A Great Retreat

I'm just getting organized after spending 3 days hosting my Pet Portrait Retreat at our lakehouse in the Poconos.  It was 24/7 of sewing, eating, talking and laughing.  Everyone made great progress and I felt they left with the tools needed to finish the quilt.

We used every square inch of the house.

 Can you see my Accuquilt Studio cutter behind Roz?

 When your quilt is made up of 1,296 squares, their 2" die cutter is a beautiful thing. 

 It cuts 60 squares at a time.

 When I arrived at the lake to prep for my guests, my son and DIL were there.  Loren had gone to the Rhinebeck Sheep & Wool Festival with her Mom.  It was a convenient place for them to stay.
I was thrilled when she offered to stay and help me with the cooking for the retreat.  I took it as an opportunity to further entice her with quilting, because the pet quilt I was planning on creating was a portrait of their dog, Cooper. It was supposed to be a surprise.  Instead I taught her the techniques and she just ran with it.

I ended up being her assistant! I did the grunt work of sewing the pieces together.  We got pretty far working as a team.

To make my map, I printed the photo of Cooper and placed a clear grid over it.

 The pattern starts to take shape using 2" squares of fabric following the grid.

 

Here's a close-up of the ear.

I chain pieced the top in sections.  See how much it shrinks?

 The top half is done!
Here are the start of more pet portraits:

Roz and Reggie

Wisps of Reggie's fur

 

Teresa and   Rosie (www.TeresasQuiltStudio.com)

Rosie's nose

 Grace and her owner, Cheryl

 

Grace's eye

 Luna

 Luna and Rose

A Luna close-up

You can see from the close-ups that these quilts are not pixilated.  The grids are used to piece the details.  This makes the quilts look realistic. I'm looking forward to seeing them quilted and bound.

I was delighted to receive an e-mail from one of the quilters, after she arrived home that said:

"I want to thank you for a relaxing creative weekend, I feel recharged!"

I have tentatively schedule another Pet Mosaic Retreat in June.  June 12-14 th of 2015, also at the lake house.  If you're interested, shoot me an e-mail.

The Good, The Bad And The Indifferent

It's time for some new additions to my quilting studio. I'm not much of a gadget person, but I have been in the mood for some upgrades and to try out some new products.

If you are familiar with my quilts, you know that I love circles. Over the years I have cut out hundreds of circles for my quilts. I own lots of different circle templates that I use to draw the circles and then I cut them out by hand. A tedious but mindful task. Now that I am promoting Curvalicious, I thought this was the time for a custom circle cutter for my Accuquilt Studio Cutter. I just wanted a die that would cut a bunch of 2" circles. So this frugal quilter bit the bullet and emailed Accuquilt for a price quote for a custom die. I received an email back the next day with quotes that ranged from $99-$120 depending on the number of circles I wanted the die to cut. I thought that wasn't unreasonable to save me hours of time. Then at the bottom of the email was one line that caught my eye " we also have a die for 2" circles that is currently on sale for $39". What? I clicked on the link and ordered the 2" die right then and there and also bought the 1" die also.

 

 

 

 

I couldn't wait to try it so I fused a bunch of silk dupioni scraps

And ended up with a bunch of beautiful, perfect 2" circles in under a minute.

The other 2 items I purchased I'm not that crazy about. The first one, I purchased to save my iron and keep my ironing surface clean because I do a ton of fusing. No matter how careful I try to be, that fusible web has a way of being ironed onto places you don't want it to go. My solution up to now has been to lay a sheet of parchment paper down. That works pretty good but it's cumbersome.

I read about the Bo-Nash IronSlide Iron Shoe. You attach it to your iron. This is what it looked like when it arrived.

 

You attach it to your iron kind of Iike adding a new cover to your ironing board with the strings to tighten it. It's made to fit any iron. Although it will protect everything, I felt I lost any fine control at the tip of my iron. More importantly, the Teflon cover kept my iron from getting as hot as I wanted it.

 

My biggest disappointment was this rotary blade sharpener. One of the women at one of my workshops had one. It can sharpen any size blade and I own lots of different size cutters. I love a sharp blade so I went home and ordered one. I couldn't wait to sharpen a bunch of my blades. I can only say that I was underwhelmed. I tried different size blades from different manufacturers. When I inadvertently dislocated the lid, I just threw the whole thing in the garbage!

 

 

 

Posted with Blogsy

First Scrappy Quilt of 2013

 

You may have gotten a peak of this quilt when I wrote about my Disappearing Design Wall.  

Do you remember when I cut up a bunch of my blue and white fabric with my new toy, the Accuquilt Cutter?  I saved all the 2 1/2" strips to bring to Key West for power sewing scrap quilts. In addition to the strips I had a few blocks.  They were box in box blocks.  I have always wanted to make one of these quilts, and I guess at one point I started, but I don't remember when.

 And clearly I did not get very far.

The basic construction is one large block with 2 adjacent small blocks. The unfinished size of the large blocks is 11" and the smaller size is 6".

 Since my scraps were now 2 1/2" strips, I had to modify the construction of the blocks a bit because the original one had varying width strips.

The finished quilt top measures 66" x 66".   It will have to wait to be quilted until I return to PA.

And here's a vanity shot.

I purposely chose to photograph it with a lizard, because as I was walking to my exercise class, I was scared @#%*less when I saw this creature on the sidewalk.  It was about 3 feet from the tip of its nose to the end of its tail.  It was lurking around some trash cans.

I found out later it was an iguana.

They are an invasive species and there are lots of them roaming around, hanging out in trees.  Their presence is blamed on pet owners who have released them as they grew too large.  There are several groups trying to banish them from the island with names such as "Iguanas Be Gonna".  LOL!!!