WOWIE ZOWIE!   When you’re a quilter, there are a couple of real “biggie” things that can happen.  Getting in to one of the major shows (done that), winning an award at a big show (done that! Second Place at Houston, Honorable Mention at the NQA show), being published (done that, a lot fortunately), but up there with winning an award is being on the cover (still hoping) of a major magazine, or featured on the last page in what I think of as the Grand Finale page where most magazines profile one quilt.  Guess what…… DONE THAT thanks to Jan Magee (editor) and company at The Quilt Life magazine, which is one of my favorite quilt magazines (along with Quilters Newsletter).  My art quilt “Fields of Gold” made the final page!

Here is that last page, 86… I mean PINCH ME?  Is this real?!?!?!  It MUST be, because I finally have a copy in my happy hands!

Page 86, April 2012 issue of The Quilt Life

And talk about WOW… they included me on the page with the other quilters in this issue…what a line-up…and me, next to them!!! Plus, I’m right next to the amazing Suzanne Marshall, who was my roomie when I taught at AQS-Paducah in 2008.  Suzanne is so much fun!  I can hardly believe I’m on the page where, in the last issue, Noriko Endo’s quilt was featured!  Who ME?????

The quilters in this issue page....I'm on the right and LOVE that they chose my favorite "head shot"...the one with the dog! so much more fun than the usual mug shot! It's a PUG shot!

And a final bit of kindness… I had thought this would end up only on their website or blog (blog link here), but it’s on p. 18–a note that this quilt is, sadly, one of two lost.  The whole sad story is here.  Thanks so much, Jan, for adding this note.  If there is any hope of someone spotting this quilt, this will help SOOOOOO much!

Note about this quilt being lost....sigh....

Thank you to Jan Magee, the wonderful editor of The Quilt Life, for asking to publish my quilt, to Ricky, Alex and the entire gang that put together The Quilt Life for such a fun magazine….now I’m off to read it cover to cover and pinch myself yet again… wow, this really happened!

Hi all!   Several years ago my Frayed Edges friends and I were lucky to be included in Lark Books’ Creative Quilting With Beads, and my pomegranate notebook cover was the cover of the book.  Lark has re-issued the book as a paperback, and added a few more projects to the cover including Deborah Boschert’s houses and trees!

Lark graciously sent me a copy to do a drawing, so guess what…. leave a comment by midnight (East Coast of the US time) March 28th, and on the 29th I’ll do a drawing using a random number generator for the lucky winner.  To make it even sweeter, I’ll add the pattern version of my notebook pattern.  As always, you have more real estate on the page when you publish an individual pattern, so there is more “how to” in my pattern.

Hmmm… I just discovered that I never (DUH! Sarah) put that pattern on my website for sale!  Guess what I’m adding to my to-do list.  Anyway, it is the full-length version of the pattern in the book.

To read about the book at Lark Crafts click here, and over on Amazon, click here.  You can read my original post about the book here, but please note I am not selling the book myself any more.  You’ll need to order from Amazon or another source.

So finally it was time to square up the quilt.  Oh dear.  The standing woman was not standing up straight!!!!!!  And if I didn’t get her straight and centered, then she would look like she was listing sideways when I squared up the edges, where I REALLY needed there to be EXACTLY even background on either side of the woman with her leg up.  So I carefully pried apart the figure (from the waist up) and repositioned her and did some insertion of yellow to fill in the gaps.  Problem solved!  Next, time to fuse the entire top to the batting, baste all of that to the backing and quilt!

At the machine.... Rubeus Hagrid (aka Janome Horizon 7700!). Decided I needed to use up some of my print fabrics that I no longer use, and had enough of this beautifully colored Fossil Fern for the back.

Here is the entire quilt:

Finished!

A close-up of the two figures at the top in “mermaid” poses:

Notice the pale pink and pale peach women at the top, with arms reaching towards each other

A view of the bottom:

Two figures at the bottom..."warrior" on the left and "pretzel stretch" on the right

And a bit more of the middle:

center--close up. Interestingly I used some No. 100 (same as size 60-wt) silk for the background quilting. The part on the yellow is a variegated yellow, and sure enough Bob Purcell of Superior is right... the variegation doesn't show. I ran out of my 220-yard spool of variegated, and had only a section the size of my hand left to quilt, so used a medium-yellow 60-wt silk from Superior to finish...and even up close I can't find where I switched threads! So I guess I can skip the variegated silk (even tho it is so beautiful on the spool) for the way I use thread.

I hadn’t used silk for background quilting before, but I very much like the way it handles and looks, so when I want the thread to be fine and disappear into the quilt, I think I’ll use the silk.

When I was done, I had intended to put a facing on the quilt, as most of my art quilts are faced.  But I missed that darker edge.  See I quilt so much, I have to make things that are to finish at a specific size at least 2-3 inches larger because I don’t know how much “take-up” or shrinkage there will be from the dense quilting.  And I ended up needing to trim off some of the darker edges, and I missed them.  So I used a traditional bias double-fold binding in a deep purple batik.  Just right!

Now, here’s to hoping it makes it into the exhibit this year!

Fairly early in the fusing process for Strength and Calm

We left off with Strength and Calm at the stage above.  Then I added more, a lot more, of the background.  I was on such a roll that in fact I forgot to take photos until I got to here:

Background almost all fused up, and not yet trimmed--you can see to the left some of the sketches pinned to the wall. You can also see a sliver of light blue added to the standing leg of the smaller figure to help that leg not visually merge into the figure behind.

Next step was to decide what to do with the other four figures.  By this point I was certain I did not want to get complicated.  It would be an outline shape of some sort.  I thought solid fabric, like a batik or hand-dyed, would mooosh into the background too much, and simply outline quilting might not stand out enough, and I didn’t want to paint.  So I took out some of my sheer fabrics.  These are the cheap-o prom dress synthetic sheers you can find at places like JoAnn Fabrics, which go on sale right after prom season (making it a good time to stock up).

Test-driving various sheers to see how they would look on the background. I ended up selecting two blues and two peach/pink tones.

A while back I developed a way to work with pre-fused sheer fabrics using my stencil cutting hot-tool and an old storm window.

First, I place the inked-outline drawing on the table, with the storm window on top. Then I place the pre-fused sheer fabric on top of the window. On this one, I have begun "cutting" with the heat tool by drawing the top along the right side of her legs.

The exact length of time depends on the heat of the stencil cutting tool and the fabric.  If you go too slow, you get a blobby, black nubby icky edge with pock marks.  If you go too fast, you don’t cut-and-sear/seal the edges and have to go back over it, risking the icky edge with pock marks.  And it takes a bit of breath holding and lip-biting and twisting of the mouth to get the cuts done just right.  And wine after.

More cutting done. As you cut/melt the synthetic fabric, the MistyFuse on the back sticks slightly to the glass, making it easier to cut the remaining edges. And notice that red circle at the top of the photo...that's my bolt of MistyFuseUV. Thank you to Iris Karp of MistyFuse.... LOVE it!

Done...with a scrap overlapping at her heel.

Next, I fused these sheer figures to the quilt and stitched them in place with 40-wt polyester thread.  Really liked the simplicity and not my usual quilt-every-inch style.

After I got it partly quilted, I decided I wanted to fuse the sheer down a bit better and melt the MistyFuse to invisibility.  However, I had just entered the studio and turned on the iron and forgot to turn it DOWN to synthetic instead of cotton.  Ooooops. Melting happened.

See where I melted the sheer by just grazing a set-to-cotton iron over it? Grumble.

And a bit of swearing at my own stupidity happened—see I know I need to turn the heat down and go slowly carefully when fusing sheer synthetics.  I wondered if the mess-up was too visible or if I could leave it and asked some friends.  Some said not visible really, leave it.  But I knew I needed to fix it.  So I carefully (with a HUGE holding of breath) took the heat-tool to the quilt (!!!!!) and “cut” the section of lower-body/hip out, cut a new piece of synthetic–thank heavens I had enough!–fused that onto the excised section and re-stitched.  Fortunately, I did well enough it doesn’t show.

Fixed. And if I kept my mouth shut you wouldn't know. I hope!

Thereby proving my saying that the difference between a beginner and an expert is that the expert either doesn’t make the mistakes because they’ve  made them in the past OR they’ve learned how to FIX the mistake so that you can’t see it.  Unless you blog about it for the whole world to see.  Ahem.   Last post in this series will (finally) show the finished quilt!

I was going to title this Pass on Your Passion as Interweave did, but figured that would bring in about a zillion spam comments, so hope the title worked!

Fabulous news from Cate Coulacos Prato, editor of Quilting Daily and Cloth, Paper, Scissors Today:

Interweave’s Pass On Your Passion campaign celebrates National Craft Month. They’re sharing a link to all of our free beginner downloads and also, each Interweave community (Quilting Daily, Cloth Paper Scissors, Jewelry Making Daily, etc.) is hosting at least one blog giveaway.   I just went to the link (at the end of this post) and WOW… I knew about the free ebooks from Cloth Paper Scissors and Quilting Arts, but there are lots more there, including drawing ones that I TOTALLY can’t wait to download and absorb.

You can get all the details here:

http://www.clothpaperscissors.com/blogs/clothpaperscissorstoday/archive/2012/03/08/march-is-national-craft-month-pass-it-on.aspx

http://www.quiltingdaily.com/blogs/vivika/archive/2012/03/08/pass-on-your-passion-for-quilting-giveaway.aspx

Here is the link for the free downloads:
http://www.interweave.com/free-eBooks-videos/default.asp

Pass it on!

Thanks so much Cate for letting us know…. now I’m off to do some downloading, NOW!