My Webshots page

I've started updating my Webshots albums - adding lots of new photos. Getting my renewal notice reminded me it's been a couple years at least since I added any photos.

If you are interested in taking a look then click here.

As far as the feathered star quilt goes - thanks so much to everyone who left their opinions. I've decided to go back to the red and the original brown plaid because I love it's richness. What you can't see in that photo is that the red fabrics I had in my stash - a very few with enough yardage to use - are dull, old, and uninspiring. So I'm headed to the quilt shop tomorrow to find new, rich-looking fabrics. Hopefully that will include some red plaids!

I'll post photos tomorrow, presuming I have success.

Seeking your opinion

I guess I need help with this Feathered Star quilt. I thought I knew just the changes I wanted to make, but when I made them all I still wasn't satisfied.

In the first picture I've changed all the triangles - darker around the center block and blue instead of red around the edges. I think I like the blue much better than the red - it brightens up the entire quilt. However - since the blue is so much lighter than the red I'm now thinking that maybe the dark center triangles are too dark.
So - I tried changing the center triangles to my first choice. I think I like this better - but I'm just not sure.

I'd like your opinion. Do you like the picture I posted yesterday the best? Or do you prefer the blue with the dark? Or the blue with the original brown plaid? I didn't take a picture of the darker with the red because I didn't like that at all - way too dark.

I'm not going to decide for sure until I make the other four applique blocks. In the meantime I'm leaving this up on my design wall to see if time will help me make a decision.

Please let me know which of these three choices you prefer, or whether you think I should head to the quilt shop for something else entirely. Thanks for your input!

More info about the feathered star

I love this quilt, and I can't blame anyone for asking about it. I've been a big fan of Jan Patek's for years and years, and have managed to acquire - often through Ebay - almost all of her books and many of her patterns. I know this pattern was never published in a book or as a stand alone pattern. Many of the previous Girl Gang's have been a separate book, but not this one. The feathered star by itself was published in 2003 in a book called Piece and Plenty that she co-authored with Cherie Ralston. It was actually Cherie who drafted the feathered star for this quilt.

All I can suggest is that you keep an eye out on Ebay for anything by Jan Patek. It's possible that someone will want to sell their Girl Gang collection.

In case you are curious, I've posted a drawing of the complete quilt. All design rights - of course! - belong to Jan Patek and/or Cherie Ralston.

2003-2004 Girl Gang Feathered Star

This quilt is one of my two oldest UFO's. It was the new Girl Gang project when I first joined the Girl Gang group is fall 2003. The group met at Cottons in Battle Ground, WA - a wonderful shop that was featured as one of the top 10 shops in Quilt Sampler magazine early on. As long as I attended meetings I kept up nicely - finishing the blocks for each month. I even put the year I expected to finish in the center block, figuring that would give me a year to quilt it after the last block was done.

Shortly after I started the Carolina Lily blocks Cottons suddenly announced they were closing in a couple weeks. Once the shop was gone the Girl Gang group that met there disintegrated, and I was no longer motivated to proceed. We did receive the rest of the patterns, but without the incentive of showing the finished blocks every month I moved on to something else.

Skip forward to November of last year. With only three long-term projects (formerly UFO's) remaining in the unfinished top stage - all applique projects - I decided to work on them all BOM style this year, as I explained in this post. I spent some of December prepping the blocks (all of which I finished during the "plague".) After I finished the two Carolina Lily blocks I figured I'd prep the other four blocks soon, so would need to put the quilt onto my design wall to help in choosing fabrics.

A couple days ago I spent some time putting everything up on the wall. I cut a bunch of setting triangles so I could arrange everything in the final set up. Sure looks different this way - much farther along than it looked with just the blocks hanging on a skirt hanger in the closet. When I stood back and looked I knew I'd have to get the rest of the blocks finished quickly - I was eager to turn it into a finished top. (Of course, I didn't discover that the lily block on the right is turned around the wrong way until AFTER I took the picture!)

I looked at it again yesterday afternoon as I was sitting appliqueing. I've decided I don't like the fabrics I chose for the setting triangles. So I have a new batch picked out - quite different from these - and tomorrow I'll cut new triangles to see if I like it better. I'll probably start prepping the remaining blocks - two eagles and two flower bouquets.

The quilt has a zigzag border on top and bottom outside the setting triangles to turn it into a rectangle, then four large appliqued borders to finish it off. Hopefully I'll be able to show you steady progress on this top the next few months. I'd love to have the top finished end of summer if not the beginning.

Appliqueing I will go

It's truly amazing how much applique one can finish when one does nothing else all day for several days. Just so you have an idea how much time I'm talking about - during the week when the virus was the worst I listened to unabridged versions of Pillars of the Earth and Shadow of the Wind, plus a Nevada Barr mystery thrown in between the two epics, appliqueing the entire time - almost 70 hours total.

First I tackled the third block of Times Remembered, which I prepped at the end of last December. The pieces were large, so it didn't take that long to finish it. Now three blocks are done, with six more to prep and finish.

Next I got out the two Carolina Lily blocks for Jan Patek's Feathered Star - Girl Gang 2003-2004. Those took a little longer since there were two of them.

My fourth applique block was the last block I had prepped from my Mid-Century Album class. I really loved how it turned out. This is another that I prepped at the end of last year. It was so much fun choosing the fabrics for this one. Now I need to prep a bunch more blocks so progress on this quilt can continue.

Lastly I pulled out the borders for Heirloom Stitches and started working on them again. I finished one border and now have the second border almost completed. When I finish it I'll sew those two onto the quilt top and take a picture to post. I'm sure most all of you have forgotten what this quilt looks like. I'm determined to finish the last two borders this month also so I'll have a finished quilt top by the end of the month.

Before I started the applique marathon I did finish the piecing I'd been doing before I got sick. I finished nine more blocks for the Hourglass Quilt - for a total of 13 blocks. Then I tucked that project away again, as I didn't have the energy to piece.

All this applique has really gotten me into the mood for hand stitching again - the virus effectively ended my desire to piece for the time being. Since my oldest WISP's are applique projects I guess that's a good thing!

More of what I've been up to

Soon after writing my February goals I decided they just didn't appeal to me any more. And I needed something new to do during Joseph's naps. I decided to do one EQ lesson per nap. Well, in no time at all was I totally addicted, and spent almost every waking moment at the beginning of February playing with EQ and working through the lessons in both the User Manual and EQ6 Simplified.

I loaded the second of three postage stamp quilts onto the longarm near the end of the second week of February. I did about four rows of a simple pantograph before going to bed that night. I didn't get back to it the next day - Valentine's Day - because I drove up to Longview in the morning to my favorite shop - Momma Made It - for the start of their Jo's Little Women's Club. I've been collecting the Little Women's Club patterns since the beginning, and was thrilled that a local shop finally decided to offer the club. Then in the afternoon we all loaded into the CRV and headed south for Sophie's second birthday celebration .

The next day - Sunday - I got sick with a bad virus. I talked to Rebecca and she was sick also. I'm pretty sure we got it from Joseph - who was sick only 3 days. That was over 2 weeks ago now, and neither of us are completely well. Rick got sick about 3 days later, and Fred managed to fight it off until last week. This was a bad virus - absenteeism was over 40% for over a week in several of the local school districts. Some grade schools in Vancouver had absenteeism reaching almost 60%. I know we got our flu shots in the fall - as did many others - but this obviously was something not covered by the vaccine.

So . . . for two weeks I didn't do much other than sit in a chair and do handwork. Funny - most of what I finished had been January goals that I'd not finished that I decided not to list for February. Last weekend I managed to finish quilting and bind the postage stamp quilt so I had one finish to list for February. I've also included a picture of the back, so you can see how my "self-constructed backing fabric" turned out. I'm quite pleased with the results. This will go to guild on Thursday for Hotel Hope.

In the next post I will talk about the applique I finished.

I'm back!

Thanks to all of you who left such nice comments on my last post. I want to assure everyone that nothing was wrong - I just needed a short break. I'd gotten the urge to learn EQ6 during Joseph's naps instead of blogging, and I got so enthralled with the process that almost all my computer time was spent playing with the program. I didn't want to be on the computer all my waking hours - I still wanted time to sew - so I decided to take a break.

Now I'm back, having completed one of my yearly goals - that of learning EQ6. I've also been doing a lot of quilting. I will post pictures later today showing what else I've been up to. I finished only one of my February goals because my sewing urges took a different direction. It's now time to set my March goals, which I will also do later today.

I'm eager to start reading blogs again too, and catching up with what everyone is doing.

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Gratitudes:

1. A very secure job for Fred

2. Continuing weight loss

3. One year now with Joseph home - he delights all of us daily

4. White snowdrops and purple crocus blooming in our front yard

5. Spectacular weather this past month

Blogging Break

I find myself in need of a short blogging break. I'm incredibly behind on my blog reading, and my posts have been few since my blog-anniversary. There are some other things in my life that I need to bring under control, and then I'll be back.

I hope you all miss me, and that you'll still be there when I start blogging again .

Loser Monday

Somehow I missed last week entirely. At least I've got the right day this week. I worked so hard the last two weeks, and though I did lose I didn't lose nearly what I hoped to lose. I seem to be stuck at .6 of a pound down each week. I guess that's better than none. When I weigh in this week I hope to have lost a total of nine pounds since I lost the 20 and reached my WW 10%. If I manage to do that then I will have lost an additional 5%, which is my next goal.

As far as weight loss hints go - I have a couple. First of all - be sure to journal what you eat and write down EVERYTHING that goes into your mouth. Doing this may make you think twice about eating something. Studies show that people who do this lose more weight more quickly and keep it off better than people who don't. My second hint is to start planning meals. When I plan five or 6 days at a time I'm more likely to cook, I enjoy the cooking more, and we are much less likely to head out for hamburgers because I don't want to cook.

I hope everyone else is doing well with their weight loss journey!

Stash Report - Week 5

I'm beginning to think this isn't the right time for me to be stashbusting. Not because my buying is out of control, but because the quilting I'm doing in the next few months won't do anything for stashbusting. All the quilts that need quilting already have backs. I will be cutting some fabric for applique, but not enough that it will pay to count it. If I start anything new it will be from either my scrap drawers or from a kit I already have. I know I won't cut buying out entirely - I've cut WAY down with that - but there is no point to report "no stash busted" every week. At the end of this year, if I've quilted as many flimsies as I want to quilt, and I've busted a bunch of my scraps, it will be time to start thinking of stashbusting. As Judy says, everyone will know when it's the right time to stash bust - and for me it isn't now.

So - I'll still stick with my goal of using more fabric this year than I buy, but I won't be doing weekly stash reports. Today's will be the last report.

Fabric in - one kit with about a yard of fabric from my Jan Patek Mini-Quilt club - auto shipped

Fabric out - nada

The good news is I visited Momma Made It - my favorite shop - on Thursday, and Friday I went to two quilt shops - one of which was new to me and positively wonderful! - and a quilt show and I didn't buy any fabric! It was certainly hard to resist.

(Shhh. . . don't tell Judy . . . I did ask Sharon at Momma Made It to put together a kit for the Kennesaw Mountain Quilt using the new Pink Chocolate line by Windham that she just got in as well as other fabrics. It'll be awhile before I pick up that fabric so it doesn't count until I do!)