My "Round Robin" Has Found Its Way Home!

I have a lot to catch up on since my last post, but today I must write about a wonderful quilt-related surprise.

Back in the nineties, I was involved in an online book club composed of quilters who "met" in an AOL forum.  We named ourselves The "Yo-Yo Sisterhood", a play on the title of a book we discussed called Divine Secrets of The Ya-Ya Sisterhood.  We participated in several quilt swaps over the years, including a row-by-row challenge and a four-inch block challenge.  We met in person in Chicago where we stayed in a resort for a weekend and attended a quilt show.  We were interviewed and photographed for the local newspaper with our row-by-row quilts.  The members of the group lived all over the country, from North Carolina to Illinois to Hawaii.  We mailed our swaps to each other according to a rotation.

Our last project was a "round robin," where each participant makes the center of a quilt top, and the subsequent quilters each add a border according to prescribed rules (applique, triangles, squares, etc.)

I never got mine back...until today!  As I recall, there was a problem because the top was not lying flat.  The person who was to add the next row set it aside to ponder what to do...and it has been forgotten in a closet for about ten or twelve years!

Here is my beautiful quilt top, and I don't care that it may be a little wavy!
 

 

I used a Karen Stone pattern for the New York Beauty center, and sent along some hand-dyed fabric for the others to use if they wished when they added their borders.  I love the bright look of this quilt with its contrasting cool and warm colors.  This is one that will get finished one of these days!

Feeling the Love

As I made my way through my e-mail this morning, I found two lovely surprises. First, someone from Webshots, my photo-hosting site, informed me that one of my quilt pictures was featured as the Members' Choice photo in the Quilts category this week.



This is the featured photo. I have no idea how these "Members Choice" albums or photographs are selected. I have been chosen for Members Choice three or four times now. I think it has something to do with the number of photographs you have stored on Webshots, or perhaps the number of times they are viewed. My most viewed album is my Round Robin album, which shows the growth of each participant's quilt from their center block to the completed top. It has been viewed almost 25,000 times!



Here is the whole quilt. The top was made by my friend and quilt bee member, Marilyn Featham. I loved quilting the baskets in all the pretty spring shades!

Also this morning, my blogging friend Susan Loftin at Sunrise Quilt Studio nominated me for the Life is Grand Award. It is a pleasure to be nominated for these, but I had just about decided not to participate in the passing along of these awards.

I know it is a way to increase readership of your blog. I decided to participate this time because it requires a little personal reflection about life. Like Confession, I believe Reflection is good for the soul!

The rules are that I have to list five reasons why my life is "grand", and then pass it on to five more people.

1. It is all about family. The big, loving family with wonderful parents that I was born into; the small but growing family that Charlie and I have been blessed with; and the extended family that includes all my in-laws and their children and grandchildren. I have a wonderful ready-made group of people who love, support, and share their lives with me.

2. Okay, Charlie was included in #1, but he deserves a separate entry all to himself. We met at N.C. State University in Raleigh when he was a sophomore and I was a freshman, but we did not start dating until the next year. We were married at the end of my junior year. He dropped out and went to work until I graduated, and then he went back. Starting out as poverty-stricken students is not the easiest way to begin a marriage, but we sure had fun with not much money. We have shared life together for almost 38 years now, and I am grateful for having this big strong smart funny handsome man with me on my journey through life.

3. I love the wonder of nature and God's creations. My blog readers know that I get excited about seeing birds and sunsets and flowers and deer and...

4. All my life I have loved to create things, but when I discovered quilting, I embarked on a life-long passionate journey. If I don't get a chance to work with art or my quilts, I get crabby! It is a huge part of my life. It allows me to make nice things for all those folks in #1 (and many others), and a lot of that is because the guy in #2 has cooked a lot of meals over the years.

5. There are so many books and so little time...Life is Grand if I have a good book to dive into! I have been an obsessive reader since I was a little girl reading all the cereal boxes while eating breakfast, and going through all the Bobbsey Twin adventures.

Now to pass this along...if you would like to participate, please consider yourself tagged. It is an interesting exercise to come up with five things that you think make life grand. Take a few minutes and try!

Jumping Around

I can't seem to stick to one project these days. I have worked on about four different quilts in the last week. I was going great on quilting my round robin top, but have come to a crashing halt. I did the entire top white border in a detailed filler using King Tut thread on top and Bottom Line in the bottom. The top looked so pretty! May I add, this is the exact same thread combination I had been successfully using already except for the colors. But when I rolled up the quilt to advance it, I got a horrible sick feeling when I saw the back. The white bobbin thread looked really bad! Some of the thread was just laying on the back, there were little knots at many of the turns, and the backtracking showed up on the purple backing.

I started ripping it out, spent about two hours, and got about five inches done. Maddening! To teach it a lesson, I abandoned the project for a couple days. I am still mulling over whether to rip it all out, go with the good-looking front side, use marker to ink out the knots.... but this series of Round Robins is supposed to go in our state Quilt Symposium show the next time my guild hosts it. I know I don't want mine to be a poor example of my quilting. So, I'm sure I will be frogging for many nights to come. (Rip-it, Rip-it, Rip-it!)

I started working on a UFO that I promised my daughter-in-law that I would make for her sister. I bought several Lilly Pulitzer fabrics in bright tropical colors, and am framing four-inch squares with various black and white batiks. It is so cheerful and pretty! Her sister had bridesmaids wear whatever Lilly Pulitzer sundress they liked at her wedding on the beach in Nags Head last year. So, I hope she will like this.

Feathers and Flowers

I feel very thankful that we are able to head for the hills like we did this past weekend. It was wonderfully cool in the North Carolina mountains. We had a great visit with family and friends up there, and I did get to float in the new pond Saturday afternoon! It needs some improvements, mainly because the bottom is so muddy it sucks your feet under. Getting in was not problem since I just flopped down on my tube, but getting out is a different story! My window box flowers were doing just fine, which amazed me after two weeks of no attention. They must have had some rain.

Today I decided to Just Do It...that is, get started on my Round Robin quilt. But I experimented with some of my new threads first. The LAVA from Superior quilted just fine with a Bottom Line thread in the bobbin. No breakage at all! The sample is just a little too bright for this particular project- sort of like the FAD 5 colors. I also tried several shades of the King Tut's in the Cottage Sampler package I ordered from Superior. I liked the rosy pink shade the best, and have used it in the purple outer border and some of the inner triangles. I have not decided if I will use the same thread throughout, or switch threads to blend with the background fabrics.

Taking the Plunge

Today I decided it was time...to quit staring at my Round Robin top, and start quilting! It is a little intimidating when a project has taken over a year, and seven other people's work is represented. But, it is so pretty, and will never get to be displayed if it does not become a quilt! I am thinking that this will be a wall-hanging, since it has silk ribbon embroidery, some beads and crystals. Here is a reminder of what the quilt looks like:

Beautiful jewel colors, lots of flowers, some great quilting areas!

Yesterday, my box of pretty threads from Superior arrived. Don't they look gorgeous! I already had the Glitter, but everything else is new. Some SuperBobs of Bottom Line thread, some variegated, some metallic! The purple batik at the top of the photo is the backing I got last week.

In case I get timid, I have A-Muse-ing Violette on the wall behind the Gammill. I made her for a challenge in Cloth, Paper, Scissors magazine. She is supposed to remind me to try new challenges and be adventurous.

And, while I was digging around my quilting room, I found this little project left over from the spring, and decided to stitch the trapunto designs with wash-away thread. The stitched outlines will be cut away from the white poly batting behind the top. Those areas will look white under the sheer batiste top. The rest of the white areas will appear green when I add a layer of green felt. I have used this technique five times now. The green squares contain silk, hand-painted fabric, ferny looking prints and others in all shades of green. This one is supposed to evoke springtime in the southern woodlands. The trapunto designs are from dogwood blossoms and leaves that I scanned last spring. I also added some trillium blooms and a small white wildflower. I have a feeling that this little guy is not going to remain square when I am finished with him!

Quick Update

Today I am back from spending three days in our mountain cabin- a wonderful weekend in which we were joined by our son and six of his college friends. It was a bachelor party weekend for one of them, full of fun and friendship. We enjoy being around the young people. Some of them stayed in our camper, and others pitched tents down by the creek. I tried cooking on my new stove, and found out that the smoke detector works! Two pans of sausage cooking set it off.

I am home for one day before heading to South Carolina to get my "fix," meaning I haven't seen my grandkids lately. Well, Avery was in the mountains a few weeks ago, but I haven't seen Lily since the beach trip. Now she is walking and almost running, so I have to get down there!

I purchased some fabric for the backing of my Round Robin quilt on Thursday. A local quilt shop that is also an Internet shop was having a sale on batiks and Kaffe Fassett fabrics, and I had a fifty dollar gift certificate from them for my first place in our guild's quilt show. Thank you so much to Wish Upon a Quilt! Their prices are always low anyway, but with the sale and my gift certificate, I got yards of a beautiful purple batik and still have a twelve dollar credit! I was thinking that I would get a gorgeous KF floral to go with this log cabin garden quilt top, but I just did not see one that I loved as much as the batik. I don't even like to use batiks as backings because sometimes it is difficult to get good tension. But I am going to try!

I also am anxious to get a sample cone of the new LAVA thread from Superior threads. It's supposed to be like Rainbows for Longarm machines. Rainbows is a shiny poly thread that often is difficult to use on a longarm because it breaks frequently. LAVA means Long Arm Variegated Art. That sounds perfect for me!

A Treasure Worth Waiting For

Today was a special day..."Coming Home Day" for my round robin quilt project that began more than a year ago. Look what happened to my humble little center posies! I could not have imagined anything more charming, innovative, colorful, or perfect. Everyone says this quilt "looks like me!" It helps to work with a group that has been together for ten years. Let me first of all thank the ladies who participated in this project. You are all Shining Stars of the Quilt World in my opinion!

Alice used the software program Electric Quilt to design the triangle border. A fortunate choice, because it was repeated twice more in Holly's and Janice's narrow borders. And it made the white applique border zig zag! How cool is that!

Jenny framed the center medallion with even more log cabin blocks than I made, and then appliqued the yellow curved pieces. A fabulous decision which brought out the white background and added new design elements. Lots and lots of stitches!

Mary must be some kind of quilting engineer to have figured out the gorgeous strippy border with the yellow squares as a perfect accent. So many seams! She brought the rich colors back out from the center, which Holly continued in her round.

I have always wanted a quilt with a floral applique border, and was secretly hoping that someone would do that for this quilt. Bless her heart, Tess not only appliqued these fabulous flowers, leaves, and stems...she created crazy-patch squares to form the background! She thought that would more closely match the log cabin backgrounds of the first applique. She now rises to the official ranks of Over-Achievers in this group. Thank you, Tess!

Michelle was responsible for the embellishment round. She is becoming quite a mixed-media artist, using paints and fibers of all sorts in her gorgeous pieces. (See her blog.) She added beads to the applique flowers and leaves, and also added stunning silk ribbon embroidery to the curved areas in Jenny's row. And- she left plenty of room for me to machine quilt around it!


Finally, Janice added more luscious deep color to the final triangle border, and a narrow purple outer border to stabilize the edges. Perfect finish to a perfect project! Can you tell I am thrilled?

If you would like to see the other quilts in this round robin, please visit Holly Sweet's Webshots album. She has included all the centers and the finished quilt tops. I am so proud to be part of this group of quilt artists.