Last month, I heard about a project called 2000 Bloggers. The original idea was the brain child of Tino Buntic. In his words:

55 million blogs…

I’d like to showcase all of them, but I’ve settled on just 2000 bloggers.

Bloggers come from all walks of life! Some are SEO experts. Some are writers. Some are sports enthusiasts. Some are affiliate marketers. Some are business professionals. Some are political. ALL HAVE OPINIONS!!!

Some bloggers blog to make money. Some do it for fun.

I thought, what the heck? Might as well join in. Since then, I’ve had a lot of traffic, of course, and I do hope that the folks who have stopped by have enjoyed, and possibly become regular readers. I think the whole project is interesting, and has spawned another whole “community” inside the blogging community. Speaking of community, I found the 2000 Bloggers project through 9rules, another sort of blogging community, where I’ve been hanging out a lot recently. 9rules is about great content, interesting blogs and fun people. I did submit this site to Round 5 hoping to be accepted as a member, but the jury that is Mike, Scrivs and Tyme is still out on that one. You don’t have to be a member to enjoy 9rules, of course, and I spend quite a bit of time over there lately in the Notes section, chatting with folks from around the world. Who knows, I might be the token textile artist over there.

I’m trying to write the right mix of quilts and quilting, cats, fun, and life. Sometimes those things juxtapose, and, well, sometimes they absolutely don’t!

Back here at home, I still consider myself new at this blogging thing, and I want to get better at it. I’m trying to write the right mix of quilts and quilting, cats, fun, and life. Sometimes these things juxtapose, and, well, sometimes they absolutely don’t! Right now, it’s time for an assessment of where this blog is going, and I’d love to hear comments and suggestions: what is great about this blog, and what could be better? Is it content that keeps you coming back, or could the design be improved? If you’ve been lurking, come out, leave a comment, say hi and share your thoughts. Blogging isn’t just about reading, it’s about communicating, too. It’s a two way street. It took me a while to break out of my lurker status on a few of the blogs I read regularly, but now I “get it” and it’s so much more personal and fun.

At the new home of 2000 Bloggers, Malditang Pinay sums it up:

Once again this proves that the blogosphere is not just about links and content, but about people from all parts of the world reaching out to each other, crossing geographical and communication boundaries, and connecting. The possibilities are endless.

That’s what it’s all about. Make it so.

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And it’s even mostly finished! This is the new project that I started so that I would have a quilt to use for the Swarovski crystals demo at the guild in March, and I do love the way it turned out. I think if I had to do it again, I would use a different batting, probably a very low loft cotton or something like that. I used a chunk of polyester that I had around, and it’s kinda over-puffy, which I usually like, but for an artsy quilt like this it’s not quite right. I think I discovered this once before, maybe, but as I usually don’t do these types of quilts, it didn’t stick in my head. Live and learn, again. That’s what I love about quilting: there’s always more to learn, and sometimes you even get more than one opportunity to learn something!!

My mom liked it so much, she said “Oooooo - I LOVE that one!” and “As a matter of fact, it would be perfect on a wall in the new house…” Since I had thought that I would eventually ask if my Mom and Dad liked it enough to have it, I took the “hitting you over the head with a brickbat” hint (as she put it!) and told her it was hers!

It really needed to be their quilt anyway, since it made me think of the aspen trees in Pine Valley, Utah, where my parents and I used to camp and hike when I was a kid. I do have some fond memories of those camping trips when I was little, even though camping wasn’t (and isn’t) my thing, and I’m positive that I was a complete pain about it all back then (and oh, am I getting paid back in spades by my own daughter now!).

I could hear the breeze in the aspen trees in my head when I looked at this piece, so I quilted tree trunks in the left border area, waving lines in the middle for wind, and aspen leaves in the right border. I will add a few Swarovski crystals to it before it becomes part of Mom and Dad’s collection. I named the quilt Aspens on my Mind. See bigger pics in the Gallery and let me know what you think!

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A couple of years ago, sometime before I damaged the tendon sheaths in my hand and wrist, I started a quilt with a Feathered Star in the middle, and I planned to border it with a Jinny Beyer border print. I was kind of hoping to enter the quilt into a show that year. I was going to appliqué the border with Jinny’s Soft Edge method, so it would look like this:

Well, after the hand problems started, I had to put it aside, and I just can’t see that I’ll be able to do that much hand appliqué again, ever. I can do delicate work like needle-turn appliqué for about ten minutes before my hand starts hurting, so it’s probably not going to get done that way. I pulled this project out of the UFO stash the other day to see what could be done to salvage it. I started trying to see if I could do the appliqué by machine with a really narrow satin stitch.

A couple of problems here; first, the satin stitching is way too bulky and just looks out of place to me, and second, when I was stitching it on the machine, it was difficult to keep everything flat and nice while the machine moved along. The border print fabric layer kept getting pushed out of place ahead of the foot. Definitely not satisfactory results.

Now, I’ve never been a fan of fusible anything. It’s just not my thing, especially for quilts that are…well…really nice quilts, like I would send to a show. Read the rest of this entry »

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