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!

Call Me Cookie

I don't know if you can see it, but the sign attached to the other wagon reads, "Girl Scout Cookies will make the rain go away!"  That's a lofty promise to make...but cute!

Cammie's been selling a ton of cookies in the last couple of weeks, and this is the final week of the sale.  She's going to be in front of stores three days this week, trying to make up the last 20 boxes to her new goal of 300.  She stayed late at the coffee hour on Girl Scout Sunday and a lady came in and bought 20 boxes after the rest of the girls had gone home, so I petitioned the cookie mom to give her credit for those boxes.  We were the last ones there...everyone had been gone for 15 minutes or more.  I gave her some time to think about it (I really didn't petition that hard...just put the idea out there).  She eventually agreed after giving it some thought, so she's now up to 288 boxes.  12 more boxes and she's got it.  If she can't sell 12 boxes in four hours, we'll really need to work on her people skills.

More than anything, we'll need to do the big sell on the Operation Cookie Drop so our nation's finest can get a special gift while in the most dire of circumstances, and know that we're thinking of them and appreciate everything they do for us.

Even if they're goofing off.

Took a lovely walk this evening to find a Geocache hidden in that tree over there...that's #37!  I think I might be able to make it to 43 by my 43rd birthday.  Hard to believe that I'm going to be 43.  This 40 business is getting serious.  I'm buying myself a completer kit for the Geomate Jr.  When it does find a cache, it works really well!  Makes finding them a lot less troublesome.  The way I have to do it sometimes is by looking at the clues, looking at the map, using the GPS coordinates on Googlemaps to get a satellite view...it's time consuming and frustrating when the map shows a cluster of trees and there aren't any good hints from other cachers.  Then I'm just stumbling around in the woods, finding nothing but blackberry brambles and puddles.  Bleh.

Wrapping up Projects

I finished up the Anglo Saxon 6a test weave.  I hoped that this would be at least two yards long, but I only got it to about 1 3/4 yards before I ran out of length to work with.  It was a fun pattern and I'd like to try it again with a different layout of colors--more contrast between the background and the diamonds.  The lady who asked for help did hers with black background and red and yellow foreground patterns.  It's really striking.  While I like this color combination, I'm thinking I need to switch it up and do something different next time.  I like the idea of black background with yellow and red...or some variation.

Of course in the meantime, I warped up a new pattern, called Anglo Saxon #8 on Guntram's Tabletweaving Thingy.  I ran out of the bright green from the previous project, so I chose this darker evergreen color...I don't like it as much, but I love green and Kelly loves blue, so I thought it would make a nice marriage.  I also like the pattern of hooks.  I'll definitely do this one again.

I started this weave a little differently.  I started by back-twisting the cards a bunch of times to build up a twist in the opposite direction and to create "tails" at the beginning of the weave.  This, if nothing else, created a more solid platform to start weaving on.  I stuck in a "Woodsie" (popsicle sticks would work just fine) to hold the twist and anchored the weft thread to it, then started weaving.   It took a few tries, but I got it right.  Weaving left to right, I started turning the even cards first, including the #1 card, just like the last weave.

I decided not to use the swivels this time.  It didn't turn out quite as good as I'd hoped...the theory worked better than the practice.  Sadly.  It means that I'll be able to weave about half of it, then have to untwist the tangled mess.  Then I can weave half again...then untwist again.  PITA (pain in the ass) but will ensure even tension whereas the swivels were inconsistent.  Maybe I'll donate the swivels to a fisherwoman I know. :)

I took it with me to the social meeting where Cammie sold a few boxes of cookies, and I sat with Lady Emma (not my kid--the lady who asked about how to do the 6a weave) and we worked side by side and talked about home made cider and experimental archaeology.  By the time we left, I had about a foot or so finished, and I worked a bit longer on it after getting home.  One down, 11 more to go.

And one more project wrapped up...the bathroom is done!  While we still need to wait a few days for the grout to fully cure, the bathroom is usable for pottying and toothbrushing.  He suggested we not have them do any showering in there until Saturday, so they'll be able to get the floor wet by the weekend.  Hmmmm...wonder where the shower curtain went?  The only other thing we need is drawer pulls for the cabinet.

Our next mission is to save some money to replace the carpet.  I'm still thinking we should do it one room at a time, and maybe start with the closet in our bedroom, which I can do and no one will be able to see my learning curve.  Then our bedroom, the downstairs, then the other bedrooms and sewing room.  I'd like to get to the sewing room sooner, but we'll see.  The square footage alone is going to make the wood an enormous purchase, and we should probably get it all at once for cost effectiveness and color matching.  While I might be dreaming, I am still hoping that it'll happen this year.  This carpet is pretty beat.

Went to Children's for the quarterly check up today.  Everything looks pretty good, although Ben's lung function numbers were down a bit (probably due to the cough that we both had), and Emma needs to work on getting her medicine done every night...same story.  Emma grew another inch...now she's 5' 5".  I think she has officially become "grotesquely tall" for our family.  Ben is still 3' 10" and 48 lbs.  We need to get that boy to eat more!  Hot lunch tomorrow...one less thing to worry about.

Cookie Day and More Weaving

I didn't get to Omi's today.  I delivered some cookies to a customer first thing this morning and ended up chatting with her for quite a while.  She's very nice, but seems to be in the midst of boyfriend chaos and needs to unload him.  When I left, he was arriving with a small bunch of flowers.  Oh dear...time to go!  I needed a cuppa, so I pulled into the Starbucks and while I was getting my drink, the handyman called and said he was running late due to an emergency at one of the apartment complexes he works for.  I got home and once again, I waited around for the handyman to show up for several hours.  Kelly got home just after 2:00 and I ran off to get the little kids from school as well as one of the Girl Scouts who was scheduled to sell cookies with Cammie today.  We got back to the house, grabbed the last few things for the cookie sale, and I got the call from the handyman that he wasn't going to make it after all.  He'll be here tomorrow all day to finish the tiling, which he got about half-finished yesterday.  it's looking really good so far, and he estimated that we'd have the bathroom back this weekend.  Maybe Monday...



So we got to the store to set up, and started by going in to talk to the manager and gifted him a box of cookies.  He already had a set of girls out there selling (their shift was scheduled to end at 4:00, when our shift started), and was really surprised and delighted by getting a box of cookies!  He laughed and said that since there were witnesses (other employees) he supposed he'd have to share them...and he did!  Another employee came out and said he had a couple.  Cool!  The girls danced and hawked their wares, and ended up selling 60 boxes in 2 hours. Pretty awesome!  14 of them were gifts to our soldiers and their families.  We gave little thank you slips from us to most of the buyers.  We did have one woman who was vocal about not supporting the Girl Scouts, although she DOES support Boy Scouts. OK, thanks for sharing your political views.

Aside from cookies and home improvements, I got thrown back into weaving again.  Over the last day or two, another tablet weaver asked about a pattern she was experimenting with.  She's new to the weaving gig, and she's already jumped into the intermediate and advanced pieces.  I like her gumption!  She's doing great work and enjoying it!  So she asked me to look at a pattern on Guntram's Tablet Weaving Thingy (that's the actual name of it) and see what's going on.  She said hers "looked funny".  So I quickly warped up a couple yards (not the full length) of the weaving pattern and gave it a go.

Well, first I had to figure out how to get the darn program to work.  It has a really unusual file type, so I had to download the program, then monkey with the guts of my computer for a while to find the program and get the computer to recognize the files and open them.  That took another 45 minutes of my time.  Once I got it to open the files, it worked like a dream.  They have lots of cool patterns and somehow you can create your own patterns on the Tablet Weaving Thingy.

Like many of the other Anglo-Saxon weaves, you have to separate the odd and even numbered cards and turn them alternately between shuttle throws.  I followed the directions turning the odd pack first, throwing the shuttle, then turning the even pack.  Repeat a few times.  First problem, that first card wasn't weaving in properly; the shuttle was missing it entirely.  I unwove back to the start and decided to make card #1 part of the even pack instead of the odd pack--just make it another card 2, as it were.  That solved that problem--no more stringy bits hanging off the left side.  However, turning the odd cards first before the even ones still made the pattern look odd.  Certainly not like the picture.  I stared at it, scratched my head, unwove it, re-wove it backwards, unwove it again...then started looking at the white designs in the pattern.  They're supposed to be diamonds, but it was weaving up out of order.  It struck me that maybe the directions were wrong...maybe the even numbered cards should be turned first...

I gave it a try after having woven a few passes starting with the odd pack.  As you can see, the first centimeter or two "look funny", then the next few repeats are a fun twisted diamond pattern.  I sent my findings to Debbie, so hopefully this is the same issue she was having and it will be corrected on her weave as well.  I love being able to help out someone else with their weaving.  I'm not the expert...not even close...but I love a good puzzle.

The other great thing about these Anglo-Saxon patterns is that they are double-sided.  The front and back look the same!  This is what the front and back of this piece look like.  Very cool!  I'm not sure if I like this color layout...I think I might try this again but reversing the green and white for higher contrast.