In The Beginning

I am entering the world of blogging to share my excitement and enthusiasm for quilting. There are so many different ways that you can express yourself with all those wonderful fabrics out there. I love brights, primitives, contemporary, reproductions, hand dyes - I guess I love them all.

I belong to a great quilt guild (www.CalicoCutters.com) and have been an active member. I look forward to every meeting to see all these wonderful women who I consider my friends. We have a great Show N Tell and great speakers. The meetings certainly charge my creative batteries. I recommend that everyone finds a guild or some type of group to share your creativity and to help with your growth process.

I also belong to a small art quilt group. Our initial name was the Quiltinis. It's a fun name, but we decided that we wanted to be more serious, so we renamed ourselves, "Layers - Art In Stitches". We try to meet at least twice a month. Sometimes it's to discuss and share our work and sometimes it's for a road trip. We are working on our 2nd challenge. The theme is "Something Old is New Again" with assorted rules. We keep our work secret until the big reveal. Next Weds is the big day, so I can't share my quilt yet. Stay tuned.

Our first challenge is currently displayed in the Marple Township Library until the end of February. The theme was Woodland Trails. The only rule was that it had to be 24" x 24". I named mine "Crossroads", indicating my time conflict between being at my sewing machine or being on my bike. Right now the sewing machine is winning.

Here's a photo of my challenge:

Except for the center panel, I used fabrics that I dyed from a kit I bought from ProChem & Dye(http://www.prochemical.com/). It was their earthy blend gradation dying kit and I ended up with 30 fat eighths. It took a while to set up and mix the 30 color combos, but it definitely was worth the end result.