Busy time of year......

Well sadly this is the start of a very busy time for me at work since the annual All County Fine Arts Festival is in about 2.5 weeks. I still have a lot of work to mat or get labeled for the show. I get home beat.........sadly too tired to quilt during the week. This weekend I fused the rest of my fabric choices for my grandson's Caleb's big boy quilt.
I then cut out the shapes needed for the last 6 monsters. I will have 9 monsters in all. I do have a pattern that my daughter picked out 2 years ago but now she told me to improvise and come up with a quilt design using the monsters of my own ;-) This should prove to be fun so I will probably be anxious to get started working on a design.;-) Maybe I'll have more energy to quilt after I get home from work? ;-)))
As you can see from my photo there was a lot of cutting this weekend.
The other photo is a piece of my rusting that I want to try to float on my HQ16 and see what I can do as whole art quilt.

Busy Busy week! yet.......

What an interesting week yet busy!..... Our last week we were all fighting germs at school if you remember? (work) Students out ill the worst I've seen in my 5 years of teaching in VA. I finally gave in by Thursday, dropped by doctor and stayed home Friday sick. Laid low all weekend trying to get rid of the germs......then snow hit our area come Sunday evening AND suddenly March 2-3 = 2 snow days! ;-) WOW! What a nice reprieve..it gave me time to regroup AND two days of sewing and time in my studio.

So this week I finally dragged out a pattern I bought with my daughter in Denver when my grandson was born 2 years ago. It's a great pattern, the most I ever spent on a pattern but that is because it was a "block of the month" quilt and the patterns are for 9 wonderful monsters! It's a great design and I promised my daughter I would make it for Caleb's big boy bed someday.

Well Caleb is getting a new sibling come Sept 09 so figured I'd better get started? lol I have 3 monsters on their squares and am trying out fabrics for the other 6....the patterns mention/suggest colors but the fabric choices are up the quilter.

This is going to be a fun quilt!

Then I also fit in a little experimental dyeing this week I made 5 pieces of fabric using Tahitian blue and a red..you'll see the blue on the left and the red on the right. I then mixed the red and blue together in various mixtures... The dark blue fabric was from another time. I am pleased with the end results.

Next week I hope to experiment with yellow and blue dyes......and maybe try solid coverage.

Fun Sunday.....

So after a week of fighting the germs at school......cold, flu, coughs and then coming home each day zonked and heading to bed for comfort, I seem to finally be on the upturn to better health ;-) Took a sick day myself to regroup. Yay....feeling better!

So finally I got to mess around this weekend with some quilting....I got my 2 post cards for the pex winter exchange in their envelopes and mailed.....then got to have some fun with my HQ16 today ;-) and now am trying to remember how to reload the machine. I'm putting some simple black cotton as backing and a white muslin top that I hope to float some simple whole cloth quilt tops over to see what kind of free motion thread painting or other type of quilting I can experiment with? I have some ideas in my mind that I want to try....will let you know if my ideas or thoughts work out or crash ;-) Either way I figure it is just more practice to help learn the machine and get comfortable with it; tension and movement of handles etc. I have cut up the long practice piece I ended up with from the set up fabric and actually am not to unhappy with the bottom of my practice piece; which was nice discovery. I am going to zigzag on the edges of the cut up pieces then wash them and dry them and then do some experimental painting or dyeing on the fluffy quilted pieces.

It's something else I have had in my mind to try so looking forward to seeing the end results.

Figure nothing lost and fun to experiment. I also ended up with one practice piece I figure I can hang just for fun in my studio to showcase my first attempt on my new machine and to remind me of options or ideas for free motion quilting. (You might have to click on photos to get a clearer view of quilting stitches.)