To my utter astonishment and delight, one of my newest pieces–Fields of Gold– (finished in the nick of time) has been juried into Art Quilts XIII at the Chandler Center for the Arts in Chandler, Arizona.  Actually, if I tell the total truth, the facings weren’t even completely sewn down when I took the photos for my entries!

I am mind-boggled to find myself in the company of so many of the leading art quilters today…. the list of those in the show is here.

A little bit about this piece:  I had designed the center part, which I called Sunset Trees, for a project / exercise for the applique section of my manuscript.  It is 9×12 inches (or thereabouts) and I intended for it to finish at that size…small and easy to manage as a learning exercise.  Then, I was able to help my friend Lisa Walton of Dyed and Gone to Heaven (Sydney, Australia) get an entry into the IQA / Festival at Houston when she unexpectedly got a quilt finished and photographed in time, but not enough time to mail reliably (i.e. quickly) from Australia to Texas.  I told her not to send anything, but she did anyway…a metre of her glorious hand-dyed fabric that ranged from rust to gold to green.  I pinned the fabric up on my design wall, next to Sunset Trees, trying to figure out how to make a journal entry for this year.  I couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t trite (the black silhouette of an Aussie cowboy and outback house against the glowing sun…been done well by others, and too many times).  Then I realized that if I used one section of the piece, it meshed PERFECTLY with Sunset Trees’ background.

Then I mulled over the quilting… at first I thought of blowing grasses.  Then, in the back of my mind, the song Fields of Gold by Sting came to mind.  I knew I had seen a quilt named after that song somewhere…and when the Frayed Edges got together in early September I mentioned it.  Deborah piped up:  it was on my blog!  I did one!  So here is Deborah’s version!  To me, the wheat fields of late summer /autumn are Fields of Gold, so I googled wheat images, learned that some wheat has the really long whiskers, other varieties have shorter, fewer whiskers, etc.   I think my favorite part of this entire quilt is the wheat quilting!  Once again, I seem to be moving toward nearly wholecloth pieces that are drawn with thread…. Here’s a detail:

Enjoy…now back to working on the Elusive Crested Batiki Bird, a small piece I’m doing for another Lark book on small quilts.  Cheers!

Thanks to Deirdre Abbotts, I’ve been awarded the the

First the Rules:

1. The winner can put the logo on his/her blog.  It’s right up on top

2. Link to the person you received your award from.

You can find Dierdre at Deirdre’s Sloppy Studios

3. Nominate at least 7 other blogs.

4. Put links of those blogs on yours.

1. A perennial favorite is my friend Marie’s blog…her photography is just ONE of the many things she does wonderfully! Being a good friend is another one!
2. Dijanne Cevaal’s work and blog never cease to inspire me!
3. Elin Waterston has been exploring stamp-making this year on Love.Will.Logic, her blog….. I’ll admit to being just a tad jealous of the time she has to make things!
4. Blue Moon River is Susan Brubaker Knapp’s blog; I met her not too long ago online, and we’ve had a fun time writing back and forth.  I can see her background in graphic design in her work, and not only enjoy it but learn from her work!
5. Planet Textile Threads isn’t really one person’s blog, but a whole bunch of people (in the interest of complete disclosure, me included).  I love being able to travel the world in one blog, with so many points of view.
6. Judy Coates Perez makes wholecloth quilts…she paints, then she quilts.  They are amazing, there’s never a dud, and you can see them here.
7. Even though she was also on Deirdre’s list, I’m also going to name my friend Lisa Walton, in Sydney, Australia!  Her blog is here.  I LOVE that we can live half a world apart, meet on the internet, then meet in Houston (at Quilt Festival of course), and get to be good friends despite not being near each other in person.

5. Leave a message on the blogs of the people you have nominated.

I’m off to do that now.  Hope you enjoy these blogs as much as I do!

And then  I’m off to work…. I’ve been really busy quilting lately, then hope to be really busy working on the manuscript and samples for my oft-delayed book.  This weekend, tho, will be spectacular.  On Saturday Deborah flies in from Texas!   She is staying with Kate, and on Sunday we will all get to have a sleepover at Kate’s neighbor’s empty (summer) house, then go to a workshop with Natasha Kemper-Cullen on Monday.  Get ready for good eye candy… this is going to be SUCH a treat!

During lunch break from class on that Friday, Jan and I went down to the show floor to see the quilts, and what ribbons I might have won …… teeeheee!   I got lucky this year, and received two first place blue ribbons and, drum roll please, my first ever Judges’ Choice from (usually traditional-loving) Lisa Erlandson (you’ll have to read to the bottom for more!)!  The first of my quilts that I ran across was Nourish; when I walked up all sorts of folks were looking at it closely (way cool!).

Here’s me doing the “Vanna White pose” and explaining to some viewers how I did it….

The next aisle had a wonderful exhibit called A Sense of Place, the annual Art Quilts Maine challenge for the year.  This year there were many entries (some years there are not so many!), and they were all wonderful, and some outstanding.  Of course I loved Kathy and Kate’s!   Kathy’s features her signature bright colors and many beads….as always not one too many, not one too few:

This detail shows more of her fine work:

Kate outdid herself this year.  She went to Italy earlier this year, and was so inspired by Cinque Terra.  She took her time with this quilt (as an overextended mom, we all tend to rush!) and it shows in the quality of design and workmanship.  This may be the best machine quilting she’s done… I totally love the piece:

Anne Walker, the President (aka Queen) of AQM, made this stunning aerial view…. her work is always tops—I wouldn’t mind owning a piece like this one!  The blue binding on the bottom is inspired!:

Across the aisle, the Coastal Quilters challenge hung on the ugly burgundy drapes.  Inspired by the Frayed Edges 5×5 grid (seen here in an older blogpost, and here and here), the chapter chose a photo by Jan’s husband and photographer Dwight P. called Ropes and Buoys.  The challenge was to make a 10x 10 inch quilt using any technique.   Many went for realistic colors….weathered wood and rope and a bright buoy, but some of us went hog wild!

Mine are the two close-ups….last one on the 4th row, first one on the 5th row.

I LOVED that some went traditional in their interpretation, and that others went totally wild.  What is astonishing is that some of the most traditional quilters who had never EVER made an art quilt did some of the most AMAZING piece….major kudos to Karen Martin and Leigh Smith for not only attempting the challenge, but excelling!

This quilt was a round robin made by Roxanne Wells, Rebeccah Hokkanen, Susan Barry and Gail Galloway-Nicholson.   Despite serious medical challenges to them and / or their spouses for at least three of them, they did a wonderful job.  Alas, I somehow only got the picture of this one (not all four) of their challenge quilts.  Of course they are, all 4 of them, part of my awesome local Coastal Quilters chapter.  I’m so glad I’m here! What luck to find so many kindred souls.

As promised, here is Rana O’Connor’s tiger….he is totally, completely amazing.  The tiger himself is ALL THREAD….and then appliqued onto the surface, which is a single batik. Everything else you see is thread–the snake, the tree, everything.  Can you tell she loves thread as much as I do?  Not surprisingly, he took a well-earned blue ribbon!  The quilt is fairly small, maybe 14 inches tall?

Here are several quilts (and sorry, I’m too lazy and rushed to run upstairs and find the show brochure to add who made them… if you know tell me and I’ll update the post, which I’ll try to do later anyway) that I really liked…. first this awesome green NY Beauty:

And this very Maine-ish quilt, complete with loose-flapping flags:

No blog about the show would be complete without one of Jeanne-Marie Robinson’s quilts (she’s also in Coastal Quilters…grin!).  Almost always her quilts feature animals, and most often are brightly colored.  This one is softer, yet is one of my favorites….the handwork (all hand applique and quilting, and lots of embroidery) is stunning:

This charming little quilt was made of one of those fabrics you’d think would turn out, well, a bit tacky, but it SO works, and the beading is just perfect.  I want to track down the maker (I have the info in my notes somewhere) and ask her if I may use it in my lecture on beading on quilts:

Last but not least, here I am doing another “Vanna” showing off my Judges’ choice ribbon for Naiads:

Hey!  A milestone happened last night, and I think it was someone from the
Quiltart list…..    I got the 100,000th visit to my blog!   I thought I’d
do a giftie (a half yard of my hand-dyes probably) for that person, so if
you surfed in to see the two blogposts about Nourish last night and

you are from Tel Aviv, Israel
your ISP is netvision.net.il
you surf using firefox on a microsoft windows XP platform
and you visited two blogposts last night,

write and let me know!  Send your snail mail address and I’ll pop an
envelope in the mail…and tell me your favorite color(s) and I’ll see what
I’ve got in the stash!

AND—

since it is sometimes hard to catch the correct person when they’ve just been to the site, I will ALSO send a half yard (or two fat quarters) of my hand-dyeds to the FIRST PERSON TO WRITE  to me from  here!   Just use the comment for this post and write to let me know!  (Note from later in the morning:  Mary is the first person to comment, so she wins it… Mary, I sent an e-mail; if you’d like the fabric please reply to my message with your snail mail address! WOOT!)

Cheers, Sarah

OK, if I haven’t alienated everyone with that title, I’ll share the sad tale of my beloved Mac laptop. Sob.

Last Tuesday, Joshua was surfing the web, listening to Youtube videos on my laptop while I was in the kitchen.  Suddenly, it froze (this should have been a warning), but then it unfroze.  We resumed what we were doing.  After a while, I went to take a shower.  When I returned, Joshua was on the glacial desktop (where I now type this post, which I inadvertently deleted once already because the desktop is totally and utterly awful).

I looked at Joshua quizzically, and he said:  your computer froze up, so I had to force quit, and now it won’t start.  Not good.  I tried to start it up.  I got a gray screen with a file folder with a question mark.  Really not good.

I called AppleCare, thanking my stars that I followed good advice and purchased the 3-year extended warranty.  I got a real live human within a couple of minutes, and we tried everything he knew, for more than 20 minutes, including trying to re-install the operating software.

At one point, he prompted me:  see where it has the icon for a hard drive, click on that.  Umm…no….there is no icon.   Really, REALLY not good.

AppleCare guy goes away to consult with a supervisor.  Ominous.  He returns and says “we are authorizing you to have a warranty check and repair; the nearest authorized Apple Warranty Service center is in Augusta.”  That is an hour away from here…lotsa gas!

First thing in the morning, I call Abacus Technologies here in Camden, because I know their Apple guru, Jeff, is really good and I had thought they were Apple authorized.  They are, but they no longer do warranty repairs.  However, Jeff told me that although the hard drive / hardware issues are covered, data recovery is not.  Here’s the really awful part:

Due to the assorted crises that have come at me one thing after another for the past 18 months, I haven’t done a back up of my files.  Not even putting photos on CD, including of Joshua’s accident, graduation, Eli’s year, the last pictures of dear Yeti, nothing.  On my laptop, and now seemingly lost forever are all the photos, all my teaching files, my slide presentation, my address book, my calendar, all my contacts for future teaching gigs, all my documents, all the iTunes library (over a thousand songs amongst us all), you name it it was lost. My life is/was on that laptop, and it appeared to be lost for eternity.  SHRIEK!

The only good thing in all this is that I HAD saved my manuscript on a thumb drive…thank heavens!  It has been two years of work; at least I know that is safe…..

However, Jeff the Mac Guru says he might be able to save the data, but that should happen before warranty work.  All efforts fail, including trying to mount the drive to a PC even…after all if you can drag and drop the files….  SO the only chance to save my stuff is to send it away to the “Doctors of Mega Computer Death”.  Jeff said “you know those Clean Rooms you see on TV?  all white, guys in Tyvek suits?”  That’s your only chance.  Cost:  $800-2700.

After I got off the phone, I had a total, complete and utter bawling-out-loud meltdown.  Fortunately, I was alone in the house except for the cats and dog.  I had simply had it… after one family crisis after another, I didn’t need this too.

I only beat myself up a little for being a total idiot and not doing back-ups.  After all, I DO have an external hard drive in the house.  However, I was using it to back up the PC, and it can be formatted for PC or Mac, but not both.  And the bookkeeping was still on the PC.  Plus, I would have had to figure out how to erase the external HD (hard drive), re-format it for Mac, etc.  Since I find computer stuff frustrating beyond bearing (one misplaced comma and you can spend four hours, whereas someone who knows what they are doing looks at it and says “oh here it is”….), I procrastinated what with all the seemingly endless family crises and demands.

So, upon reflection, I called back and said do it.  Getting the photos alone is worth it, and saving 2-3 months of full-time work re-doing all my class stuff is a bonus.   And amidst all this, Jeff said there was no point in his having the computer all apart and then sending me somewhere a long drive away, so he’ll ALSO do the warranty work!  BLESS HIM! I’ll put the cost on my visa card, ask Mom for a loan if I need one, and just get on with it.

Moral of the story:  BACK UP YOUR HARD DRIVE.  Do it NOW.  Go buy an external hard drive.  Even on the PC it was easy to format and do the back ups.  A 500 GIG hard drive is now $140 at Staples online…. that’s about the price of developing 10 rolls of film.  Cheap at the price.

My Mac (and yes, even with this highly unusual hard drive suicide, I’d still do it all over again and buy a Mac, and working on the PC has reinforced that!) is now in a lab in New Jersey. Please beam “get the data” thoughts in the direction of the mid-coast of the US, please…..   I won’t relax until I know for sure they can save it, but since these companies can retrieve data from computers that have been through fires and floods, I am guardedly optimistic, she typed, nervously.  They also send it back on a new external hard drive.

Guess what I’m gonna do?  Hook that baby up to my laptop and try to back up EVERY DAY!  Sheesh I don’t need this!

So that’s why I won’t be able to blog quite as often or with pictures.  I’ll do a book review or two and see if I can find pics on the internet to upload for color….  and in the meantime, remember:  BEAM GOOD THOUGHTS TOWARDS NEW JERSEY THAT THEY CAN SAVE MY DATA!  Thanks, and now I’m off.  I WILL believe it will come back….