Field Trips in Fiber - Adventures in quilting, hand dyed fabric and fiber art.

2011 Journal Quilts

I can't believe I am at the end of my Journal Quilt project! Here are the last 3 quilts in the series.

This is my December 16 journal. Most dyers are familiar with the work of Carter Smith. He is very well known for his shibori silk garments. He also sells scraps and I bought some! I decided to use a few of them for a journal quilt as a way to make myself break into the box. It's a big box of scraps and contains a little of everything from small bits to fat quarter sized pieces and they all are spectacular in patterning and color. I can't wait to make something else with them!

This one is my December 23 journal. I wanted to use one of my new Go! dies so I picked the chicken/rooster and eggs.

After I made the last one I put all 51 journals on the wall to see them together. Then I printed this image on fabric and created the very last journal.

I used the printed image to create the numbers for my last journal. 

I am so glad I did the journal quilts this year. Certainly some are much better than others but then some weeks are better than others too! I will not be doing journal quilts in 2012 - one year is ENOUGH! But we are doing the color palette challenge so check back tomorrow for the kick off of that.

Customer projects

I'm excited to have 2 more great customer projects to share with you. Before I do, remember to check out all of my customer projects in the Flickr Group. If you have made something with my fabric please add it to the group. Each month I will draw a name from that month's entries. The winner will be announced in my newsletter and will receive a personal 25% shop discount that is good for 3 months!

First up is this beauty from LuAnn Kessi.

This was a challenge quilt (I believe it was a guild challenge). LuAnn sunprinted the leaves and then used the Sugar Maple Gradient for the borders. The green, gold and orange of the sun prints blend perfectly with the gradient colors. If you don't follow LuAnn's blog, you should, it's always full of inspiration and she is always creating something new. Check out this post for a great slide show of the creating of this quilt.

This next quilt was made by Summerset Banks. You will know her primarily as an art garment maker. She has won many awards at all of the major shows for her spectacular art garments. If you are into garment sewing you should be following her blog because she shows great detail of her work with lots of tutorials. She is also an avid mountain climber and spends a lot of time on the mountains of New Hampshire.

It's not an art garment, it's an art quilt! This one was based on a photograph taken by a friend while they were hiking on Waumbek Mountain, NH.  Her friend captured this photo just as the sun was streaming through the trees. She used the photo for the quilt and added the hand dyed fabric for the frame and back.

I love the detail stitching that Summerset did to enhance the photo. Beautiful!

Audiobook Reviews and a little giveaway

I first discovered audiobooks around 1985. I was living in Washington, DC and working as a consultant. One of my first assignments was to travel to Norfolk, VA every week to work at Tidewater Regional Transit. Ironically I had just moved from the Norfolk area to DC but that's another story.

At that time audiobooks came from a company called Books on Tape and they were on cassette. I looked forward to my long drive every Monday and Friday so that I could listen to my latest book. I listened to all of W. Somerset Maugham during those drives. 

It wasn't long before I got a Sony Walkman and I was able to take my books on the Metro to work and then to listen to while I sewed.  Since then audio has moved from cassette to CD and now to digital download and my Walkman is a tiny MP3 player or my Driod phone. How awesome is that?

After about 10 years I started accidentally getting duplicate books because I'd forget that I had read something already. Of course the answer to that is a spreadsheet! Since then I have logged every book I've "read" and even included a review of the reader and the story.  The spreadsheet currently has 764 items.

I would probably best be described as an eclectic reader. I'll read almost anything except fantasy, science fiction and romance. They bore me.  I find them very formulaic and dull plots and ridiculous characters.  They aren't bad books. They are great for people who like escapism. They just aren't for me.  I love history, historical novels, crime and intrigue, science, biographies and just about everything else.  I also don't necessarily read the current popular books. I'm just now getting around to reading The Blind Side.

I've been thinking about including some book reviews on the blog and then Audible sent me a little something to give away and that was all the prodding I needed to get on with the book reviews.  Here's my first review and at the end you'll find a little extra something.

The Kitchen House

by Kathleen Grisson

The Kitchen House opens in 1791 on a Virginia tobacco plantation. Lavinia, an Irish orphan, has been brought here as a indentured servant. She is put under the care of Belle, the master's illegitimate slave daughter, to work in the kitchen house.

The story hooks you quickly as you follow Lavinia, Belle and the other plantation residents through the decades. I very much appreciated that the author stayed away from imposing modern morals on the subject of slavery. Every modern reader knows that it was wrong but we can't erase that it happened. This book seems to do a great job of telling a story of the time very similar to the way that Gone With the Wind is told. As with GWTW, slavery is a part of the story, it is not the whole story.

The book is narrated by Orlagh Cassidy and Bahni Turpin. I am usually not a fan of multiple narrators but they did a masterful job on this one. The book runs almost 13 hours and I could have listened to Belle and Lavinia's story for 13 more.

Now for the giveaway

Audible has given me 3 3-month memberships to give away. Most of my friends already use Audible so I though I'd give them away here. I believe that with the membership you get 3 free book downloads. It's a great way to try out audiobooks if you've never tried them before. 

If you are not already a member and would like to give audiobooks a try, just leave a comment below. I will draw and announce the winners New Year's Day.

Blogger's BOM

It's time for the 4th block of the Blogger's Block of the Month series. If you are not familiar with the Blogger's BOM it is sponsored by Jackie at Canton Village Quiltworks and you can read all about it here.

Block #1 was done by Sherri at A Quilting Life

I did block #2

Block #3, is by Stephanie at Loft Creations.  

Block 4 is by Pat Sloan. She challenged us with some small pieces. But it's not challenging at all with her strip piecing instructions. I'm using vintage feedsack 6" charm squares for my fabrics so I had to do a little more piecing. It was worth the extra work because it's a really cool block that looks differently depending on the fabric placement.

 I'm making 2 of each block. 

If you are thinking of participating you might want to check out the Flickr Groupfor some great color inspiration.

Here are all 8 of my blocks together and I am caught up for the time being!

I'll be back in a few days with a couple more layout options. I love how they are looking all together!

 

 

Back to reality

The holiday weekend is mostly over (I have 2 small gifts left to deliver) and it was 100% nice. Christmas is mostly low-key for us and we like it that way. In fact I got to sew all day Christmas day since our events were on the 24th and 26th.

I decided to spend Christmas Day on my QOV. I got the borders on it and started quilting. I'm using a pantograph so this should go quickly. I want to get this one completed and in the mail by Saturday.

I had been using hand dyed wide backing fabric for all of my most recent quilt backs but I can no longer get the fabric. I am back to piecing my quilt backs. I know a lot of you like to do fancy pieced backs but I just can't make myself do that. Instead I look for sale fabric and buy it in 6 yard cuts. I bought several when a friend's quilt shop went out of business. My Mom took a few of those. So when I say the eQuilter clearance sale Sunday I went a little crazy. Let's just say that I bought "several" large cuts for quilt backs for me and Mom.  How could I not? They were as low as $3/yard? If you need to stock up on quilt backing fabric (or any other fabric) check out eQuilter, Thousands of Bolts and Fat Quarter Shop for some great year-end sales.

I got several lovely gifts for Christmas but the one quilty gift are these new Go! dies. I'm already percolating a project for the chickens that I hope to get started next week.

I even got one more applique block done. 5 done. 45 to go! I discovered that I can do a bit of this work in the car. This one was finished yesterday as we drove to Newport News to deliver a gift I made that I'll share later this week.

Because my SIL's birthday is December 23 I always try to make her a birthday card that looks nothing like a Christmas card.  It's not my best work but I though it was kind of cute.

That's all I'll share for today. I've got lots more to catch up on but I'm still enjoying the slowness of the Holiday time and taking things easy this week.