Five a Day

These adorable Needle Keepers were made from the pattern Fruit Salad by Wooden Spool Designs.  The ones in this first picture were my samples for the Monthly Wool Projects group I lead.  The covers for the apple and watermelon were made from hand dyed wool and pretty much everything else is from National Nonwovens Wool Felt.

Cathy decided to take these along with the pattern to the Quilt and Stitch Expo of Pueblo this weekend.  She decided to only take the Wool Felt and I said I’d make new samples for the watermelon and apple.  Now because I work best under pressure (insert a touch of sarcasm), I waited until this morning to start on them (they are packing up for the show tomorrow morning — hey I still had more than 24 hours).

I ran into the store this morning on my way somewhere else and grabbed the buttons.  I got a little bigger this time and I think I’m going to need to change out the one on the watermelon, but that can wait for later.

These needle keepers have several layers for storing your pins and needles.

I told my group these are fast and easy (not everyone agreed).  I made the first five in just one evening.

There’s No Place Like Home

Mom came out of her class at 12:30 yesterday talking about a couple of rulers Kimmy was recommending in class.  We went back up to Rob’s Rulers booth and I did end up buying something else.  The “Large Curved CrossHatch” which is a new ruler (we bought two of the last three in the booth) and “Carol Thelen’s Nested Leaves” which has been around for several years.  They demoed in the booth how to use the curved crosshatch ruler to stitch the spine for feathers.  I can see many uses for that ruler.

Because of that last stop at a booth we didn’t leave the convention center until 1:00 pm.  We got home just before 9:30 pm.  It was good to be back in my own bed.  I just don’t sleep well in hotels.  It was back into the groove this morning.  Off to church and leading Juniors’ (10-12 year olds) Sabbath school.  I was happy to have leftover spaghetti sauce frozen from the dinner theater a week ago so I had something for lunch without a lot of prep work.

Tonight while watching “Evan Almighty,” which was checked out from the library, I finished marking my quilt top from the class with Irena Bluhm just before midnight.

OK there are a bunch of run on sentences in this post, but I’m finished.

MQS my last Day

I’m sitting in the courtyard of the Overland Park Convention Center waiting for my mom to finish her class so we can hit the road.  I wandered through the quilts again this morning taking pictures of those that I had gotten blurry shots of yesterday.  Once again, I couldn’t find anything else that I needed or wanted to buy from the vendors, so I really did complete my shopping during Wednesday’s shopping frenzy.

I’m posting a picture of Renae Haddin’s Best of Show.  I’m sure she will get a picture of it on her webpage soon.  I heard from one of her friends, she just finished it in time to overnight it to this show.  It is stunning workmanship and creativity as usual.

Speaking of workmanship, Ronda Beyer had at least three quilts entered in the show (all three of which received awards).  Her workmanship and attention to detail as always were spectacular.  I’m not going to post pictures of her quilts, you can see parts of them on her blog and in her webshots album.

There were some other very inspiring quilts, but I am running out of time and battery so this will have to suffice.

 

MQS My Day 2

This morning I had a three hour class with Jamie Wallen called “Threadfusion: Artistic Delights for Every Quilter.”  He is another teacher I would happily recommend.  I didn’t think it was fair to post pictures of his quilts or his drawings, but below you will find a couple of pages from my sketch book drawn during this class.  There is some shadow through from the back side on one picture.

 

 

Jamie provide loads of technical information as well as design ideas.

I spent the afternoon viewing the quilts.  There were several that were stunning.  However, at the risk of offending someone, it is my opinion there were fewer jaw dropping entries this year than in previous years I have attended.  It wasn’t just my opinion, since I overheard some comments that the quilts were “more usable this year.”  I don’t have any room to grumble since I certainly didn’t get around to entering anything.  It could also be that I have become jaded after seeing so many great quilts through the years.

I was correct when I posted last night that I thought I had done all my spending.  I didn’t find anything else today that I needed or that I just couldn’t pass up. 

I had planned to attend the MQR get together tonight, but I got to my room and I was just worn out.  So I worked on a little fusible applique and crashed.

MQS – My Day 1

Today was my first full day at MQS 2008.  I took a class from Irena Bluhm & Paula Platter from 8am – 3pm.  The title of the class was Machine Applique with Whole Cloth Design.  For the first couple of hours Paula taught us her method of drafting stars using the star generator she designed.  We did our star block using an applique method.  The generator can also be used for paper pieced blocks.  It worked out very well, but since I already own Renae’s Rays I think I’ll stick with it.  I think Renae’s Rays are more flexible, but you get what you pay for.  For the last three hours Irena talked about marking our quilting designs and showed us a lot of her original designs.  We used those to come up with our own wholecloth design.  She also demonstrated how she uses colored pencils to color her quilt.  I need to finish marking.  I would definitely recommend a class with these ladies.  After attending MQS five different years, I was finally the lucky winner of a door prize in this class.  I received a copy of Irena’s “Blooming Background Designs.”

I went straight from class to the MQS shopping frenzy.  I didn’t come to MQS last year and in all previous years it was just the “sneak peek” on Wednesday.  This year there weren’t any classes during this time so lots more people than in previous years.  There were also special offers by several vendors during that time period.  I was fortunate, many of the vendors from whom I planned to make purchases had specials tonight.  So, I think my shopping is pretty much done.  My credit card is smoking!  I have a class with Jamie Wallen tomorrow morning, then I have until Friday noon to take in all the quilts.

Road Trip

I spent today on the road between home and Overland Park, KS.  We listened to a couple of books on CD on the way here.  The one we finished was “Cheaper by the Dozen” which has been a favorite of mine since I was a kid.  The other that we have made it part way through was “Identical Strangers.”  It is about identical twin girls who were separated at birth and found each other in their 30s.  So far it is pretty interesting.

  My mom and I arrived at the Convention Center at about 5pm, plenty early enough to get our registration packets for MQS.  There are coupons this year for the shopping frenzy and I’ve already made my list.  The only problem the flyer is printed on two sides and some of the ads say they are coupons.  I want things from both sides!  I have a class at 8am tomorrow and since I was up at 5am this morning and we lost an hour driving here, I need to think about heading to bed.

I didn’t have time at home to do my next layout for the “Up and Running with Photoshop” class before I left , so I did it tonight.  I used pictures that I had loaded on PhotoPoint before they went bankrupt.  I hadn’t saved copies — stupid I know, but I’ve learned.  They aren’t as high a resolution as I would have liked, but the boys were cute!  I also had to just guess on the date.  I think I’m accurate on the year, close on the month and have no idea on the day!

 

 

 Don’t they look like trouble?

Puyallup/Sewing Expo Report

I’m tired and stiff today from wandering around all day yesterday and about 5 hours on the road.  Because I have talked so much about this show in the last few posts, I felt it only fair to report on it.  It was a good show with lots of people and vendors.  All kinds of fun things to look at.  My first purchase was one fat quarter.  Just in case your monitor is telling you something else, it is orange.  I’m planning to use it for the legs on the applique chickens I was talking about a few days ago.  I wandered through many more booths without buying anything.  At 12:30 my mom and I sat through a free stage presentation by Luveta of The Junk Jeans People.  She comes up with very interesting ideas.  The jacket she wore was from one of her patterns (Expo Jacket) and I seriously considered buy it.  However, all day the question kept running through my head  — “Will I really use/make this?”  The pattern stayed there. 

I had time to walk fairly quickly down one aisle of vendors before my next class which was with Jenny and Simon Haskins.  I knew this class would be worth the $4 just to listen to those wonderful Aussie accents.  It was worth it for other reasons as well.  Their samples were drop dead gorgeous.  One of Jenny’s lines was also worth the money.  She said American’s don’t like making decisions/choices.  American was founded by the Puritan Fathers who had many rules and we want to follow rules.  She said the Aussies don’t have that problem, their country was founded on convicts and they had already broken all the rules!  She breaks the rules beautifully with her work.

Now I had about an hour and 15 minutes to walk more vendors.  Just after I started in my sister called on my cell phone and asked where I was.  She and my mom had gone to the car and eaten lunch while I was in class.  I was teasing her when we left yesterday morning about taking more than enough food to feed the 5,000.  After all Jesus only started with five loves and two small fish.  She always takes good care of us.  She found me and brought me a great pita bread sandwich, carrots, juice and a granola bar which hit the spot.  (Good vegetarian food can be difficult to find at events, so this was great.)

We picked up again with the vendors and I found a Moda Jelly Roll I hadn’t seen in other booths.  That booth also had all fabric discounted by 25% including the Jelly Rolls.  Again I didn’t really need it.  I finally told myself I’d come over 1,000 miles to this show, I’d better buy something.  So I bought two!  I intend to use them for a quilt from one of Debbie Caffrey’s books

I went to my last class which was with Cheryl Barnes of Golden Threads. It was on playing with your quilt patterns.  She did fine, but the set up wasn’t good for what she was teaching.  It was a large room, but no camera person.  That meant the people near the rear of the room couldn’t see a lot of what she was showing on her quilts.  She was talking about using portions of a quilt pattern which really is a great concept.  It wasn’t anything new to me, because I took a very similar class from Keryn Emmerson at MQS several years ago.  I hope most of the students got some new ideas from the class.  After all the lecture classes were ONLY $4 for 45 minutes so if you took away even one new idea it was worth it.  And if you didn’t get any new ideas, you got to sit down and rest for a little while. 

I drug my mom and sister by the Dakota Collectibles booth.  They had some new collections stitched out that caught my eye and theirs.  They were also running a buy two disks get one free show special.  The monkeys and frogs were a hoot and I know I’ve eyed the penguins in the past (I just hope I haven’t already bought the penguins).  So that was my second fair sized purchase.

If you would like to see close ups of these designs check them out on Dakota Collectibles Web site.  Here is the link for the frogs, the penguins and unfortunately the Funny Monkey appears to be new enough I can’t find it on their web page.

The show closed at 6pm and by now it was getting very close to 5:30.  I thought I was finished shopping when we wandered back to the first building of vendors.  There were two booths that I kept thinking about so I ran back over to the largest vendor building while my mom and sister went on in the first.  I really admired the samples in Barb’s Elegant Designs booth and was  considering buying one of the patterns.  I went back and tried to make up my mind.  I finally decided that while I really liked the patterns, it was the quilting on top of it that was ultimately drawing me.  I passed on the patterns, but they were still really cool quilts.

The other booth to which I returned was Bird Brain Designs.  This booth had hand embroidered wallhangings (almost all the samples were done both in redwork and multicolor) and wool work.  The quilt that kept drawing me was Friendship Garden.  The pattern was considerably more than I wanted to spend for a hand embroidery pattern, but I finally decided I was almost finished embroidering the nursery rhyme blocks and I would like to have another hand embroidered project going.  The pattern came home with me.  I intend to do the multi color version so I have cropped the picture of the pattern.  While it looks very colorful, there are actually only 10 colors of Perle cotton used in the whole project.

It looks like I won’t have any problem fitting my purchases in the suitcase for the trip home.

I’m going to Puyallup

My brochure for the Sewing & Stitchery Expo came today.  It was sitting on the kitchen counter when Guy came home and he asked if I was going?  I hadn’t really planned on it, but he thought I needed to go.  He was on the computer and had an airline ticket purchased less than a half hour after he got home.  He is all about me going to shows, but this was also to get me out to visit my sister.  I will fly into Portland and spend a long week-end with her. 

If you haven’t ever heard about this show, check out their web page.  It is billed as “The Nations Largest Sewing Show.”  It is put on by the Washington State University Pierce County Extension.  If I remember correctly last year was their 25th Anniversary.  The first time I attended was twelve years ago.  At that time we lived in California and I drove up to the show picking up my mother in Medford, my Mother-in-law in Grants Pass and my sister in Portland.  I also brought both of my boys.  The expo was the week before Jesse’s first birthday so Nolan would have been about 2 1/2.  Nolan sat in one of Nancy Zieman’s lectures and fell asleep watching her.  He recognized her because I usually watched her show about the time he was falling asleep in the afternoon. Maybe falling asleep when he saw her was a Pavlovian response. We all took class and just made sure at least one of us was free to watch the boys.  We had a stroller and toys.  I can’t believe how well the boys did for two days.  They would be much harder to take now and would fight it every step of the way.  That first year I attended the lectures were $2 each.  This year they have made it up to $4 each.  I think I went up three times while we lived in California and I believe this will be my third time since we have lived in Colorado.

There are many well known authors and sewing TV personalities at this show.  This year  they include Nancy Zieman, Martha Pullen, Kaye Wood, Jenny & Simon Haskins, Nancy Cornwell, Sue Hausman, Libby Lehman, Cindy Losekamp, Marci Baker, Sandra Betzina, Pam Clarke, Sharlene Jorgenson, Linda MacPhee, Linda McGehee, Marti Michell, Cheryl Phillips, Hope Yoder, M’Liss Rae Hawley and many others.  There are close to 200 vendors.  I did say it was billed as the largest “sewing” show, not “quilt show.”

 Now I need to decide which lectures I want to register for.  We will only go up for one day, but I can do enough damage to my wallet in that time.

Thanks Guy for giving me something to think about for a little while other than the mess going on at church.