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

Practice, practice, practice and one more lesson

When it comes to developing skill, practice is really the only rule. You can take classes every single day but you don't learn until you do. And you have to "do" a lot. Also, by doing you learn that you aren't nearly as bad at the skill as you thought!

I had 2 reasons for working on this particular quilt. Primarily I wanted to see if I could successfully quilt a quilt from the back so that I could feature more of my tie dye backs in my own quilts. Secondly I wanted to improve my skills at free motion fillers. I've never been very comfortable doing free motion fillers. I know that sound stupid because they should be easy, but I don't think they are easy at all. 

I am appraching this quilt with a different filler in each spiral band. The practice is really helping me but I have learned one more valuable lesson.

What looks wonky, lopsided and weird up close

looks absolutely fine at a distance. 

I really need to step back from my work more often and leave it alone!

So join me in skill building and work on a project that will help you develop a new skill. Don't sweat it, jsut work on it. You will be glad you did.

Etsy shop news

Have you made anything with some of my hand dyed fabrics? If so, please share! I love seeing what people make with the fabric. As an incentive I draw a name each month from the entries for that month and the winner receives a 90-day 25% off coupon to the shop. The winner is announced in my newsletter that's published on the 5th of every month.

How do you share? Just upload a photo of your project to my Flickr group. If you don't have a Flickr account you can Email a photo of your project to me for inclusion.

I am continuing to restock gradients in my Etsy shop. This week I've added these 3 popular designs.

Beach Walk

Appalachian Sunset

Desert Heat

Design Wall Monday

Although it rained most of the weekend (and we were grateful for it) I still had a fabulous weekend because I was at the river. It doesn't matter the weather it's always nice and relaxing there and there's always some sewing involved. We even had fresh crabs and shrimp for dinner Saturday. Perfect.

I knew I would not have a ton of sewing time so I took this tumbler project to work on. The original plan was to make a blue scrappy quilt from my hand dyed fabrics. I planned for it to be a simple quilt for one of the guest house twin beds. It was about half done before the weekend and after pondering it a while I decided that I wanted to do a giant applique of some sort on it and that's why the bottom 7 rows are predominately green. I'm picturing a giant sunflower or something like that. Now that I have it up on the wall (and not yet pressed) I think it might be too long so I'll go measure it out on one of the twin beds and see before I proceed with the next planned step.  But the way, the cutting for this quilt went very quickly using the GO! 3 1/2 inch Tumbler die.

Since I took my GO! Cutter I also took my scrap bin and the Equilateral Triangle die to play around with that a bit. That die has 3 sizes of triangles and I just cut a bunch of each to play with.

I wish I could remember what I was thinking when I purchased this die! Look that the smallest triangle set and note the size compared to a straight pin. I'm not sure what I will do with these. I suppose it could be a good river project for the next 25 years if I want.

I am making progress on my spiral quilting too. I've finished the teal quilting and will start the bright pink band next. 

I will not be getting much done this week. I'll be spending a few days with Mom instead but I might sneak in a few hours quilting on the longarm. We will see. Check out what everyone else is doing at Judy's redesigned blog.

 

Patriot Fabric Palette Projects

Mosaic #19

The Patriot Fabric Palette block this week is called Mosaic #19.  This is a block from the EQ library and it's one that I use often. I made mine a little differently from the design by using all half square triangles. If you are interested in the fabrics from the Patriot Palette you can find all of the information here.

This week I played around with alternate blocks. Look at the following layouts. I kept the colors the same and only changed the alternate block. They all look very different.

This one is quite busy.

This one leaves a lit of room for quilting.

I always love an Irish Chain alternating block.

This is a really cool block although I don't think it would be very easy to construct.

Lovely traditional applique alternating with the star.

I went back to the 4th one and changed the coloration a bit. I liked this one enough to add a border.

I like this a lot. That pieced border isn't quite the right size so I would have to play with those inner borders some to get it right but I really like the overall impact of the quilt. Here are couple of other colorways.

 

Google Tools

This post is very off-topic for me but I wanted to share a free online class that I recently took that was so valuable that I would have paid money for it.

I admit, I love Google in a big way. I love Google mail that often catches when I enter the wrong address. I love Google Analytics for helping me analyze traffic to my blog and shop, I love Google Reader for keeping my 500+ blogs in order and I practically live in Google Search.

A couple of months ago I found out about an online class for using Google Analytics. It was a 1-hour web conference and I learned several new things that I could do with the Analytics tool to help me manage my sites.

A few weeks ago I received an email offering a class called Power Searching with Google. It was a 2 week course of 3 classes each week (Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday). This week I finished up the last class and it was one of the most valuable classes that I've ever taken. It was amazing how much I did not know about using Google Search. One lesson dealt with Google Search Features. Now maybe I am the last person to know that you can find out the flight status of any flight by putting the airline and flight number into the Google search box or that the Google search box is also a calculator. But if there's anything on that page that you did not know I would highly recommend the Power Searching With Google class. I don't know when the next session will be offered but if you follow the Google Blog you will find out that and lots of new features that Google is continually implementing. I added the Google Blog to my Reader so that I automatically get notices.

Of course I am not affiliated with Google, I just like their products and no one can touch their search capabilities. Power Searching with Google will make you smarter and faster on the Web.