I gathered the loot from the AQS Show back up so I could share! Here’s the first batch:

Looking at it all now, I’m sure it’s not terribly exciting to anyone but me, but I’ll tell you what it all is anyway. From the top center, sort of counterclockwise, we have:

• Something called a Waterbrush, which you fill with water and then you can brush small amounts onto fabric or quilts. The folks selling it were using it with Caran D’ache colored pencils to make a watercolor effect (a bit of a strange technique that wasn’t quite ready for prime time, IMO), but I’m thinking it will be great for correcting mistakes with the blue washout marker, and it will probably come in handy for many other things at some point.
• I bought a strange and lethal-looking seam ripper thingy, after the vendor demonstrated how it could be used to cleanly slice through fabric layered between fusible web and freezer paper. Think fusible appliqué pieces.
• The Magic Bobbin Washers were something I’ve wanted to try, and the Lickity Grip is probably just an alternative to my favorite free motion machine quilting “get a grip” tool, the Neutrogena Norwegian Formula Hand Cream. Worth a try to see if it’s better.
• A couching foot for my Bernina 440. This thing makes couching soooo much easier. You use it like a free motion quilting foot to stitch down cording and fibers to fabric.
• Some new embellishment glue and fabric markers that I haven’t tried before. It never hurts to try lots of different brands to see what’s best.
• I renewed my AQS membership, and they gave me free curved thread snips at the show. I love these thread snips and they’re at least $15, so that was a steal!
• I searched all over the show floor to find that little green thing there on the left. It’s the new flat needle threader from Clover, and I LOVE it. Works great for threading fibers through small needle eyes.
• I bought a couple of new types and brands of hand needles that I haven’t tried before. So far, I really like the Bohin Crewel Embroidery for embroidered embellishments on quilts. It’s nice and long and sharp, and pretty easy to thread with that new Clover threader.
• The clear box is a bead storage box from Embellishment Village. You can never have too many beads, until they outgrow your storage options, that is.

That’s it for the first round. My goal at the show was to catch up with (and buy) the new things that I’ve missed because I live here, and don’t see or hear about the new stuff until it’s old news most of the time. I’m off to try out some of the Loot! More to follow!

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The carefully chosen palette for my next current project has been sitting there on the cutting table since I took a picture of it to share, over a week ago (it has now entered “current” project status, as you’ll see). It’s not that I don’t want to work on it, I do, other things keep getting in the way, including my own “quilt design block.”

Short “house” update: the heating/hot water system is working about as well as it’s probably ever going to work, after the plumber’s visit last Friday during which he finally figured out that a 5″ section of copper pipe was almost completely blocked by water deposits and cleaned it out. He’s coming back though, with the owner and a service person from Vaillant, the manufacturer, to replace the section of pipe, and figure out why else it’s not performing up to par. And of course, it’s a bit hard to tell if it’s going to heat the house to my satisfaction in winter anyway, since it’s the end of April and it’s not exactly cold here right now.

Other than that, there are various other things, some small, some not, that the owners need to take care of for us before they take off for Canada in mid-May. I’m still making weekly trips to the hardware store for this and that, and yet another trip to Ikea is probably on the schedule for this weekend. I did get a really great office chair for a lot less than I expected to spend there last weekend, so that was an unexpected pleasure.

Back to this project on my cutting table. I’ve been thinking about working on it more than actually working on it, and part of the reason for the delay before actually setting rotary cutter to fabric has been due to a niggling little feeling that something’s not quite right. I did make templates for a couple of pieces, and actually traced one of them onto the border print, but I wasn’t keen on taking that next step, so I kept turning my mind to other things. I finally decided that the lovely border print was the big problem and had to go, because it’s just not fitting in with my (admittedly slightly foggy) vision of the finished product.

After that flash of insight late last night, I was determined to progress today in the studio, and I had all day to do it in since I had nowhere to go. I spent all morning drawing trying to draw appliqué designs for the spaces that I’d planned to use the border print for, only to be soundly defeated by fusible web by early afternoon. I HATE that stuff! I don’t know why I ever bother with it, truly. I didn’t even get past peeling the paper off of it after fusing it to the appliqué piece. I could only get some of the paper off, and the rest stuck terribly and never would come away. Into the trash bin it went.

Still determined to get something done today, I started cutting, and threw eight pieces up on the wall. I looked at it and lost my nerve, or whatever it was I had left at that point. Maybe I just didn’t know what to cut and place next color-wise. I decided to break into the Hoffman Watercolor Wraps that I bought for this project before the move, and play with the colors, since the embellishments that will go on the quilt will be made of these fabrics. This is how I spent a very happy hour or so in the late afternoon:

There were 160 different bali fabrics in the eight tubes that I bought, and I sorted and played and pared down until I had 128 left. I thought maybe I’d have a better direction in mind if I could visualize more of the whole thing, or at least more of the whole color scheme. The row on the left is winter/spring and/or air/water colors and the row on the right is summer/fall and/or fire/earth colors. I hope. I think it helped the whole design process a bit though I’m not entirely positive, but I do feel better now. It’s possible that I feel better because I played with all these fabrics and colors though, and not necessarily because I’ve made any great design decisions!

The appliqué patterns I spent the morning agonizing over may become quilting designs, though I’ll hit the Arts & Crafts shop tomorrow for a different kind of fusible web and perhaps torture myself some more at a later date if the design really needs the appliqué. Hopefully life will allow me a bit of studio time tomorrow to see if my color play today opened the floodgates to design heaven. At least it’s officially a “current” project now, since I have cut into the fabric.

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When you have an idea pop into your head, you can try it out immediately, and the result is even better than you’d hoped it would be.

Despite all the misery, this quilt does have it’s enjoyable moments, like this one which is definitely a Quilting WFF. This is what’s supposed to happen when you quilt:

This is one of the machine embroidered medallions in the outside border of The Misery Quilt. I’ve been a bit worried about these medallions since the beginning; the flower is really dense machine embroidery and the medallions are fused to the olive green background fabric and then the edges are sewn with a very small satin stitch in #100 silk thread, and when you put that many variables together, sometimes the finished product isn’t going to lay flat. I’ve been afraid all along that it might end up looking slightly bowl-like and ruffly around the edges in the end.

As an added bonus to the host of unknowns, I really hadn’t figured out how I was going to quilt the gold-ish background fabric behind the flowers either. All I could think of was echo quilting, which is very heavy, close together stitching, and not only might that heighten the chances for a bowl-like, bubbly outcome, echo quiting isn’t my strong point and there are lots of little squidgy points and dips around the edges of the flower, so I wasn’t sure echo quilting in that area was going to go well.

This morning I had an epiphany about the background quilting, and thought that these radial lines might be cool, since the area could probably use some straight quilting lines anyway. I took a wild “hey that looks about right” guess and figured that dividing up the outside edge of the oval into 3/8″ bits would look good, and it divided up evenly, believe it or not. It worked perfectly, from the marking to the last stitch, and it’s perfectly flat without a bubble or ruffle in sight. I couldn’t stop smiling while I was quilting it, because I could just tell it was going to look soooo cool!

*sigh* This is how quilting should be all the time…mmmmmm. Feeds the creative spirit, it does.

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