Some Autumn Quits and Autumn Scenery

I recently copied some pictures off one of our old computers onto a CD, so I thought I would share a few of the autumn-inspired quilts.

This one is called Autumn Wedding.  I participated in a Sharon Craig challenge with 13 members of the Cyberbee.  We all got the pattern for the eight-inch star block and about a half yard of a bittersweet print fabric. 

I used my star blocks in the outer border.  These blocks were incredibly difficult to piece! And they all looked different depending on the placement and colors of the fabrics each quilter chose to use.

                                      

The large center medallion and the smaller stars in the border are from a commercial pattern called Star Spin.  I love the colors and the glow in the this quilt.  I gave it to my son Bryson and his wife, who had an October wedding.

The marriage sadly did not last, but Bryson still has the quilt.

The next quilt was made by Nancy Kinane of Capital Quilters Guild.  I quilted it for her.  Usually Nancy does her own quilting by hand, but she wanted this one finished in time for a grand-daughter's graduation.  It remains one of my favorite quilting jobs of all time.

Another customer quilt was made by my friend Carolyn Ormond.  I believe the pattern was called Chutney.  She hung the finished quilt over her sofa, and I always enjoyed seeing it when The Whacky Ladies met at her house.

The last quilt for today is made from the Turning Twenty quilt pattern.  It is practically on fire with bright autumn colors.  I think I saw this one at the Hartsville, SC Swamp Fox Quilt Guild show several years ago.

I got some good news medically this week:  my Deep Vein Thrombosis in my left leg has completely resolved, and I can now discontinue the hated anti-coagulant medicine.  I decided to celebrate by taking Kasey for a walk at Mill Bridge Nature Park this morning.  I walked from the Rolesville end to the Trail head at the other end of my street.  It rained last night, and it was partly cloudy and partly sunny.  The trees are starting to change color here.

We did not run into any deer, just a squirrel and a few turtles sunning themselves.

Don't pick the pretty red leaves...Poison Ivy!

Don't pick these either...Poison Sumac!

I even walked Kasey down to the creek where she enjoys long sips of waters near the cascades.

My sprained ankle is still bothering me after three months, but I am going to continue my walks.  I have missed them!

After seeing all the colors starting to turn in our Wake Forest landscape, I can't wait to get to the North Carolina mountains this weekend.  It should be "the peak" weekend for leaf viewing in Ashe County.

Bee Season

Today I will show you what two of my quilt bees have been up to this week.

On Monday, the Anything Art bee met at Roberta's to explore the "Faux Silk Screen" technique.  This was featured in an article by Patricia Gaignat in Cloth Paper Scissors Magazine.

Roberta had already made lots of samples, making cute high-heeled shoes and men's shirt and ties quilts.  Basically, you make a sketch, draw it onto self-stick craft foam, and cut it apart into sections.  Adhere the sections to clear plastic, such as deli packages that you have cut apart.  Coat the foam stamps with paint.  We used Speedball Fabric Screen Printing ink.  You could also use acrylic paint.

You stamp the image in sections, using different colors of paint.  Here is a cupcake that I made from one of Roberta's foam stamp sets.  I think the pattern was provided by Cloth Paper Scissors.

The foam stamps were scored with a tracing wheel and a sharp instrument to add additional lines to the patterns.

We each tried making our own stamps.  I tried just a simple two-piece tree.

This is an easy method of making stamps from inexpensive materials, and being able to split the stamped images into different colors.

If you are a member of Cloth Paper Scissors, you can see a much more elaborate example of this process on their Online Resource web site.

The Whacky Ladies Bee met last night at Sharon's house.  I got five of us in my little Subaru to drive out to the country in Franklinton together.  With four people navigating for me, we did not get lost on the way there or back.  We had a good show-and-tell.  Mary had made two quilts for babies out of the Warm Wishes pattern.  (Sorry, some of these pictures are a bit out of focus---no one held still long enough!)

I loved the backing fabric on this one.

Mary also made some really nice quilted place mats.

Lori created a fabulous Halloween wall-hanging from her original design.  Several of the Halloween motifs were done on her embroidery machine.

Sharon also had a Halloween wall hanging.

I love my quilt bees and the friendships that have developed from our monthly meetings.

New Challenges

Here is another of my sister-in-law Debbie's quilt tops made by her late grandmother, Helen.  I have finished five or six of these for her.  In the photo, this one is airing out on the lawn on a sunny day, after being in a garbage bag for about forty years!

It is a double wedding ring, made from many of the same fabric scraps that I have come to recognize from the other quilt tops that Helen made.

It is very bright and cheerful, but I think would have looked much nicer if there was a solid color background fabric instead of this floral sheet.

I don't intend to quilt this one as ornately as the two blazing stars, but binding that scalloped edge will be a challenge.  I have been trimming threads and doing some repairs on the top before putting it on the machine.

I also have another old unfinished quilt to work on.  My sister-in-law Lee's friend in Asheville wanted someone to quilt a candlewick embroidery quilt top she made thirty years ago.  Does anyone remember candlewicking?  I actually did some pillows with this technique back in the 70's or 80's.

The blocks are beautiful, sashed with beige lace and beige fabric.  (The blue lines are basting threads that Debbie put in.)

Most of the stitches are French knots.

The quilt was actually already assembled, with a store-bought binding and a pre-quilted fabric back.  But, there was no actual quilting done.

Not good!  No way will I quilt over that zigzagged-together backing.

And the binding is whip-stitched on with very visible stitches.

I suggested that we remove the binding and that backing, buy a neutral print fabric for the back, and rebind with a double French binding.  Debbie liked the plan, so that is what I will do, and I have already received the backing fabric in a beautiful paisley swirl.

Debbie L. sent me the original instruction book and a cable quilting template, but I do not know how I will quilt this.  I have to go inside the embroidered blocks at least a little so they don't sag.  I think it will be very beautiful when it is finished.

More Quilt Barns

We are having a wonderful time up here in the chilly, windy, but beautiful North Carolina mountains.  We have been on several excursions and enjoyed the beautiful colors of the changing leaves.  Yesterday we went to the New River General Store.

On the way I saw lots of new quilt squares added to barns and storage buildings.  This is one of the prettiest yet, a log cabin block that literally glowed.

Here is a Lemoyne Star.

Both Sunbonnet Sue and Overall Ollie were on this hay barn, looking like signs on rest room doors.

The Blue Ridge Parkway is closed for repairs to the stone guardrails on the way from Sparta to Laurel Springs, but we were able to travel as far as the Stone Mountain overlook.  Beautiful!

The clouds were lined up in formation like they were marching above the mountain ridges.

The day before, we went for a visit to our friends Tom and Vicky's farm in West Jefferson.  We all enjoyed seeing their beautiful garden and orchards. She still had some towering sunflowers.

This is the hillside behind Tom and Vicky's house.

Tom let us load up with apples for the deer.

Not to mention some pumpkins.  The trailer was loaded for Tom's son to take to the Farmers Market the next day.

When we got back, we went up the mountain and put out some of the apples for the deer.  We had a couple buckets outside of our garage last night, and the deer came right to the house and munched on some of them!

Kasey looked like a dog angel with a halo around her as she ran ahead through the meadow.

Tomorrow is the first Monday of the month, which means my art quilt bee meets.  We are going to do some faux screen printing and play with Inktense color blocks.  Can't wait!

The Rest of the Story

In my last post, I told the story of the little log cabin quilt that recently came home to me after thirteen years.  Here, as Paul Harvey would say, is "the rest of the story."


As I mentioned, my father and mother were both excellent dancers.  In addition to ballroom dancing, they participated in square dance and round dance after moving to North Carolina.  In fact, they met at a school dance back in junior high, and were sweethearts ever since.


Here is a picture of my father next to the portrait he painted of my mother wearing his favorite red dress.  As I recall, he painted this while she was still living.  Dad looks like he is wearing a tuxedo with a snappy vest- perhaps to the wedding of one of my younger siblings.  The note on the back says 1996.  Mom was taken from us way too soon from cancer in 1984.

I actually got to wear this dress once.  Charlie and I got married while we were still college students.  I had a great job working at the student bookstore on campus at North Carolina State University for about three years.  Shortly before his graduation, Charlie landed a job at the university business office.  That Christmas, the chancellor invited the entire business office and their dates to his lovely home for a party.  I made a panicked call to my mother because I had nothing appropriate to wear.  She brought me the red dress and, I think, even took a few stitches in it to make it fit me a little better.  When we arrived at the door, Chancellor Caldwell greeted us himself, and seemed confused about which one of us was the business office employee!  But he gave me effusive compliments on my "beautiful Christmas dress."


As I wrote previously, Dad brought me the dress in 1998 to see if I could make a quilt from it.  The first attempt was a colorful wall hanging, but it was evident that he really wanted a snuggle quilt.  So, with lots of fabric left from this floor-length gown, I began again. 


You can imagine how hard it was for me to cut into this dress the first time! I remembered the gown as being sort of a polished cotton, dark red with a border print.  Of course, the garment was around thirty years old when I started the  project, so it may have faded a bit.  But it was a shiny, thin fabric, sort of a silky polyester, perhaps. And it definitely looked more orange than red.  I used a French-fuse interfacing to back the parts that I used.

The blocks are Album Blocks, and the orange center of each is from Mom's dress.  The rest of the block fabrics are hand-dyed or commercial cottons. 

Here is the second quilt made from Mother's Dancing Dress.

This one has been hung on the wall over Dad's bed, used as a lap quilt, tucked over his recliner...but always lovingly used.  The other quilt got packed away when he sold his house and moved to Boone, and was not unearthed until he moved out last spring.

A final funny end to the story:  when my sister Katy went up to Boone to get Dad out of the nursing home, she went by his apartment to get a few things that he would need.  The first time I visited Dad at her home, he was still mostly bedridden.  She made a point of mentioning that she had brought his quilt, thinking how pleased I would be.  Unfortunately, the quilt she retrieved from the apartment was a blue Wal-mart patchwork bedspread!  Oh, well, he's got his paintings and his books and his quilt with him now.  And he is doing much better, and that's all that counts!

Colorful Quilt from the Past



Circles of Life, 1998



Some of you may recall that my father recently moved in with my sister and her husband due to some health issues.  He had been living in a retirement center apartment in Boone, NC for the past six years.  My sister-in-law, Debbie, recently gave me two boxes of items from his apartment that she had salvaged for me. 

One was this little log cabin quilt that I gave to my father for Christmas in 1998. 

This quilt is an attempt to copy a quilt that I loved from a book about Quilt National, the wonderful innovative art quilt competition at The Dairy Barn Arts Center in Ohio.

Some of the orange-red strips in the off-center log cabins are from a dancing dress of my mother's.  She and Dad used to enjoy ballroom dancing, and this was my father's favorite of her dancing gowns.  He even painted her full-size portrait wearing that dress.

My mother passed away in 1984 from cancer.  Dad kept that dress in her closet until 1998, when he brought it to me and asked me to make a quilt from it.

I actually made two, Circles of Life, and a more snugly lap quilt.

It was nice to see this one again!  Right now it is adding lots of bright color to my kitchen table.

First Fall Weekend in the Mountains

It's starting to look like fall on the first official weekend of the season.

More and more trees are displaying their autumn palettes.

As is the forest floor.

The fern banks still shine in the shafts of light that reach them through the forest, but some have shed their brilliant yellow-green for the tawny golds and brown of fall.

My window boxes on the cabin have been very sad since all the heat of the summer.

Now they are happy.

It makes me so happy to be in the mountains.

Almost Heaven!