What better pairing than a great exhibit  (of which I am proud to be a part) AND an opportunity to help “Kickstart” a great new chapter in the Why Quilts Matter series.

I’ve blogged before about my quilt, Strength and Calm, which has been juried in to the Rituals exhibit that will debut this summer at International Quilt Festival Long Beach then travel on to the mega-kahuna-mecca of quilts, International Quilt Festival in Houston (where I will also be teaching again! would love to see/meet some of you in my classes!).  Well curators Leslie Tucker Jenison and Jamie Fingal have been running a fun and fascinating glimpse into the lives and personalities of the artists who have made the quilts in this year’s exhibit.  Today is my turn!  So to read more about it, go here.  Thanks to Moore‘s Sewing and Havel (as in those wonderful scissors) for sponsoring the exhibits!

Speaking of sponsoring, I was starting to read some old QuiltArt digests, and discovered that Shelley Zegart has launched a new project, a companion guide to the WONDERFUL DVD series, Why Quilts Matter (click here to read lots more about the series).  I’m thrilled to say I’ve just made a donation to her fundraising campaign on Kickstarter.  You can click on the widget (the doohickie to the left) in the sidebar of my blog or go here to help support this effort and read more about it.

Hi all…great news this week:  I’ve been selected to be on the Faculty at the International Quilt Festival in Houston, Texas…as in: I’m teaching at the best show in the world! (I taught there are few years ago, and am thrilled and considerably less terrified now return… I know I can do it!)  I will have full-day classes Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, will participate in the Machine Quilting Forum on Thursday morning, and may well do a 30-minute “Meet our Teachers” demo on the quilt show floor (schedules permitting)  and participate in the “Friday Sampler” from 10-Noon.  If the scheduling for the latter two works, I’ll be demo-ing my fused collage technique at the “Meet our Teachers” and on Friday will share/demonstrate free-motion quilting!  And as always, Janome-America will be able to lend me a machine for my demos…yeah and thank you Janome!

Here’s my Festival schedule:

• Monday, October 29:  Fine Finishes–edge finish techniques; full day class
• Tuesday, October 30:  Birch Pond Seasons–fused collage landscape; full day class
• Wednesday, October 31:  Decorative Stitch Applique–learn to use all those fun stitches on your machine! Full day class
• Thursday, November 1:  Fun with Fancy Threads–the trick to metallics, holographics an other fussy thread; 9-Noon
• Friday, November 2 (tentative): Friday Sampler–free-motion quilting; 10-Noon
• Thursday afternoon or Friday afternoon (tentative)–a 30 minute demo at the Meet the Teacher area on the show floor
• Thursday afternoon or Friday afternoon (likely)–demo(s) at the MistyFuse booth again… love MF and Iris (the owner)!
• Saturday:  PLAYTIME!

Not sure yet if I’ll stay and see the show on Sunday, too… I just may given how busy my schedule has become!

I sure hope to see some of you in Houston and, even better, in my classes! When the show/class catalog comes out, I’ll post to the blog with pictures from the classes and links to previous classes I’ve taught so you can see student work.  FUN!

AND….. drum roll…. the portrait of my son, Joshua, has been juried into the AQS Lancaster show (March 14-17)!

The quilt is too small to fit into the categories for Paducah (must be 40 inches wide, and this one is 36 inches wide by 48 long), so this is the show for which it fits into a category.  I’m thrilled, as I think this is probably the best quilt I’ve ever made.

The Quilters Heritage Celebration show (now defunct) used to take place in Lancaster in March, and it was the first major quilt show I ever attended, driving up from when we lived in the metro DC area.  I love going there and hope some day to be able to teach at AQS Lancaster (which picked up the show-in-Lancaster after QHC ended/retire).  If I can just get my schedule clear for March then I can apply (currently there is a conflict with son’s wrestling season!).  Anyway, it’s been a good quilty start to the year!

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!

Last year, Karey Bresenhan and company (the forces of nature behind the International Quilt Festivals) had a great idea:  an exhibit of the photos quilters use to inspire them.  The small exhibit was such a success that they are doing it again this year, and two of my three entries were accepted!

The theme this year is Reflections.  As soon as I heard that, I KNEW I wanted to have this photo as one of my entries, titled Joy Reflected.  It is the day we brought home our puppy for our son’s 9th birthday gift:

Joy Reflected: the day Pigwidgeon (the pug puppy) came home, with the dearly departed Yeti-dog on the left and Eli on the right

I also remembered a photo I took while on a visit to the Maine Coastal Botanical Gardens with the Frayed Edges.  Since the photo was a bit tippy, I fiddled a bit with it in photoshop to make it look better (including odd clipped edges).  It is, to me, one that captures all the elements:  Earth (the rock and trees), Water (caught in the carved boulder),  Air (reflected sky) and Fire (that helped create the rock), so I called it Elemental:

a foggy Maine day reflected in the carved boulder

When I was teaching in Arizona, the hotel in Flagstaff had these AMAZING carved doors.  I am always on the lookout for quilting motifs, so snapped a few photos.  Although this photo didn’t make it in to the exhibit, I still like it.  And I, my camera flash and the overhead lights are reflected in the shiny doorknobs:

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!