A while back I learned something from Lisa W. (then at Curves, now at Quarry Hill where mom lives, first in assisted living and now in the memory loss unit…mom lives there that is, not Lisa…she works there!):  every day say what was a good thing or the best thing that happened to you that day.  And nothing backhanded (saying that the best thing was that the day wasn’t any worse than it was doesn’t quite cut it).  So I try (but don’t always remember) to give thanks daily.

At our local quilt chapter auction this past month I bought the adorable felted wool mat and --for the first time in memory-- remembered to bring out my Thanksgiving candles, which I have had since I was about 6! I believe these are now beyond "vintage" and headed towards "antique." And that is my October Angel (my birth month) in the background, a gift from gramma about 50 years ago!

But today is the annual U.S. feast and giving of thanks.  This year, I am so glad that despite our very small numbers, the four of us are here, happy, healthy and together.  As you can see from the photo, my pleas to “wait for the Thanksgiving photo” were this year greeted with “heck no I’m eating!” <grin!>

Wait for the photo? Apparently not this year LOL! PS--notice Joshua, on the right, wearing Elmo pants! Love 'em!

Here’s the repast in preparation….I try to clean as I go, otherwise it would be impossible in our no-counter-space kitchen!  After breakfast I started with the pie crust, then the cranberry sauce, then the pie filling, then the stuffing, then putting the hot pie filling into the just-baked crust (A recipe from The Cook’s Bible, where you bake the crust separately as if making a banana cream pie, cook the pumpkin pie filling on the stovetop, then combine and finish in the over for about 25 minutes.  Helps avoid soggy crust.) Anyway, once I get that done, I clear out and hubby does the turkey. I do NOT “do” raw birds or large meat…they need to be mostly cooked before I get near them!  Then I do the potatoes, veggies and gravy.

In progress...pie made, Turkey in the oven......

As far as I am concerned, the best reason for roasting a turkey is to make the gravy that goes on the potatoes.  Half the pan of potatoes is for me (ditto with the gravy, tho I usually get a fight on that one) and half for everyone else.  Can you tell I’m Irish?  Life is GOOD!

I hope whether you are in the United States celebrating also or elsewhere in the world that your lives are filled with goodness, love and light.  And thread and fabric and time to create!  Blessings be, Sarah

OK…no pictures today (sob, I’m sorry!).  It has been, as usual, chaos, and more chaos than usual!   I am happy to report, however, there are lots of pictures and things to share….I just need to find a few extra hours in the day to process and re-size the photos, then write and blog!

The biggest interrupted by life was going to the International Quilt Festival in Houston, where I demo’d, met friends, ate Mexican (HEAVENLY!), met new friends, had fun, spent some money on fabric and paints, tried a new product that I think is gonna be awesome, and generally got exhausted and happy.

Then there are the teenager and kid and aging mom things that tend to interrupt life.  And filling out insurance claims.  And selling our house (going like a dream) and buying our new house (not so much…I’ll dish AFTER the closing is done and we own the house, but it has been unnecessarily difficult because of one person…more in maybe February or March on that one).  It looks like, at long last, that all WILL come off without a hitch (I’m an optimist), and in late January we’ll be moving to a new house about 4 miles away (same school district).

Then, on the way home from Houston, I was too tired for the level of attention required by the book I had.  So while changing planes in Dallas (which by the way is like a big city shopping mall with airplane gates added!) I went into the Barnes and Noble (complete with Starbucks) and bought The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.   Ooops.  That means I have been DEVOURING that book and the two sequels.  I am halfway through the last book, and will surface when done LOL!
Thanks for checking in, and I promise good pictures and fun stuff SOON, Cheers, Sarah

Yes, I am a calendar girl!!!!! Can you believe it?  I STILL, even though the quilt is home, I have the ribbon (now a year old), and saw the quilt with the ribbon in Houston this time last year, cannot believe that *I* really won a ribbon, and then of the 110 or so winning quilts was one of 13 selected to be in this calendar:

Robbi Eklow's eye-cathing gears quilt is on the cover

The inside cover tells a bit about each quilt:

Inside the front cover, a bit about the 13 quilts

And, drum roll please, here is Fields of Gold, a.k.a. Miss September.  I like how they brought the quilt down over the staples onto the lower page, rather than reduce the size to fit on the top half:

Fields of Gold

I swear, if someone had told me when we left Friday Harbor 6 years ago that I’d have a book, be a Houston award winner, and be in this calendar, I wouldn’t have believed a word of it…absolutely astonishing!  It just goes to prove that if you work hard, are really passionate about something, and are willing to devote the time and effort it takes to do something, you CAN!

This blogpost continues my work on a quilt inspired by Kathy Schmidt’s Cell Block Blues pattern from her bestselling Rule-Breaking Quilts book.  (Check here for my book review.) At first I thought all my blocks (and I had no idea how many I would make or how large this quilt might be) would have bright hand-dyeds (all made by me!) as the stems and veins.  As the quilt took shape, though, I decided a bit of subtle would be a good think and make a good transition to the outer edges of the quilt which, in my mind, would be the remaining squares and rectangles from the original ten fat quarters of batik.

Another set of blocks, adding some blues to the bright mix

At this point, the design wall was getting crowded, so I removed the other “stuff” so I could spread out my blocks into what might become the final quilt.  It is fairly unusual for me not to have a final image inside my head before I begin, so I was enjoying working this way for a change.  It definitely won’t become my “new favorite” way, but I sure had fun with this one.  You’ll notice in the photo above that there are blobs of white-white fabric and dark-dark, and it got tricky getting the direction of the stems correct and preventing same-fabric from touching the same-fabric in another block! In this case, contrast is good.

The quilt grew and grew; finally, I decided I had enough blocks.

By this point, I had as many blocks as I thought I needed.  My design wall is 6 feet wide at the widest point, and I had just about reached that size, which I decided was plenty large.  As the blocks went up, I scattered the colors and the direction of the blocks as if they were swirling upwards in an autumn gust.  The bright colors are clustered in the center with the blue-vein blocks on the edges.  Now it was time to fill in the pieces.  To my dismay, I didn’t take in-process photos until after the whole thing was sewn together.

Filling it in to become a rectangle

The top is now about 40×60 inches.  This is what is left of the initial ten fat quarters, with a 6×12 inch ruler for scale:

what's left out of 2 1/2 yards of fabric (ten fat quarters)

Not much!   Seven of the ten original fabrics are pictured here.  The rest is totally used!  The white one on the right and the dark blue on the left were purchased for value-range (i.e. light-light and dark-dark) and were essential, but they really grab your eye almost too much so I stuck to the medium-dark to medium to medium-light fabrics for most of the work.

When I went to the Batiks by Design website it appeared some of the fabrics I used were sold out, so I called the store and thankfully they still had some of them, so my outer border and binding will not have to feature prints not used in the center.  I’m so glad they were willing to custom cut some pieces for me to match what I already had. Here’s to good quilty service…thanks ladies!  I’m planning on a narrow inner border of the bright colors all the way around the top shown above (probably a finished 3/8 or 1/2″ wide multicolored strip), with a wider (3-5 inches?) of squares and rectangles of the blues, with a slightly darker blue batik for the binding.  What do you think?  Suggestions?  I’m thinking maybe some of those larger rectangles on the outer edge need to get sliced up with some of the medium-value pieces set into them.  Maybe with some angles? Let me know what you think!

So, you might ask, what have I been doing?  OK, no, you probably haven’t been asking.  But it has been insane here.  We are hoping to buy a new house and move in January, so there have been MANY (way too many hours) doing real estate related stuff.  The good news is that our house got a contract on it in 12 days, in this economy!  The bad news …well…. I’ll share when all is said and done (you won’t believe the story when I can finally tell it).  Let’s just say EVERYTHING is on track, and we do expect to move (so much for January as making quilts time!) in January—yeah!

In the meantime, I’ve not been able to concentrate a lot on art quilts.  But I liked that use-a-big-print sampler I made for my free-motion class  so much that I decided to make a bed quilt, possibly as a project piece for a future book (yeah, shoot me again please!). Here are the squares pieced with the sashing into rows:

Big prints with white sashing (vertical pieces)

Adding the horizontal sashing....it has been a LONG time since I've done precision piecing!

And the first of the rows with the horizontal sashing added..I am going to LOVE this quilt.  But it’s a good thing I am probably buying an HQ16 sit-down machine early next year as I will need the space:  this quilt will finish at about 100 inches on each side!!!!

The top three rows now have the horizontal sashing....

And I’m getting ready to head out on Nov. 2 for the International Quilt Festival in Houston.  I will have four quilts and two photos on display!

Cookie? PLEEEZE Cookie! is in Art Quilts-Miniatures in the juried show

Joshua is in the Beneath the Surface Exhibit

Koi and A Sense of Place:  The Wall are in the 500 Art Quilts exhibit, where the quilts are from the Lark Books book of the same name.

and in the Eye of the Quilter Exhibit, I will have two photos!  I’ll post those photos in a post in a few days!

But here is the pile of “getting ready to take” stuff, including some in progress postcards for a swap. I’m going to take some of this round’s swap cards for my demo in the MistyFuse booth!