Lake Farm Park Quilt Show and The Quilting Blogiverse

 It's silent in the quilting blogiverse these days. I have a "reading list" on blogger that I began curating many years ago. Decades now, if you can believe that! So many people have stopped posting that it consists of only about five active blogs that regularly post. I feel like I have returned to my hometown to find no one still living there anymore. I think I'm a little disappointed by that. The quilting landscape is different, and I'm going to have to adjust. I suppose this also presents an opportunity to start anew.

I stopped into a sweet little quilt shop today, about a half hour drive from where I live. A very kind woman, the owner, greeted me as I entered. I spent a few hours in her shop today and found lots of treasures. I'm collecting fabrics to make a quilt called Wooly Stars by Coriander Quilts. Oh, what beautiful fabric I found! The shop was simply packed full. Initially I had chosen black and white fabrics as the pattern called for. But I really love a little warmth, so I ended up rethinking that choice and grabbed chocolates and creamy buttery off whites. Here's some of what I brought home:

I am so excited to get sewing with these! I bought a few other things too, like this Jo Morton charm pack that I just couldn't leave behind.

I cannot wait to get sewing now!

Last post I told you that I went to the Lake Farm Parks Quilt Show in March, too, remember? It was wonderful, as always. Below are a few snapshots of quilts that I really loved.

I had a wonderful time at the show. My husband and the babies were good sports and came along with me. I would really like to enter the show next year. Let's see if I can get things together enough to make a quilt to share. That will be a great goal for this year.

Plants are growing too. Look at the size of this Hosta! 

I had my three-year-old son place his hand beside it for reference. Of course, he's just small, but what huge leaves this plant has! Today it supposed to rain all day. I have some work to do, and then I will make some time for sewing. I was able to get one border onto my patriotic quilt. I think next, I'll try to add two more!

Sewing, Gardening and a Quilt Show

 Good evening, friends. It's been a while. How are you? We are doing well here in the northern most part of Ohio. I have gardening and quilting on the brain, and so that's what I've been doing a lot of.

I am still working, but a little closer to home these days. Not that this has given me much more free time, I do have teenagers and small children after all. But it has made the drive home shorter and allowed me to sleep in just a little bit longer in the mornings. 

I have decided to be intentional about making time to sew. Last month I returned to the local quilt guild after nearly a decade away. There are new faces, and some more familiar, but the overall feeling was very different. The same joy and love for sewing, and a new excitement for gathering in the name of quilts. But it was just different. I enjoyed it tremendously. I made new friends, and they have inspired me to sew more. Having a monthly "quilting commitment" has worked its magic. I sewed a quilt top! I must, after all, sew a little bit, if I'm going to participate in a sewing group. Tonight I hope to add borders to this.

Hopefully this image doesn't give you vertigo. I cannot seem to rotate it. (I might be too tired to try.) Memorial Day is on the way and the Fourth of July too. So red, white, and blue are my current colors. This top is very simple, made from scraps in my stash, but if you know me, you know it's all about the quilting anyhow. I'll be quilting this on my Juki TL2010q. Eventually.

And I said that I have been gardening. Oh, have I! Situated prominently in our back yard is a garden bed. The back yard feels more like our front yard because it faces the main road, where just beyond that is an expansive view of Lake Erie. When we purchased this home three years ago, the garden bed was unruly. It housed a beautiful purple iris, an overwhelming amount of ivy, a holly bush, two unknown trees, and was filled thick with lily of the valley. Each summer I thinned the lily of the valley, removed a few things more, and put in plants. This year, it feels for the first time, like a garden.

I planted another iris, this one pink, and I have one more to plant waiting patiently in the driveway. I planted lilies, creeping phlox, delphinium, daisies, echinacea, mums, and foxglove. Oh, I cannot wait to see how these plants fair!

I'm also going to try a few dahlias this year. I planted six in pots. This one I picked up on Mother's Day at a plant sale. So beautiful! I hear these get very tall. I can't wait to see!

Oh yes, and I've taken up a new hobby. Cross stitch. I had no idea how much I would love it. There are so many new patterns these days! And wonderful designers! I am loving these.

There are a few errors, and maybe you'll find them. I don't really mind though. These are for the fun of stitching. I love to have a hand project now just about everwhere I go.

I went to Lake Farm Park's annual quilt show a few weeks ago too. See how sewing intentional I am? It was wonderful! I took many pictures. I think I will save them for my next blog post, though. I am being intentional about my blogging too, see? So sorry if you visited to see the photos! You will just have to come back...

If you are out there and still quilt blogging, I would love to hear from you. The online quilting community has changed so much in recent years. I really enjoyed these small little private spaces where people share their day-to-day quilting life. Is anyone still out there?

Until next time!

Slow Stitching Hexies and Garden Musings

 Well, friends, it seems that I am saying hello once again after a long absence. For the few who still visit, all these years later, you know that much has happened in the past ten years. I spent time recently scrolling through old posts, and I cannot believe that this blog began in 2008. That's getting dangerously close to twenty years ago! What a different world it is today. Not only for me, but the blogging community. It is very different from when I began blogging, as a way to stay connected and talk about quilts and gardening while staying home with my children-to now. I don't come across nearly as many personal blogs anymore. I miss those! I did eventually grow into long arm quilting as a business, but this blog primarily was a diary of those days and remained a way to document my quilting and gardening life over the years. Even the quilting community online has changed dramatically. Facebook and Instagram seem to be where everyone connects now. You can find me on both of those platforms, but I think I still have a place in my heart for the personal connection only found in silly little personal blogs. 

I have been sewing. Can you believe that? And not just a little bit of sewing. I've been my regular obsessed self with sewing. Right now, my obsession is English paper pieced (EPP) hexies.

    

I started these primarily because it was difficult to get myself in front of a sewing machine with a toddler in the house. It's still difficult, but as small children grow, things become easier. I paused on my blue and cream quilt mostly because I wasn't sure how I was going to piece those diamonds. Now I think I will EPP them. What accuracy! I used cotton thread because I had a dwindling spool of it for piecing, but then later read how wonderful bottom line works for hand piecing. While it was basically invisible from the front, I also couldn't see it very well for stitching! I resumed using the cotton, and though I can see the stitches from the front, I think they will disappear if I stitch in the ditch. I also tried some Glide thread that I have an abundance of laying around from my long arming days. It also stitched up nicely and the best part was-I could see it! I am undecided if I will hand quilt or machine quilt this though. It feels like it should be hand quilted, doesn't it? If for nothing else because it is hand pieced. I did buy some pink Perle cotton and wide-eyed needles to stitch it with if I go the hand quilting route.

And if you've visited my blog before, then you know I love gardening almost as much as I love quilting. I'm a plant collector. Some of you who collect fabric can probably relate.

There is no rhyme or reason to my plant collecting other than I focus on perennials and just a few annuals. I just love that you can throw a small baby little perennial in the ground, and it will grow back twice as big the next year and the year after that it will have given you more baby plants of that same perennial. So, what I'm saying is it's a thrifty way to grow a garden, if you care to be thrifty.

This beautiful iris was already living in this wild and sprawling garden bed when we purchased the property. It is blooming and absolutely beautiful! I love irises and have had many over the years in all the different homes I've lived in. I think I need a few more, don't you?

I went back through posts, and it looks like it was ten years ago that I planted pumpkins in my back yard! Initially that was why I named this blog "pumpkin patch quilter." Because I love to quilt, and I think I had the most fun growing pumpkins of all the things I have grown. There is something special about growing pumpkins with small children too. They don't care nearly as much about the flowers, but the pumpkins! Those are special and a symbol of fall fun! So, this year I'm trying my hand at it again. I planted Jack Be Little's, mini pumpkin gourds, and lemon-yellow sunflowers in this patch below. I'm going to plant some container zinnias in those pots, but I just haven't gotten out to do it yet. At this rate I won't have blooms until October. I better get planting. Today I spent most of my garden time pulling lily of the valley from the aforementioned sprawling garden bed. Boy does that stuff spread!

I think that is all I have to share for now, but rest assured, if you are still blogging out there and talking about your quilts and gardens-I'll be reading! I have really been enjoying playing in the garden and hand sewing. I won't bore you with pictures, but I've been organizing dozens of bins of fabric too. I'll share more on that later. There's a very long way to go on that front!

Well, hello there! What a busy couple of months our family had. So much has happened in my life since last October. I passed the bar exam, moved, had a baby...and that was just through the holiday months. Things are quieting down and I'm now turning to a bit of sewing.

I bought fabric for the quilt design I showed you in my last post. 

I was able to match the colors pretty well to what I chose in Electric Quilt. These are all Kona solids purchased from Missouri Star Quilt Company.  I ordered black printer ink today (because I'm currently out of it) so I can print out my patterns and start piecing this quilt. All the fabrics have been prewashed and dried since this photo, but they are still waiting to be pressed. 

If you follow my page on Facebook, you might have already seen some of the other projects I've been working on. I'm setting up a permanent sewing space in the new house and so as a result, I have been going through boxes and boxes of sewing supplies. I found some old blocks I made years ago, and you may have even seen them if you've followed this blog that long. I think I made these with the thought of completing a Sylvia's Bridal Sampler quilt. I must have lost steam and moved on to something else, and good thing, because my piecing wasn't all that phenomenal here. The seams are bulky, and I must not yet have really been into machine quilting because now that I know better, I put a lot of effort into minimizing bulk. I picked a few of the better blocks and squared them up, which inevitably means I will lose some points or create some floaters. But it will still be a fun short project to put together so I can get to the part I love the most, which is the machine quilting.

Today I have some housework and errands to run, and then I'll try to squeeze in sewing time. The plan is to get this machine quilted on my Juki, but I've been having some trouble with thread looping on the underside during free motion quilting. I had it serviced recently but it's still giving me trouble. I suspect it may be a threading issue. That will take some experimenting to resolve. Regardless, I have to decide if I want to add borders with applique, or whether I forgo the applique knowing this piece doesn't have the best piecing to warrant so much effort. 

In the meantime, if you want to see more frequent updates as I go along, you can watch for posts here.

A Return to Quilting

 Well, it's been a while, hasn't it?

I wanted to share not only an update, but some creative developments too.

A lot has happened since I last shared. I graduated from law school, have started a new job that I love, got engaged, had a baby, and have another baby on the way. My fiancé and I are scheduled to close on our forever home at the end of the week, we're planning a wedding at the end of next year, and needless to say, there's just a ton happening in my life at any given moment. 

Sounds like a good time to start a sewing project, don't you think?  

A combination of lack of time and lack of space has prevented me from doing much sewing over the past few years. I'm not sure exactly what inspired me, maybe sewing a few projects for my daughters for Halloween, or pulling out the half dozen sewing machines that lay around my house just begging me to start a new project. Or maybe it was sorting through boxes of old quilts and fabric and sewing notions that have been boxed up in my garage for several years. Something, or maybe, all of these things, inspired me, and so I started playing with Electric Quilt and thinking about what I might make if I were so inclined to make something. Anything.

The fruit of my sorting and tinkering and day dreaming resulted in a project. I started designing a quilt with the goal of entering it into a few quilt shows. The quilting landscape has changed dramatically since I was last actively sewing. Shows have gone defunct, publishers have gone out of business, and it seems as though the online quilting community moved from Blogger to Instragram and now are all moving directly to Facebook! For the record, I am on all of those platforms, but there's something I still enjoy about blogging. But I digress. 

There's no name for my quilt yet, a necessary practice for identification in shows, but one that always felt a bit foreign to me. What I am  sharing here will just be the framework for a more elaborate design. 

I am inspired by Margaret Solomon Gunn's quilts. She creates designs with a great mix of piecing and applique, which I'd like to try my own hand at. I'm finding that I want to create quilts that I would eventually want to hang around my home afterward. With that in mind, I've decided blue's are going to make up the base of my newest project.

It's been so long that I wasn't even sure where to order fabric! I found Kona solids at Missouri Star Quilt Company that coordinated with my color palette. With hope, they will be true to the image on the computer screen. I'm looking forward to cutting and piecing this quilt in just a few short weeks.

The next step will be to plan out some applique. I think I want delicate flowers or vining. Or maybe both. I'll have to think on it for a while and then draft something.

In the mean time, I'd love to hear from any quilters who are still out there blogging with me! With any luck, it won't take me an entire year to post another sewing update. 

A Long Overdue Update

I have periodically visited this blog and reminisced about the quilting business I once had. It still floors me to look back and recognize that there have been so many changes! Like many of you with Covid-19 keeping us all at home, I've been lurking around the internet in my old familiar hangouts.

I made a very long and rambling video about a year ago and gave a brief update on where I've been. The truth then was that I wandered a bit because I wasn't really sure where all of this was going, but now I'm a little more certain.

Over the past four years I have still been doing mom things with my four children. I have teenagers which has been the most difficult and challenging experience as a parent. I cut back from full time work to part time to go to college because I recognized pretty early on that it was necessary to get a degree to support myself long term and such a large family. I earned a modest income with quilting, but the resources to continue as I had were no longer available to me, and so I had to make some tough decisions. I loved what I had built with quilting, so it was extremely sad for me to see it go. I took a job by pure chance as a legal assistant and learned immensely during my time there. The experience combined with friendships and connections made in that role inspired me to pursue law school.

Returning to school has been difficult but more rewarding than I could have imagined. My experience has been unique as a mother and nontraditional student. I balanced my children's lives, my own work life and school life, the loss of my mother in the midst of the most difficult time in my life, and now navigate the unique experience of finishing my degree during a pandemic. I was active in school and took on leadership roles in many student organizations and tried to volunteer in my community whenever time allowed. I learned so much about the world - and that there is so much more to it than what I previously understood. It was not always graceful or pretty or perfect. I lost sleep and was at times grouchy and short tempered. The dishes often piled up, dinners frequently consisted of anything quick and microwaveable, and there was definitely not time to be the kind of mother, daughter, friend, or partner that I wanted to be. As one who goes through significant life changes does - I grew and evolved- and hopefully for the better.

So here I am exactly two weeks from being finished with a Bachelor of Arts in English! I have been accepted to a number of law schools and have chosen The University of Akron's Law School to complete my legal education. My oldest is graduating high school and headed to college this fall. My youngest will be entering kindergarten. I made it through with the support of new friends, the faculty and professors at the college, coworkers, my small but loving family, and old friends who have supported me since grade school. Just when you think the world is hard and cold and will eat you up and spit you out - incredible people show up and remind you that the world is also full of compassion, love, and those with a desire to make it a better place.

Very little sewing has occurred but I have not abandoned it entirely. I have been creating art, mostly as a way to relax and curb the anxiety of all the uncertainty we are experiencing, and to express the hardships and joys that I've experienced through the years. 

I have so very much enjoyed blogging about my sewing endeavors and creating friendships along the way. Some of you still follow me on Facebook and have been my cheerleaders through all of this - and I am so grateful for you! 

While it looks like a sewing business is no longer in my immediate future, I am still drawn to sewing and artwork and creating. My competitive nature might even inspire me to enter a few competitions and learn new techniques. 

I have thrown around the idea of creating a new blog or revamping this one. For now, I will leave it as it is. I will not be taking in quilts again, and any projects will likely be small. I have loved sewing and quilting, but law school is a long term commitment and so my energy is going to be focused on that for the time being. In the meantime, I will try to periodically drop in and catch up.

Until the next update - take care!

Progress on the Unnamed Whole Cloth Quilt

One more week until school resumes. I have been working diligently in my spare hours in an attempt to establish some semblance of organization so that I have a permanent creative space. Things are coming along. The long arm is set up - with two of the bars loaded onto the frame incorrectly so, with help, I hope to swap them around and get my machine up and running this week. I wonder if I will remember how to load a quilt?

Many years of memories had been tucked away in boxes and piled around my long arm. Though I turned it on a few times, and more than once attempted to sew, all of those feelings were not quite ready to be sorted through. I have finally begun that process, and purging things I no longer need to hang onto. I suppose this is one of those spring time rituals many of us share. The daylight lingers a little longer in the evenings, Christmas is finally over, and it feels as though it is time to start anew.

More work on my unnamed whole cloth. Above you can see the full view. It is not very big, a wall hanging size. I used a fat Moda solid fat quarter on the top in a minty green. Full disclosure, I did use a filter to help highlight some of the detail. When finished, I will take photographs in natural lighting to share with you the truest representation of this piece.

This quilt is entirely free hand, no marking, just play. I have such an appreciation for well planned designs that pay special attention to size, shape, consistency, and balance. Show pieces have always been my passion and fascination; the ultimate goal to aspire to. This quilt, however, follows no rules. The complexity in its quilting is a bit paradoxical to its free form nature.

The plan to finish is really no plan at all. I love fancy schmancy things and fancy schmancy quilts and so I think this calls for beads and some painting. Many faces twist and turn with a puzzled look as I explain that I will paint my quilt. I see it as a canvas waiting for emotion to be applied. The painting will add shading and dimension and mood - and with hope add to the overall feeling of  the piece. The goal is not to cover or alter the quilt, but rather, to enhance the feeling it invokes.

For those who are curious the makeup of this quilt, I have shared that the top is a Moda solid fat quarter, the backing an inexpensive calico from likely a box store, and the thread is a mix of cotton on top from Connecting Threads and Glide which is a popular shiny polyester thread. The batting is two layers of Hobbs 80/20 which has become my favorite go to quilt batting and what I use for virtually everything. Though I enjoy long arm quilting, this was quilted on a Juki TL-2010Q sit down domestic sewing machine. For quilting enthusiasts, this is the model that came out shortly after the Juki TL 98, the machine that became infamous among members of the quilting community through the instructional videos of quilting legend Sharon Schamber.

Currently, this piece is blocking on a craft table I have unfolded and allowed to dominate the kitchen. As I have mentioned, I no longer have the space to sew that I once had, but difficult circumstances have never proven to stop me from pursuing my interests. Besides, it's the evening and no cooking will happen until tomorrow. Let's hope it dries quickly.

Other things on my mind: I have yet to figure out how to reply to your comments. Let me tell you I loved reading your comments! It feels so nice to be welcomed with such warmth back into the quilting world. Creative people love to share, and even more we love eager spectators to our crafting sport. So know that I appreciate your words, and that you have taken time to visit. Once I have a moment to sort out the glitches I will try to respond to your kind contributions.