The quilt

The quilt pattern is called “Beef Cake”  — it’s from the book Have Your Cake and Eat it Too by Dodi Lee Poulsen of Two Sisters at Squirrel Hollow.

Once I had the correct cutting instructions (which can now be found on their website), everything was golden.  I’m not a fan of the Turning Twenty type quilts, but this particular design struck me as being much more interesting, particularly (I think) because the pieces are much smaller, and they tend to blend together much more (in MY opinion).

(And please don’t send the lynch mob after me.  *I* don’t care for Turning Twenty or Yellow Brick Road.  If *YOU* like those designs, then by all means, keep making them.  I’m sure I do stuff that you don’t care for either).

The quilting is a variation on a design from my first Meandering Magic book.  It’s called ferns, but instead of making the fern fronds touch the meandering line, these fronds don’t touch, which means each side of the line is done in a separate pass.  It still goes very quickly.  Even if your quilting machine starts making hideous horrible noises that make you think it is ready to die.

(It didn’t die, it just had thread wrapped around the shaft right behind the hook.  Good gad, though, the sound was horrendous.  I nearly cried in horror).

So there you have it.  The quilt I was nearly ready to give up on, turned out to be pretty darned cute, if I do say so myself.  It’s not in my normal color palette (HA!  No red, white and blue!), but I like it!   And I very much appreciated the personal phone call from the designer who filled me in on the situation with the cutting instructions.  

One of the things I’m finding fascinating about working within the fabrics I have for sale at the shop is that while these are not the latest and greatest superstar designer fabrics, they are still pretty good-looking fabrics.  They don’t have a rockstars name on the selvedge, but you know what?  They make a pretty nice quilt just the same.  Plus, I find I like the challenge of putting together fabric that DOESN”T all come from the same line, I think it adds a little more sparkle. But again, that’s just MY opinion.

OK, I’ve got to get working on a writing project, so I’d better sign off.

Have a lovely evening!

Suzanne

 

p.s.  the credit for this variation on the fern design goes to my friend Terri W.  I’m sorry I forgot to mention this earlier when I posted originally.

Read Full Post »

Journal Quilt 2007

So, it turns out that I have a really short memory span, because I’ve already shown you pictures of the journal quilt that I sent to Houston.  It just came home this week (it’s been flying around the country without me).

Post last November about quilt

I did just take some new pictures and since this is my blog and I can talk about what I want, I guess I’ll show you one of them, since I went to all of that work.

It’s a little hard to photograph, there is a layer of fuschia tulle over the red wool, which makes it kind of shiny.  The red buttons on the quilt because someone accidently used an iron near the tulle and melted some of it.   Problem?  No, it’s a design opportunity.

My lesson from yesterday:

I learned that even though Will is practcally a grown-up (he is, after all, 9 years old), he’s not too old for footy pajamas.

More later, I got that quilt done that I’ve been so mysterious about.

Read Full Post »