BZB Quilt Show 2014

The quilt show was a success!  While I didn't get photos of all the pieces hung, I was very pleased to see that the last quilt I finished was a winner in the Large Pieced category--I got a 2nd place ribbon!  Very exciting!  This is the first time I ever won a ribbon for a guild show, and the first time our guild decided to vote for winners for all the categories with the guild members only, rather than have the public vote.  We had a potluck preview party on Friday after the show was hung and got ballots to vote.  The only voting that was done by the visitors was a Popular Vote--they could vote for their favorite.  While there were several really nice pieces, I didn't see any that were really *WOW* worthy.  You know the ones--the drop-dead-gorgeous one that everyone loves.  The winner of that vote is anyone's guess.

Just to recap, this is the Scrap Bag Jewel Box quilt--108" square.

This one I called Civil War Unchained because it's Civil War fabrics and it's a chain quilt.  I was playing with words and thought of slaves being unchained.  

This one is Purple Pinwheels, half-square triangles made from swapped charm squares.


Japanese One-block Wonder - Emma can now put it back on her bed. :)


The Children's Hospital Quilt for me to use the next time we need to have an overnight stay.


Pineapple Party!  Wheee!

So I was not at the show yesterday due to the SOUNDERS WINNING 4-1, but today I went out to the county fairgrounds where they were having a "Spring Festival". It wasn't heavily attended, at least on Sunday, but had rides, musicians, traveling entertainers (clowns, balloon animal makers), and some kind of car racing.  It was $5 for a car load to park, and all the activities (except for the carnival rides) were free.  We couldn't charge a fee to get in for the quilt show, but they had items for sale in the Boutique, sold vendor space in the hall, and sold raffle tickets for multiple items.  The guild calls it a "Fishbowl" raffle, where a number of items are offered and a fish bowl with a corresponding number is set out for each item or grouping.  Contestants put tickets in the bowls for the things you want to win.  They also have a Guppie Prize, which is everyone's non-winning tickets dumped into a large fish bowl and all the things that didn't get any takers are given to that person.  Kind of a boobie prize, really.


I was working in the charity quilts area where we had set up our machines to sew 9-patches together.


 We had pre-cut hundreds of 4 1/2" squares for our visitors to lay out on flannel-covered boards, and we would sew them together.  Some of them were well-thought out combinations.  Some of them were more...eclectic.  Those blocks will be sorted into piles and used to make quilts for patients at Children's Hospital.  This was a great activity for children and adults!  I hope that it made them feel like they were a part of the charity project.


We also had a pile of fabric squares set aside for children to color on, and those would be incorporated into quilt tops for the charity quilts, too.  They could trace photocopied drawings onto the fabric and then color it and add extras.  KayLee even took part and made a few blocks--adding tennis shoes to butterflies.


One thing I found an excellent idea was bagging all the quilts in clear plastic bags for transport back to their owners.  This helps lessen the accidental misplacing of a quilt, especially smaller ones.  We had an incident at the last Moonlighter's quilt show where a small quilt got sandwiched between two others and it took a few days to recover it.

Back to the grind tomorrow.  Three more days to finish the guild newsletter and snag 95 more points for the Munzee clan war.  I'm the last one to achieve the 600 needed for the month.  Sigh.

Photo Finish

I spent the last few days banging out the quilts for the show.  Today was the due date, so I got them all finished, labeled, and delivered to the venue.  Six quilts were quilted, bound, and sleeved, and just in the nick of time.  Tomorrow they'll get hung and the members of the guild will vote on their favorites in each category.  The show will be Saturday & Sunday.

Sadly, this particular quilt, which I worked on and agonized over when the long arm broke twice, is not going to be featured in the show. Not because it isn't done, but apparently, I didn't get the paperwork done on it.  Sigh.

I have a few more quilt tops that are waiting to be sewn up, but five quilts from customers that have priority.  Lauri's quilt for her step-daughter's baby shower is up first.  I guess that's what I'll be doing tomorrow after a few catch-up chores.

Long Arm of the Blah

I finished the quilting on the Pineapple quilt.  I love this quilt.  But what made me *really* happy was when I posted a picture of it, Judy asked if I would display it at the Sedro Woolley quilt show in June!  I need to have it done for the quilt show in 3 weeks, so I know time won't be a problem.  I wasn't sure if it would be OK for me to display it if I wasn't a member of the guild there (not sure if that is a restriction at all) or if it would be a problem if I displayed it at both shows.  She said that it wouldn't be a problem, so I guess it'll be at both shows!



I used a swirly, feathery pantograph design all over.  It took much longer than I thought it would, but it was densely quilted.  BUT IT'S DONE!!  I know that the edge is flipped up a bit there; it caught on the hopping foot as I drove off the edge, but it'll take just a couple of stitches snipped to unfold it and it'll be covered by the binding anyway.



I put the Civil War quilt on the frame yesterday and then proceeded to have a series of issues with the speed controls for the long arm.  The stitching was going very slow, and no fiddling of the knobs to control speed or stitch length would make any difference at all.  I was getting some toenail catchers on there and it was driving me crazy.

As an attempt to fix the problem, I swapped out the stitch regulator with a spare I had.  No change--or at least not fixed.  Initially, it was snail-slow until I fiddled with the plug, making sure that it was fully engaged.  Then it went warp speed.  I wiggled it a bit and eventually it went fast, but at least it was no longer going 10,000 stitches per second.  Unfortunately, the speed and stitch length knobs were still useless.  I think that it might be a problem with the cable that goes from the regulator to the machine.  Maybe there's a bent prong or something.

Anyway, this is done, too!  Now I have 3 quilts that need bindings.  I have a couple more to go!

Next up is the striped modern quilt...if I don't throw the long arm machine out the window first.  I think I'll quilt this pantograph pattern on it, which I got free from Urban Elementz:

It's much simpler than the last one I did, which was much denser.  It took friggin' forever (about 3 days), so I'm hoping I can get this one done faster and start working on the next (final) quilt that needs to go to the show, and get some bindings done.

Long Weekend

The week after Easter meant a week of vacation from school!  After a few obligations early on in the week--karate, orthodontists, etc.--we made arrangements to spend the night at a hotel just outside of Portland.  We headed down on Thursday and had a few adventures over the next few days.

We visited with Mike & Laura and their new baby, Malcolm.  The kids took turns holding him (heavily supervised, of course), and we went out to dinner on Friday evening.




Little Mikey MacMaster turned 9 weeks old on the day of our visit and was about 12 lbs.  Good lookin' chubby cheeks!

The kids also got to play with the instruments, too.
Cammie and Ben took turns playing with the squeeze box...

And Ben was really taken with the skinny little guitar.  It's just his size!

On Thursday, however, I got to spend some time with Heide.  We went out for sushi while Kelly took the kids to the movies.  We looked at homes that she is interested in moving to that will downsize their house and expenses, and did a little geocaching on the way.  Heide found one of them just a few paces away from one of the houses she was looking at.

Heide and I took in a quilt show on Friday that just happened to be going on.  The theme was Red and White, so there were several quilts that were just those two colors, but of course, I was drawn to the scrappy ones!









When we returned from our visit, we had one good night's sleep and then got together with some friends and supporters of the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation on the 12th annual Troll Stroll!  Our team was small, but we had a good time.  Lauren, Branden, and Daniel were part of our registered team, and we had Bekah and her boyfriend, Neil, joined us for a time before they headed out to get a late lunch.

Lauren ran into a friend who was part of the stroll last year, and here he was again...in a tutu.  Don't ask...you know, what happens on the Stroll stays on the Stroll.

At the end, I went to find a geocache up near the troll (it was actually two blocks away), which I thought was high time for me to go see.  After more than 20 years of living in the area, it's a shame that I have taken so long to go see this local icon.  I had to find the perfect place to stand in order to get the troll in and cut out the bums sleeping under the bridge and the camera man (whose lens still got into the right side of the frame) and the many tourists who took turns posing with the troll.  Someone took a bunch of chalk to the statue, which you just have to ignore.

Tomorrow...back to school.  I need to get to bed or it'll be a really hard morning.

Hello...my name is Karen...

...and I....I'm a...a quiltaholic!  <sob>

I took Emma with me today to go to the quilt show in Monroe (this ended up costing me a lunch and about $70 in manga books).  The show used to be held in the dingy, dark 400 building, but it was moved this year into a new, light, clean, high-ceiling building.  What an amazing place!  They had hundreds of quilts hanging up--I'm guessing 400 or more--in 10 or 11 different categories.

While I can't post *all* the pictures, I will post a few of my favorites.  I didn't catch all the names of the creators, there were so many stunning pieces!  Some of the pictures are a little blurry...I changed the settings on my camera about half-way through. Some of the photos looked clear enough while I was there, but appear much less so now that I'm home and can see it on 'the big screen'.

This one I just liked for the black and white simplicity.

A scrappy hexagon quilt.  There was another one just like it...

Loved the black and white and bright splashes of color.

I made a quilt similar to this called Majestic Mountain.  This one has an extra strip that has a triangle on the end to make the pinwheels in the middle.

I think this one said it was an antique...all hand sewn and hand quilted.  WOW!

This is a pretty bargello type quilt that reminds me of warm wool plaid blankets.  I have to wrap my brain around how this is made.  I'd like to make one, but I'm hoping it will turn out as pretty as this one.

This is a great way to use coordinated fabrics that are too busy to lay next to each other in a traditional pattern.  Just a little strip of black breaks up the busy fabrics and sets it off beautifully!  I have some aboriginal fabrics--I think they're Australian--that I've been struggling to find a way to showcase.

Another great scrap quilt.  So many of the quilts I liked best were scrappy.  Maybe it's because I have so many scraps, I am looking for ways to use them up.

This one had a sweet story to it.  You know on Valentine's Day, there are so many couples who go up to the top of the Empire State building to propose...this quilt was the Proposal Quilt...

Complete with a ring!

This one is hard to see, but it's called Flower Boxes--all the fabrics are florals.

This is the same kind of pattern that I used to hand out for a Friendship Block, except instead of brown, I used black and asked for bright colors.  Now I'm inspired to find all the blocks and sew them together...and maybe use up some more of my scraps!

This one I found striking because of the bright splash of color in the middle...but it's also...

3D!  I don't know how they did this fabric folding, but it's AWESOME!

This one was just so darn sweet!  Delicate ginger jar prints and tea service for four!  I just imagine four little girls playing teatime on the living room floor...

I love applique.  I even love doing it, but I always think it's more work to do and get absolutely perfect...so I don't do it very often.

More bright scrappiness.

This one is just awesome!  The photo, to the right, is of a bunch of trees in the Bayeux.  She recreated this using fabric and a special fiber called angel hair. Or angelica.  Or angelina.  Or something like that.

or possibly some yarn, but I think it's the angel stuff.

LOVE LOVE LOVE this!  Just a bunch of boats in the harbor.  Makes me think of Heide's Grampa Porgy.

This was an astounding 3-D quilt.  It's only about 24" tall, but dang!

More scrappy lovelies...

This one really tickled me--she used old silk neckties!  That's right...a SILK quilt!  Can you imagine how great that must be to snuggle with?!

Zig-zag quilt...kinda makes me think of Charlie Brown's shirt...again, these are made from scraps using a simple "flying geese" block...over and over and over.

This is some detail of a quilt that was machine quilted...those hearts are only a couple inches high.  Seriously small!!  This is something to aspire to...

I love the diamonds...they are, as they say, a girl's best friend...especially a girl with a lot of quilt scraps.

More scrappy bits!  

This, likewise, was a scrap busting challenge.  They took the scraps and made small squares--probably 4" square--and put those into a quilt top!  It's amazing how far you can stretch your stash!

More scrappy strips!  I really want to make some scrap quilts.  Both of these are stunning, and can show how you can set the blocks differently and use different border techniques.

This is a crazy quilt style.  Karen M. makes quilts like these, foundation piecing her scraps.  This one doesn't really have a place for your eye to rest, but it sure would spice up a boring bedroom!

This one is a show-stopper.  This one, I think, is going to take home quite a lot of ribbons, like Best of Show.  All the creatures are based on local art from the Pacific Northwest museum (with permission, of course), all appliqued, and then machine quilted with the most detailed patterns...

This is around the heron's legs!  Look at that fish!

 And this is the back of it!  I mean...wow!!!

This one is really stunning, too...lots of little tiny hexagons.  Also visually interesting because it doesn't have flat edges on two sides.

They also had a featured quilter, Klota Underwood, a very sweet lady who is undergoing cancer treatment again.  She had a number of quilts there--all of them were exquisite, as evidenced by the ribbons adorning the edges.  I took photos of a number of them, but these were my favorites:

Jacobean floral thingy on a purple-ish fabric (it looks a little brown here)

New York Beauty--I love these patterns, although I have never attempted them...or rather, I made a few blocks, but never finished a quilt top with them.

 Applique and New York Beauty spikiness.  Gorgeous!

This one was one of my favorites...block of the month flowers!

The show will be going on for two more days, so if you're in the Monroe area, you should stop in.  $7 and you can return all three days.  There's also a food area and lots of vendors.  Great stuff!  Enjoy!