An Amazing Trip To Denver and The Quilt Show

I know it has been  a while since I have blogged.  It has been crazy busy and I was hurriedly trying to finish a quilt for my trip. I wanted it to be my centerpiece.

There is so much to share about my trip to Denver.  It is way too much for one post and because it is all about my quilty life, I want to share it all.  Fair warning - lots and lots of photos.

Post #1 - My visit to The Quilt Show

Alex Anderson and Ricky Tims have one of the longest running quilt related shows.  It's an Internet subscription show.  I was a guest on the show in 2011, when my  first book was published.  I was thrilled when they heard about my Mini Mosaics and invited me back.  They video in Centennial, Colorado which is right outside of Boulder.  

I packed most of my quilts and step outs into my carry on bag. I wanted to make sure they arrived with me.  In case you are wondering, they are checking the size of your carry on.  If it doesn't fit that template near the boarding gate.  they make you check it.  I was happy that I listened to the warnings.  My checked bag had my lesser important quilts and my clothes. Fortunately, everything arrived with me. Oh, and I had a quilt with me in my personal bag that I finished binding on the flight.

I rented a car and drove to the studio and was welcomed as if I was a long lost friend.  It was the day before I was scheduled and got organized. Maria Shell and her amazing quilts were being videoed.

I was able to watch from the control room.

The next day I arrived at the studio to see all of my quilts hung on the set.  WOW! What a feeling! It took my breath away and I tried not to cry.  How did I get here?

Each segment was taped individually.  Before each segment we planned in general what we would talk about or demo.  it was very easy going, with no memorization.  First they had to"mike" me.

We started in the conversation area and talked about what I had done since the last time I visited and where I had travelled.

Then Ricky and I went over to the demo area and with the producer and others, planned the next segment on Mini Mosaics.

It worked out very well.  I showed them all the step outs I brought for the demonstration and  they chose what to share to fit within the time allotment.

My last segment was with Alex about how to use Curvalicious 

to create a quick and adorable baby quilt.  

Here they are hanging on the set.

Here are a couple of photos of what you won't see when you watch the show.

 Lots of lighting and cameras.

 The audience

 Lighting my quilts

The audience can watch the show on the screen.

They taped 10 shows in 5 days.  Now the shows head to the editors.  These shows will be available in 2018.  I think mine will be available in March.  They will provide me with a link for free access to my show.  I will be sure to share.  I will also share some video that I shot in my upcoming newsletter.  If you want to see more, sign up HERE.

License To Sew

How cute is this?

 I made it today using the fabric license plate that I bought at Miller's Quilt Shop in Lancaster during our fabric shopping trip on Tuesday. At first I wasn't going to buy one, but I am sure glad I changed my mind.

I am so tempted to make it my mission to start collecting them from other shops participating in the Row By Row Fabric Shop Hop. Each of them are different.  However, not every shop offers them and with the price of gas, I am hesitant to take off on a road trip, and come home empty handed.

I visited another shop hop quilt shop today- Steve's Sewing Vacuum Quilting in King of Prussia, PA.  I was going to take my friend Kathy to Longwood Gardens, but the almost 100 degree weather concerned me.  Outdoors was not a good place to be.  This is what we found at Steve's - our very own beach!

 This is the Row By Row Shop Hop offering from Steve's. 

If you don't want to make a quilt, their row by row would make a lovely tablerunner. 

There were kits in 2 different colorways, at a great price of $5.00 each.

 I bought the orange with the black and white.

And the reason I went to Steve's?

I bought myself a new family member.

Welcome home Baby Loc.

Feeding A Quilter's Spirit

I am still unpacking from my teaching stint at MAQ.  It was a wonderful experience, as an instructor, to stay in one place and really get to know students over the course of 3 days.  I can't wait to go back next year and reconnect with my new friends.  my classes will be chosen by the board, so I don't know yet what they will be, but mark your calendars - July 18-20.

 

My friend Kathy flew in from Utah to take a workshop from me.  We met during a workshop from Lisa Call in Philadelphia last year.  She has been spending a few days with me, which has given me an excuse to leave my studio and visit some highlights of the Philadelphia area.  Monday we went to visit The Barnes Foundation.

This museum recently was moved from a Philadelphia suburb to the city amongst a lot of controversy.  Dr. Barnes, a wealthy scientist,  collected and arranged its contents, which includes a ton of paintings by Renoir, Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso along with PA Dutch blanket chests and metal hasps, in a specific format to fit his view of art. He collected the art before it was popular.  His collection was not well received by art critics, so he turned it into an exclusive educational facility with limited access. He died in the 1950's.   Specific instructions were left in his will about the collection, that included leaving it in the suburbs.  It has since been moved to downtown Philly, as the culmination of a lot of wheeling and dealing.

 There is a great documentary about it called The Art of the Steal.

 

 I have been to see the collection in the suburbs a couple of times.  This was my first visit to the new Barnes.  Other than the cavernous lobbies with expansive seating, the collection is presented in an identical manner.  If I had been blindfolded and dropped into one of the rooms, I would not have known the difference. 

 

Yesterday, we just had to head to Lancaster County to check out the Amish and a bunch of fabric shops.  A couple of other women from MAQ joined us as we visited the best of the best.  We started at Burkholder's, then  stopped at Zooks and then The Country Store.  And of course lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, The Kling House, where sitting on the porch you can watch the Amish buggies clip clop down the street.  At The Country Store, we came across the Pennsylvania/New York Row By Row Quilt Shop Hop.  There are over 60 shops participating in Pennsylvania. 

 

Each shop has instructions for a row of the quilt.  This is the pattern from The Country Store:

 They also had a kit for the pattern.

 The theme for the rows is country fairs.  These canning jars are perfect for Lancaster County.

The we were intrigued by the shops participating in the Shop Hop.  We started our trip back home so that we could stop at one more - The Quilt Shop at Miller's.  Their row was a pinwheel pattern , and they also had a fabric license plate. We found out that some of the shops have them. (cost $3.99)

 

I think I need to make something from it.  Stay tuned.

 

Wednesday's Wanderings #41 - "F" is for Fabric

F is for fabric!

The definition of a quilter in the dictionary should include, "loves fabric".

We love to look at fabric.  We love to touch fabric.  We love to buy fabric.  We love to cut up fabric and then sew it back together.  We are what's called Fabricholics.

Almost every quilter I know has a stash of fabric, because we love to buy it.  Sometimes we buy it because we have a project for it and sometimes we buy it because we just like it and have to own it.  Some of us display it proudly and some of us squirrel it away in drawers, in plastic bins, under the bed and in closets. 

 None of us want to think about how much money we have spent developing our stash! 

Something that non-quilters might now know is that stashes need to be managed.  How do we manage our stash?  We do it by organizing and folding and refolding, especially when we are done with a project.  We also make an assessment from time to time.  This is when we realize that there may be holes in our fabric collection, whether it be a color or pattern.  This gives us another good excuse to buy more fabric.  After all our stash is our palette.

I spent this week "managing" my stash. 

Messiness, fabric on the floor and bulging shelves were a few of the motivators.  It is rewarding to see my fabric organized and neatly folded.

It is not a big stash.  I have seen much bigger, (not to mention any names my dear friend S). 

And it's not a small stash.

As written in Goldilocks & the 3 Bears, it's just right for me. 

But that will not prevent me from buying more.

So, F is for fabric.

I started with a low contrast printed piece of fabric.

Then I used my printer to print the word "fabric" in a contrasting color,

over and over again in many different fonts,

just like there are many different types of fabric.

After printing, I layered it with a low loft batting and quilted it.

The quilting obscures the words somewhat and that makes it a happy little surprise, once it is noticed.

Then I used my favorite sequins in chartreuse to decorate a large applique F (for fabric!!)

How do you "manage" your stash?

Or don't you?

Learn Something New Every Day

Oy Vey!

Learn something new every day?

My brain is exploding. It is good to learn something new. But why is it when life is easy, breezy, nice and comfy, some of us, like me,  insist on adding something new to make it complicated? 

 Something that gives us a headache and agita.

I spent a few hours today at a local quilt shop called Quilter's Corner, located in Chadds Ford, PA.

I was not the teacher.  I was the student of a very patient teacher named Deb.. 

They have a long arm quilting machine for rent.  For those of you non-quilters, it offers a unique way of quilting.  Instead of you moving the quilt and folding and scrunching with a home sewing machine, the machine moves and your quilt is stationary.

I have thought about purchasing one for quite a while. 

 It is quite an investment and the rails are 10-12 feet long.

 Where would you put it and how many quilts would it take to justify the cost?

So this option of being able to rent quilting time is very appealing to me.  Today was my day to take my lesson.  In 2 1/2 hours, I was taught the complicated and time consuming steps to load your quilt, how to quilt it using a pantogram and how to free motion quilt it.

This was the pantogram that I used to stitch across the width of my practice piece. You follow the line with this red laser light and it moves the needle that stitches the quilt. 

It looks much easier than it is!

This is what my practice piece looks like:

and close-up.

Really more square than loopy. Will my quilting ever look loopy? Is there hope for me?

 It's like the the old joke -  How do you get to Carnegie Hall?  Practice, practice, practice.

I won't even share my free motion quilting.  It was pretty sad. 

There are benefits to continually challenging yourself.  It's a good thing.  It leads to personal growth and builds confidence as you surmount the challenges, but there is a fine line between challenge and frustration.

I had a bit of both today! 

Quilters On Bikes

I belong to a small art quilt group that tries to meet at least twice a month. We usually meet for breakfast or lunch to encourage, critique and challenge each other. Since the weather here in PA has been so nice, we decided to take to the roads - on our bikes. That's Lisa, Terry, me and Kelly. Actually, as a group we have been riding on multi-use paths where cars are not allowed. We pedal along and chat about quilting and try to solve all the problems of the world. And of course we stop for lunch along the way. Life is good!

Alzheimer Quilt Exhibit

This is one of the greatest honors I have ever had - having a quilt in the traveling exhibit, Alzheimer -Forgetting Piece By Piece. It started almost 4 years ago. Ami Simms' mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. For those of you who don't know who Ami is, she's an internationally famous quilter known for her great sense of humor (http://www.amisimms.com/). In her energizer bunny kind of way, Ami wanted to do something to both raise money and awareness about Alzheimer's. She worked in the medium she knows best - quilts. She called it the Alzheimer Art Quilt Initiative.

So she first put out a call for quilts that would help to educate the public about this terrible disease. She chose 52 of them to put together a travelling quilt show. I was so thrilled when I found out that mine was one of them. My father, Leonard Krisel, died in 1998. He passed away from a heart attack, but he had Alzheimer's. It was a blessing at the time. Mentally and physically he was in terrible shape. Making this quilt was an opportunity for me to honor my father and revisit his life. "Leaving Us" was designed as a 3 panel quilt, depicting 3 stages of a person's life who has Alzheimer's. A tree full of life and family is the first panel. As the dementia starts to take hold, cognitive functions are lost. And at last, the only thing left is a shell of a person, who is still a father, a grandfather, a human being.

I made the quilt using dupioni silk and spent lots of hours sitting at my sewing machine, thinking about my Dad, and blanket stitching all of the leaves. I used a gold paint pen to write on the leaves. The poignancy of my quilt led Ami to choose it for the cover of the CD depicting all of the quilts. I was beside myself with joy.

Ami's belief in this project, led her to invest lots of her own money to self-publish a book - Alzheimer's - Forgetting Piece By Piece. (All of the profits are donated to Alzheimer research.) It is a wonderful art book with all of the quilts and the authors words about their creations. (You can purchase a copy at http://www.alzquilts.org/.) Ami also started on-line auctions for small quilt pieces to raise money for research. In all. she (along with the help of many people) has raised close to $300,000. Impressive! (Unfortunately, her mother passed away at the beginning of November, 2008).

Initially, the quilts were supposed to travel for 3 years and then return home. But there were more and more opportunities for them to travel. When asked if I would mind letting her keep the quilts for a longer time, my answer was YES! Who would see my quilt if it was sitting in my closet?

I was reminded of all of this recently, when I found out that The Upper Cumberland Quilt Show in Tennessee (http://www.quilt-festival.com/currrentnews.htm) was hosting the Alzheimer quilts in September and they were using my quilt as the poster. MY QUILT IS FAMOUS and it makes me so proud to be part of this group and to keep my Dad's memory alive.


So many of us have been touched by this cruel disease. You don't need to be a quilter to relate to these quilts. Check the schedule (http://www.alzquilts.org/) and bring a few tissues with you.