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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I’ve made my plans and reservations to go to A New Tradition in Quilting workshop with Diane Gaudynski at the Museum in Paducah in the beginning of March. Three whole days of quilting with my quilting idol! Woohoo! Not to mention a whole week in the States with my buddy Dawn since she’s taking the class as well! I decided yesterday that it was probably time to really start looking at the supply list and order some things, as well as piece the sample quilt that we’ll be using in class.

I did finally load EQ6 after the holidays, and I used it to redraft a pattern that I found in a quilt calendar. Diane said this pieced wall quilt needed to have a 12″ light colored square in the middle, so I made this block 24″ total, then added 3″ borders. The pic you see here is an exported .jpg file from EQ6, and the export feature is much improved in this version. I used to have to take a snapshot of the quilt, paste it into a graphics editor and save it in the size I wanted. With EQ6, I can just do an export, and the program will ask what format to export to (.bmp, .jpg, .gif, .tiff, .png are the choices) and then I can tell it how big I want the picture, and what resolution. Sooo much better!

The pic of the quilt was easy, the piecing was painful. My own fault, obviously, since the thing has these diagonal seams that have to match up. It’s done though, Read the rest of this entry »

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Sometimes it’s amazing how much you can really get done when you just do one thing at a time. I’ve been machine quilting this UFO quilt, and while my mind has been free to wander and think about other projects, I haven’t let myself get sidetracked and actually do any other projects. I’m almost done with the main quilting in the center of the quilt, and it feels like the whole quilt is half done already, even though I know it’s really not. After the main quilting on the whole thing, I have tiny grids and stippling left to do, so that will take a while.

One thing I discovered about a UFO that’s been sitting around this long: I basted this quilt with batting and backing at least 3 or 4 years ago, and then didn’t continue on with the quilting for whatever reason. Except for brief moments when it got unfolded to look at it or show it to someone, it’s been folded flat on a shelf with other quilts and quilt tops piled on top of it. As I’m working on it, I’ve realized that the batting is quite compressed and flat, which makes it much less bulky to push through the machine. Wow! What an epiphany!

When I get ready to baste a quilt, I take the batting out of the bag and unroll it to let it fluff up, and sometimes I even pop it in the dryer on fluff to really puff it up. I don’t know where I learned that, probably from a machine quilting book at some point, and I’ve always told my quilting students to do that too. But what if we’ve been shooting ourselves in the foot all this time? We fluff and puff the batting before basting, only to have to fight with it to squish it though the machine when we quilt the quilt.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens when I wash this quilt that I’m working on right now. Will the batting puff up in the quilting designs the same way as other quilts? I think the next time I baste a quilt, I’m leaving the batting compressed to see how it goes. Maybe just this simple thing will make machine quilting large quilts that much easier. What do you do when you baste a quilt??

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