilt

OK, one more of the quilts that was finished this last year.  The pattern is called the pineapple block, so I simply call this my Pineapple Quilt.  It was started (like a LOT of my projects, it seems) when I got back to California from South Africa.  I had always wanted to make a Pineapple Quilt, and there were lots of yummy bright-colored fabrics available to work with in 1994 and 1995.  Besides the bright fabrics in this quilt, there is a black fabric with white polka dots. The polka dotted fabric was a gift from Karen Matsumoto, and was just crying out to be used. Black is an obvious color to be used with brights, because it sets them off so nicely.  The polka dots were a direct contrast to the geometric lines of the block. I was happy with the materials, so what could be the problem?

The problem (at least in my mind) is that lots of people seem to think that I took my inspiration for this quilt from Freddy Moran.  Freddy is an amazing quilt artist and she makes wonderful quilts. She loves to mix bright fabrics with black and white fabrics, and I must say that she does have a knack for putting just the right fabrics together.  But I had not yet met or even heard of Freddy when I started my quilt.  So it kinda bothers me everytime somebody looks at my Pineapple Quilt and says "Oh, it's a Freddy quilt!" or "How lucky for you, you did a class with Freddy". Please take a look at this site to see more of Freddy Moran's work - you'll see that her work far surpasses mine.

Anyway, back to my Pineapple Quilt.  It was constructed using the Pineapple Rule from The Great American Quilt Factory. The finished size of this quilt is 62 X 52.  It was machine quilted on my trusty Bernina 1260 using a random running loop pattern with Warm and Natural Batting .