Hanging out in Baltimore

I’m in Baltimore for work and decided to spend the weekend with quilt friends. Amy was so kind to let me stay with her and her family. She even put a nice brunch together with some guild friends. It was so nice.

We went to Savage Mill and I was able to go to Queen’s Ink and the Treasure Trove antique linen store there. I could have spent a fortune there. We also stopped at Seminole Sampler, one of the best quilt shops in the country.

I had a great time. I hope to come back for the West River Retreat in November.

And can you believe these are back in season already?

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Art Quilt Workbook homework for Chapter 2

Using the practices in the book, this was the quilt I made. My theme is Pomegranates. After all, it’s the year of the Pomegranate for me. It uses some of the principles and elements of art. My scanner cut off the borders, which are only a half inch. Also, this is not quilted yet, but I did “pillowcase” bind it.

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Pick a Pear

I don’t know why I picked “pears” for this month’s theme. After the “Incident“, the pears I stamped out of foil have been on my mind. This is one of my class samples from my foiling class.

There’s pears everywhere. In fact, two Art Quilt books I am studying from currently have pear projects in them. I also recently did a pear watercolor, so it’s not quite as obsessive as I have been with the Pomegrantes, but Pears could be a whole subject to themselves…

I am not sure why, but I have been lackluster in blog-land this week. I apologize to my readers for not posting very much, but I hope this will change. I am rolling out the big project at work this week, and it’s taking my mental energy. I am also working on some super secret stuff, and hope I can reveal that in due time.

I was a “winner” this week too. I went to a spring/summer fashon show put on by my salon, and was the winner of a gift basket full of Redken products! My New Year’s resolutions were to “use it up” and I haven’t bought new hair or face products since the beginning of the year since I already own so much that I never use! Now I have even more. I was pretty excited to be the winner though!

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Recycling from IQA Chicago

My weekly quilt this week is firmly on the theme of “recycled” for April. As I described on my earlier post about the show, and the “Surviving the Runway” luncheon, I took some of the scraps on the table to use in this week’s quilt. I think this makes a perfect memento of the event, and our win for our table team.

Used here are tissue paper, a bingo card, a paper doily, gesso, pink paint to take down the bingo card color, ink from a stamp pad in the prize pack I won, and Wright’s hem tape used on our model, that was origianlly grey but I dyed with pomegranate juice. Too bad this is not 5×5 inches (my weekly quilts are 6×6) or I would enter it into Quilting Art’s current reader challenge!
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For real this time…

I have been travelling for work, so I apologize for being away from my blog. I was in Orlando at MegaCon, a really neat comic book convention, in which I met a bunch of cool creators and artists, and tried to sell the heck out of the program my company wrote.

This is the paper quilt entry I submitted to Quilting Arts/Cloth Paper Scissors for their “true colors” challenge. It was not accepted for either the magazine or the show in Chicago. I was a bit disappointed, because I used a paper technique I learned from Patricia “Pokey” Bolton herself at last year’s show, but in the end, I know what is wrong with the piece. It will go proudly on my wall and be entered into other shows. More pomegranates.

Next up, this month’s theme. After checking my schedule for this show in Orlando, I knew I would not have much time at all for myself. So I picked the easiest of themes, with the help of those who voted on my poll. I chose “words”, but not just any words… hip hop words.
If you need help defining these lovely words, I would suggest http://www.urbandictionary.com/. However, this site is not child or work friendly, so be warned! (NSFW) My sister works with 6th graders, who have added to her vocabulary, and now mine. I am surprised that 6th graders know what “crunk” is, but I’m apparently out of touch with the younger set.
As for how they were done… I used a technique I learned from Ann Lullie called “The Escape Hatch”, where after stitching all around turn right side out using a cut hole in the backing which you then fuse closed. This made great finished edge pieces for me to quilt using hand stitching. The “bling” quilt is done using what I call “rice” embroidery, and “crunk” is done using good old French knots. The words themselves were designed with Microsoft Publisher’s word art tool, and fussy cut and fused.
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