Sneak peak….

Posted on March 18, 2010 by katyquilts

of a new piece I am working on for a local show…..

Oh, I am loving this new desk/cabinet!

Back to work!

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What to do with practice pieces?

Posted on March 18, 2010 by katyquilts

My free motion quilting is not good these days……I am WAYYYYY out of practice. Most books will tell you to doodle on a practice sandwich of top, batting, and backing before starting on the “real” piece. Good advice. But what do you all do with these practice pieces?

I made cozies for the foot pedals of my Featherweights as well as a sleeve for a travel iron. But my favorite thing to make is zippered bags like this:

This worked great for protecting my scissors and such while traveling. I made one a while back that I use for my double pointed needles:

I liked to seam the ends in such a way as to make the bag more three dimensional. Just for fun :).  I find the zippers at thrift shops. I have  some bigger pieces to use also:

This one is about 14 inches square. I have only shown a part of the piece. It would be a good size for the front of a tote bag….like I need another one of those! Cutting it means small zippered bags…. Hmmmmm…….  

 Any ideas?  What do you do with your practice pieces?

Until next time….

Posted in Free Motion Quilting | 1 Comment

A new sewing table!

Posted on March 17, 2010 by katyquilts

I have the best dear husband! I am forever trying to figure out the ultimate quilting/sewing set up. He puts up with a lot in my fiddling with things. He often ends up getting invloved. He does a great job! Last weekend, I found a desk at Goodwill. It looked to be a perfect size- not too big, not too small…..just about right for machine quilting and piecing and much heavier than the folding table I had been using. It seems that most tables/sewing cabinets do not have as much space in FRONT of the needle as I would like. If we could modify this desk, I could have as much as I wanted and still have room to support a quilt behind the needle. It was more work than I expected but it turned out great. Here are pics in case you would like to see how it was done:

First he had to move the drawers to the left side from the right side.

He cut a hole so the machine would sit nearly flush with the table. The extension table that came with machine rests just a hair above the desk top.

Here you can see how he used bolts with sleeves to fasten the board to the bottom of the table. He used an oak stair riser for the board.

The desk cost $25 and the additional materials brought the total to about $45.

This was a commerical office desk and it weighs a ton even though the top measures just 30″ x 42″. I can really speed and there is no vibration at all. I love the space in front of the needle to support the work if machine quilting and for laying out pieces when I am piecing. Hope this gives some of you ideas for making or modifying  your own table.

Until next time!

Posted in Free Motion Quilting, Sewing Machines, Sewing Room Pics, Uncategorized | 11 Comments

It’s working!

Posted on March 12, 2010 by katyquilts

Well, I have written about my total lack of creativity as far as art quilting goes. For the longest time, I found myself wandering into the sewing room, looking around and moving a few things and walking back out again. I have done a lot of knitting over the last 6-9 months but I am not a creative knitter. I make mittens and socks and plain ones at that. A while back I decided I needed to do SOMETHING and starting cutting my scraps, my repro scraps, very traditional stuff. And I starting sewing again. I made some Dear Jane blocks among other things. I came home from Arizona and yesterday decided I needed to make one small thing.

One small thing…..using a basket with some hand dyed scraps so there wasn’t too much to choose from. The scraps were colors of the desert. I decided to make one small( 5″ x 7″ ish) piece and that it did not have to be a masterpiece, just finished. Here is what I ended up with:

This is actually about 6 x 8 inches. Okay, no award winner but it is done, even the facing. Cool! I went off and did other stuff around the house. Hmmmmm……. what if…… yes, I have an hour and a half before dear daughter gets home….. maybe I can do one more…. Back to the sewing room! Pulled strips and scraps from the same basket and tried not to spend too much time overthinking. Second piece done!

This one is about 8 x 10 inches or so. No, it is not straight. This reminds me of the  way the colors/light changes throughout the day in Arizona. Granted, this is another simple piece but at least I DID something instead of just thinking about it and reading blogs about what others are doing!

And, when I finished this, I picked up and finished the facing on another piece that was nearly finished last spring! Okay, that done, I moved on to a piece that had been hanging on my design wall for  ages as well. I kept trying to figure out what it needed next and was stuck. I wanted to make it taller but it wanted to be wider. I finished that top and got it ready for quilting. I pulled ANOTHER piece off the  wall, added a few strips and basted that. I even got that one quilted late last night!

Kathy Loomis has some excellent posts on her blog about finding your voice in your art. I read it in between trips to the sewing room yesterday and can wholeheartedly recommend what she has to say here! Kathy is a terrific artist and knows of what she speaks. One of the biggest things is that you must KEEP WORKING on something, anything.

The less creative I am, the less creative I am! The more I work, the more ideas I generate. I woke up this morning with a new idea in my head. That hasn’t happened in a while. I think just going back to what I know (traditional stuff) and doing the sewing got my moving forward even though it seemed and looked like moving backward.

Okay, enough rambling here….I have stuff to make! Until next time…..

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Desert Textures

Posted on March 11, 2010 by katyquilts

One of the things I loved about the desert was the huge variety of textures everywhere I looked! I hope you enjoy this little closeup tour:

Hope you enjoyed this little mini tour! Until next time….

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Arizona is the place to be!

Posted on March 10, 2010 by katyquilts

And that is exactly where I have been! I flew out to Phoenix for a week to visit my son.

 He lives on the west side in Avondale and goes to school at UTI. It was a wonderful week of visiting, playing mom and even cooking for him! While he was at school/work, I did some work on my Dear Jane (or not!) blocks. I got 9 of them finished, only one short of my goal. My son doesn’t have much furniture so I mostly worked sitting on the floor. Here is my set up:

I highly recommend the June Tailor cutting mat/ironing surface. I got mine with a coupon at JoAnn’s a while back and never used it until this trip. It is the perfect item for traveling!

While he was home, I helped a bit with a small project on his ’77 Trans Am. This time he was replacing door panels:

We also spent some time exploring the desert! I loved it! Here are a few of many pics I took there:

The colors and textures were amazing! I took a number of close ups of textures and I will post those later this week.

Until next time….

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A few oldies….

Posted on March 1, 2010 by katyquilts

Since I am still in my traditional quilting kick, I thought I would show you a couple golden oldie quilts. The first one was made with friendship blocks swapped way back in the hey day of the AOL Quilting Forum!

This hangs in my music room surrounded by the kids many instruments. Normally, the Victrola sits in front of it like this:

The next one is called Remember Me. It was published in Quilt or Quilt Almanac about 10 years ago.

Sorry you can’t see all of it. It is too hard to move the piano!

This one is hand pieced and both are handquilted. So I KNOW they are old!

Until next time….

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Dear Jane….I am sorry but…..

Posted on February 28, 2010 by katyquilts

I just don’t think I can follow your rules. I know you worked hard on all those 4 1/2″ blocks and I tried to follow the book, really I did. But it just isn’t going to happen. Love and admiration, Katy

A number of years ago, my local guild makde a Dear Jane raffle quilt. There were a lot of leftover photocopies of pages and someone gave them to me.  I was quite fascinated and  decided to make some of the blocks. I got kind of hooked on it and yet I had other blocks that I liked that were not in the book. I made them anyway. I invented more blocks with things that are important to me: a school house, my family members’ initials, scissors, a cross etc. I made 100 blocks and put them together into this:

This picture is washed out but most of the prints are repros or things that just look old to me. You can’t tell but the border is quilted with feathers. I won a ribbon at a local show with this for Best Traditional. I love this quilt and had a lot of fun making it my way and my own.

Fast forward a few years and I am again thinking I should do the Dear Jane thing. I bought the book. I made patterns. I made some blocks. This past week I discovered the 25 or so I had done and decided to make more. Some of these are really fussy to make. I thought about simplifying a few blocks but the very thought made me feel like a criminal or at least a serious slacker….

I remembered this quilt I finished earlier and got it out of the closet. I am going to put a sleeve on it and hang it in my front room.  I remembered how much I loved this and how fun it was to make without being married to the pattern.

Once again, I decided to ditch Jane. I will still make plenty of blocks from the book but I will change them with wild abandon. I will add and subtract to my hearts content. The world doesn’t need one more Jane Stickle wanna be quilt from me.

I think I will call this, Sister Kate, She Hath Done What She Could…..

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A Blog Give Away!

Posted on February 27, 2010 by katyquilts

Wil is having a giveaway on her blog to celebrate her 333rd post! Click here  for details and to see her lovely work.  She is giving away a piece of her snow dyed fabric. Get a cup of coffee, you will be there a while. The first time I visited, I had to go back and read every post!

Until next time….

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Hmmmm….what to do, what to do…..

Posted on February 27, 2010 by katyquilts

We lived in France for a few years in the late ’90s. We were so blessed to be able to travel and see some of Europe. On one trip to the Netherlands, I was able to visit Den Hans & Wagenmakers in Amsterdam. I purchased some of their lovely blue and white wax prints as well as a grouping of repro Dutch fabrics. They were pricy but lovely. I have long enjoyed handpiecing, particularly hexagons. So I decided o do just that with these lovely fabrics. The problem is that since completing these pieces, I have taken them out and put them away a bazillion times becuase I could never figure out how to put them together! They looked lovely all bundled up with a ribbon. Now I keep saying, do they even go together?

What do you think?

If I go with this layout, I will need to piece a lot more diamonds in something plain to tone them down a bit. This is the best I can come up with at this point. I need a good hand project next week and thought this would be it. I guess I need to sleep on this one, one more time….

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