Yes, I Still Cross-Stitch!

Though I haven't posted a cross stitch finish for a while, I still stitch. I recently finished several larger pieces, and have "finished" two of them. The third, Raise the Roof's "Crabby All Year" is awaiting finishing.

This one is Prairie Schooler's "Q is for Quilting," stitched on 28-count linen.

This one is Bent Creek's "Cabin in the Woods."  I stitched on 28-count linen, but over one thread instead of two. So the finished size is about 5" x 3".

Bighorn Mini from Karen

I received this mini a couple of weeks ago - it's from Karen, my March-April partner in my Flickr STUD (Swap 'Til You Drop) group. Our theme this time was "My Favorite Things."  We made a list of 5 favorite things, and our partner was to pick one or more and make a quilt for that theme. Karen knew that I liked the "out of doors," and she also visited my Wanderlust blog. I've posted about bighorns several times - how they're such beautiful animals that represent the wildness and wilderness I love.  She made this wonderful mini of two clashing bighorns. It's hanging where I can see it as I sit in my recliner.  Isn't it lovely?

A couple of recent finishes

During spring break, I took a few things with me so I could make some small quilts. 

 This one is made from a little pack of 2.5" squares I received as a gift. I gave it to a young woman named Jessica, who used to play soccer with Theresa. She was another recipient  of the "pay it forward" I did on Facebook.

This wonky flying geese mini was inspired by Gwen Marston's Liberated Quilting books. I had two sets of 5" charms, both the same line, and needed to use them up. I made two of these, and will give them as gifts.

These crooked pinwheels are also from the same set of 5" charms, and also inspired by Gwen Marston.

This is the back of the quilt. I just "made" fabric from scraps and put some of the bigger pieces together to make the back.

More crooked pinwheels. This little piece, which is about 10" square, was a condo-warming gift for my friend Chris. It goes perfectly with the colors in his living room.

When we were camped at Anza-Borrego last month, Patty and I each bought a souvenir handkerchief map.  I added a border, put batting and a backing on each one and did spiral quilting and binding. Patty says hers will hang in their motor home, and I think I'll put mine in our trailer. 

One of the blogs I contribute to, Bumblebeans 15 Minutes of Play, has organized a 12" x 12" mini swap, where we were to make it only from scraps in our stash.  I had pretty much used up all my small pieces of regular (non-batik) fabric on numerous other minis, so I decided to dip into my batik scraps.
The mini above was the first one.  I made so many mistakes on it, I decided to start over and make another one.  While I was doing "liberated quilting," there are still basic rules of quilting that one must follow. This one looked pretty shoddy on the back due to some basic errors.  At least it looks nice on the front, so I'll keep it.

This was the second one. See the border? That fixed one of the errors I'd made.  This one will go to my partner for the swap.

This one was another "using up" mini - I had these 3" squares and thought the color would go well on a summery placemat.

Mini Heart for Jo Ann

On Facebook, one of my friends posted a "Handmade Pay-it-Forward Challenge." She said the first 4 who commented would receive something handmade from her sometime in 2011. We had to agree to pay it forward. This is a mini for my friend Jo Ann, who attended Coronado High School in Lubbock, Texas with me back in the early '70s. One down, 3 to go!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Calico Cat mini for Karen and a B for Brenda

This month's theme for STUD (Swap 'Til You Drop) is "My Favorite Things." We listed 5 of our favorite things and then our partner was to make a mini using one or more of them. Karen had "cats" on her list, and I had just seen how to do a liberated one in Gwen Marston's book Liberated Quilting.

I made a calico cat, and inserted a ribbon collar with a little metal tag hanging from it.





Next up was my first letter from Tonya Ricucci's book Word Play Quilts. Brenda, on her blog Scraps and Strings, asked for each reader to help her celebrate her birthday by making her a B. She'll put them together into a quilt--I can't wait to see how it turns out.

Here's the B I made for Brenda.



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Our Homes Together - #s 10 and 12

I completed two more of our homes today for my "Our Homes Together" quilt. This one was located at the end of Dogwood Drive in Forest Falls, California. It was a manufactured home, rectangular in shape, but had what anyone wants to have - location, location, location.  It sat at the edge of Mill Creek - with a large boulder wash between the house and the creek (which was a good thing, since Mill Creek often flooded in tremendous fashion). It had a deck that ran the entire front of the house and then into a larger deck area on the side. From the deck you could look up into the San Gorgonio Wilderness - the boundary is on the other side of the creek. We could sit on our deck and look in any direction and not see another house since everyone else lived further away from the creek.  It had 3 small bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room with a small wood stove. This one is a bit wonkier than I'd like - but since these blocks are supposed to be symbolic as opposed to photographic, it'll do just fine.

Home #10 - Dogwood Drive, Forest Falls, California

This next one was a bit more complicated to make due to the 2 stories that were just on one side of the house, and the extra gable above the garage. But once I figured out how to make it work, it came together just fine. The angles are pretty neat - I don't want everything to look "perfect!" We bought this house because it was in the center of town, and the kids were in middle and high school and were very active in sports. (Kenny:  water polo, swimming, and soccer, Theresa: soccer and track). That meant that not only was I 5 minutes from the school where I taught, we had mostly short drives to the kids' practices.

Home #12 - Lockwood Drive, Yucaipa, California

Three down, 11 to go.  I decided to do one of our trailer, since it's one of our homes, too.

"Our Homes Together" Quilt-Block 1

This is my first post using Blogpress, an app for the iPad, since the iPad won't let you use Blogger. I got the iPad to take on our trips, since my laptop is 8 years old and will most likely die of old age in the near future. I'm pleasantly surprised at how easy it is to use.

I'm trying more and more "liberated" quilting, and one of my new projects is to create a quilt that has blocks representing all 14 of the homes Don & I have lived in together.

The first one is below. It was in a small town called Grafenhausen, in Germany. I was in the Air Force, stationed at Rhein-Main Air Base, arriving there in June of 1980. I rented a one-bedroom apartment that took up the top floor of this building-so I had to go up and down 3 flights of stairs. I met Don at the end of August, and he moved in sometime in October. (We were married in February of 1981, and just celebrated our 30th anniversary.)

Our bedroom was on the left side, and the bathroom on the right. Both had steeply slanted ceilings. The kitchen and the living room were in the middle and were much roomier. We had a balcony, which I depicted using the brown rectangle. The red rectangles represent the window boxes of geraniums that we saw in every house each spring.

Next up: our home in Walldorf, Germany.



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My First Landscape Quilt

In addition to all the shopping and the wonderful quilts on display, Road to California Quilt Show also offers classes. I wanted to learn a new technique, so I signed up for "The Art of Landscape" with Terry Waldron.We were to bring lots of fabric that we thought could be used for mountains and trees, and anything else we wanted. She showed us how to make the initial design board (simple:  foam core board and batting), how to cut fabric so that the edges were rough and ragged, and took us through some basic principals of design and perspective. She took us through the making of our mountains, and then our foregrounds.  Everyone else in the class made green-based foregrounds - but I wanted a desert landscape. When I realized around lunchtime that I needed more fabric, I visited several hand-dyed fabric and batik vendors and stocked up.

By about 1:30 pm, I had completed my mountains, canyons, and desert floor.  The stage was set, but I needed a leading actor.

Still in need of a focus

At one of the vendors I'd visited, I'd picked up a stash of fabric that could be used for rocks, trees, leaves, and such.  One of the pieces reminded me of the bark of an oak. It also looked like granite, but I decided to use it for the main part of the tree trunk.  I cut it out, and put it on the background, and thought it looked pretty good.  But Terry said it needed depth - and suggested filling in the inside of the trunk with darker colors.  An hour or so later, I had filled in the interior of the trunk with brown batiks and hand-dyed fabrics.We thought it looked really, really nice.

By then, it was 4:30 and the day was over - I couldn't believe I'd been working since 8:30 am.  I brought my piece home, and leaned it up on the couch where I could see it from my recliner. I looked at it for almost two weeks - thinking it still needed something else.  I initially thought I might need an animal of some kind, and looked at roadrunners and desert bighorn sheep.  But due to the requirements of perspective, they would have had to have been huge, and I didn't want to do that.  My husband eventually said to try leaves, and just put them on the ground. So that's what I did, and I was really pleased with the results.

Next came the quilting - and since I was doing it on a Featherweight, it was a bit dicey in places. But I pretty much just outlined all the pieces, and added lots of horizontal lines in the sky, mountains, and desert floor, and vertical lines in the canyon walls. Terry had said that these kinds of quilts didn't need borders, so I just added a dark brown binding.

From my vantage point in the recliner.

The final result.

I'm quite proud of it. I hope you like it, too!

Boomerang 4.0 - Set 3

I finished a lot more Boomerang Blocks:

#13 - Lover's Knot

#14 - King's Crown

#15 - Twinkle Star

#16 - Pennsylvania

#17 - Hand Weave

#18 - Alice's Favorite

#19 - July Fourth

#20 - Red Cross Variation

#21 - Air Castle

#22 - Whirlwind

#23 - Amish Diamond

#24 - Sawtooth Star

#25 - July Fourth

#26 - Road to Heaven

#27 - Hand Weave

#28

#29

#30

Love, Love, Love mini for S.T.U.D.

This mini is for Jody, who is my partner for this round in Swap Till You Drop (S.T.U.D.).  The theme was "Love, love, love."  This was my first attempt at a free-form, raw-edge mini.  I think I like doing these! 

Storm at Sea Block for a swap

I really didn't enjoy making this block.  The directions I used were from Quilters' Cache (the Marcia Hohn site), and required a step where I was to make a paper template, then measure out a plastic template 1/4" larger all around, and then cut out the fabric from there.  It turned out I could have a) rotary cut the rectangles, then b) cut them from one corner to the other for the corners, and could have made large rectangles and cut from the middles to the corners for the large diamonds.   At any rate, it's finished, and I think it looks pretty nice.

If you'd like to see what a whole (or nearly whole) quilt looks like using Storm at Sea blocks, visit Martha's blog Quiltcontemplation. This post shows them all put together.

More Boomerang Blocks - Set 2

I finished 8 more Boomerang blocks.  I'm having a good time with these - see how they are all so different?  I'm using several different sources for patterns:  Quilter's Cache on the internet, the Quilter's Block-a-Day Calendar by Debby Kratovil, the Quilt Block Tool application on my iphone, and some other assorted web pages.

#4 Mosaic Star

#5 Mrs. Taft's Choice

#6 Black and White

#7 Holiday Mosaic

#8 Windmills

#9 Hayes Corner

#10 - Ohio Star

#11 - Colorado Beauty

#12 - Red Cross Variation