As I travel around the blogosphere and visit with my favorite bloggers like Jane Ann and Kristin, I aspire to be as they are: eloquently descriptive writers who take their readers with them on their journeys through life, sharing the good times, sometimes seeking solace and support during bad times, and connecting with their readers across the miles through the magic of the Internet playground. Eloquence is escaping me at the moment, but I’m still going to try for a bit of the rest here.

Quilting has been in short supply here since the quilt day with Kristin, but with good reason: I’ve been working fast and furious this week to get a new website up and running for The ALS Association New Mexico Partner. I began researching ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease), when a family member was diagnosed with the disorder early in 2006. It’s really hard to be this far away, and not be able to see her or be with her, or help out if needed. It’s early days and my aunt is doing well, but I wish I lived closer to her. We purchased fabric together when I visited with them in 2005 for a quilt I would make for her and her husband (the quilt that became Stars in my Hand). I had already started work on the quilt, but after the diagnosis, I wondered if I could do more to make the quilt even more special than I already planned for it to be.

I decided to photograph parts of the quilt as it was finished to create a special collection of note cards, postcards, ornaments and treasure boxes for sale called Quilted Whispers, with proceeds to benefit the ALS Association New Mexico Partner. Hoping to reach more people about this special collection and the cause, I created the Quilted Whispers Contest, which you can still enter until the end of June, 2007, and a press release which, sadly, was never picked up by any newspapers as far as I know. At one point, I contacted The ALS Association to try to work with them to start a larger fund raising campaign involving quilts and quilters, somewhat like the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative created by Ami Simms, but The ALS Association declined my proposed effort. Read the rest of this entry »

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High on the (very) short list of things to love about living here: spending the weekend quilting (and eating and sleeping) in an 850-year-old monastery. The Kloster Schöntal, to be exact. The condensed version: good food, good company, good quilting, happy weekend.

The uncut version: Kloster Schöntal is about one hour from my house, the last 20 minutes or so through little towns and scenic curvy roads. The Black Forest Quilt Guild has held it’s spring Quilt Retreat there every year for the last three, I think, and it’s just wonderful. The monastery has been modernized of course, but not to the point of losing it’s essence. We had a giant well lit room for quilting, and single or double rooms for sleeping. They feed us five times a day (yes, FIVE!): breakfast, coffee and tea break with pretzels and savory pastries, lunch, coffee or tea break with sweet cakes, and dinner, and drinks are available anytime. There’s plenty of room for everyone to spread out everywhere, for relaxing, quilting, talking, quilt basting, Irish dancing (really!), whatever. Read the rest of this entry »

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Make no mistake, the almost-perfect fabric is indeed here, there’s just not enough of it.

Okay, here’s what happens all too regularly lately when I start quilting (it used to be that I never started quilting, because I never stopped quilting, but lately, life gets in the way most of the time ): Last night as I went to sleep, I finally had an idea forming about what to do with the in-between parts on this Feathered Star quilt that I’m working on, the one with the borders that prompted the appliqué experiments. By “in-between parts” I mean the parts in between the star in the middle and the appliqué borders. So this afternoon, I sit down to draw out what I want to do on paper, and proceed to play with fabric, and begin to be happy that it looks like what I imagined it would be.

I’m playing along happily and enjoying the process (except for the fusible web part anyway), until I start looking at the whole thing together, the Feathered Star in the middle, the setting blocks around it, and the appliquéd borders, and I decided that the green is too, um…green and boring and there’s too much of it all together there, and I’d rather use something lighter between the center and the border.

A search ensues, and I find nothing in my stash that will work, it’s Sunday, and even if the Gussy Goose was open today they probably wouldn’t have what I needed anyway. Make no mistake, the almost-perfect fabric is indeed here, there’s just not enough of it. I say “almost” perfect, because if it was really perfect, it might not have flowers on it. This could be the story of my quilting life, and it happens so often that when it doesn’t happen, it’s a Quilting Warm Fuzzy Feeling occasion. If I had enough of this lighter green, I’d use it in the curvy parts on the setting squares around the star, and in the space between the star and the borders as you see it here. It just adds more sparkle to the whole thing. Sadly, it’s not to be, at least not today.

This is one of the problems that can come up when you design as you go along, I suppose. This search for the perfect fabric is sometimes comical, really. I decide I need something else, and start digging through my carefully-sorted-by-color stacks of fabric, and sometimes, like today, I find the perfect (or almost perfect) thing, but there’s not enough yardage to make it work. Further digging yields nothing, and I continue to paw through stacks, and even look at other projects in progress thinking to sabotage them in favor of the current one. Usually I know better from the start, since I have an amazing memory for fabrics and patterns and I have a really good idea what’s in my fabric stash, and I know in the beginning that there’s probably nothing there.

There are those occasions when a fabric shortage and the resulting desperate search produces serendipitous creative solutions to the problem and the quilt is better for it in the end, but that just doesn’t happen all the time. It’s not happening today, for sure. I’ve looked and looked, even tried to sabotage, and it’s just not going to work. So, my creativity has been derailed completely, and I think I have to find something else to do at this point, like cook dinner or something equally boring. This project is officially on hold until the two quilt shops nearby are open again on Tuesday. sigh Hear me Birgit?? I’ll be coming your way on Tuesday!

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