French Braid Quilt

Today I quilted a customer quilt, a French Braid. The pattern is Feather Frenzy by Linda Taylor. I just love this quilt. As beautiful as it looks in this photo, it is even prettier in person! Her fabric choices are just lovely.

Last February, just after I got my longarm, Michael and I met our friends Ricardo and Sylvie, who were visiting from Italy, in Ft. Lauderdale for lunch. It was a gorgeous day, and we took some photos of each other with the ocean in the background. While we were reviewing the photos we had just taken, some that I had previously taken of my longarm were on the memory card. So I showed them, explained what a longarm was, and how excited I was about learning how to use it. After lunch, we said goodbye, and each went our separate ways. We both went to Miami, as it turned out. Michael and I went to visit Brandon, and they went to a dinner party hosted by friends we did not know. We hadn't planned to see them again, that trip.

Our phone rang just as we were finishing dinner at our favorite restaurant in Miami that night. It was Ricardo, calling from his friend's dinner party. He said that the hostess was a quilter and that he really thought we should meet! So, we got the address, and with Brandon's navigation skills, (he drives a fire truck for Miami Dade, so he's kind of a human GPS), drove right to the home. The party was outside, at a long table set under the trees, which were lit with little white fairy lights. They had moved the living room furniture outside, and people were lounging around under the stars. Miki, the hostess showed me her quilting room and several works in progress. I was so impressed with her work. She had taken a class with the author of the French Braid book and had a great eye for color. Our friends just looked on, stunned. They said, it is like you two are speaking some foreign language! She mentioned having a bad experience with her longarm quilter (the person took 6 months (!) to get the quilt back to her, and it was a quilt for a little boy, so she had requested no flowers, and it came back quilted with flowers)

So, later this summer I came across her card and sent her an email. She contacted me and sent me this beauty to quilt. I got it yesterday, finished it today. She should have it by Tuesday.

I hope she likes it!

Artist Trading Cards

I am a member of a small art quilt group that meets every other week for 3 hours to play around and explore our creativity. We call ourselves the Secret Artist Society (Sassy for short) and we have 9 members. I have learned so much from these ladies! As in any group, the diverse backgrounds of the individual members enhances the whole. Some members are fine artists, and they have shared a lot of knowledge, tools and materials that I never knew existed. (Brayers? Gel medium? huh?) Some of us were collectors of odds and ends that we knew we would use some day, in some project! Some of us just read Cloth, Paper Scissors and Quilting Arts and our hearts beat faster. Some of us have had pieces exhibited in National quilt shows, are teachers of these techniques, and all of us are interested/awed/fascinated and willing to get our feet wet. We are all passionate about fibers in some form or other, and our work here all gets sewn on in the end.
When the group first started, each week we played with a different technique. We did resist/discharging, monoprinting (with fish!) foiling, stenciling, altered books. What seemed to be missing was some continuity between the projects. So, our member Kathy came up with the idea of doing Artist trading cards, exchanging them, and then sewing them together into a 9 patch quilt.
My cards were a little late in coming together, since I was sidelined with the wretched illness acquired from the grandchildren for a week or so, but I finally finished them yesterday. I am happy with them! It's actually a little difficult to part with them. At the meeting where we exchanged them, the members all displayed all of their cards, and then went around and chose one card from each person. Since mine weren't finished for that meeting, I get to give each person a card that I think they would like. Who knows whether it would have been the one they would have chosen if given the chance. Probably not. Or maybe so. Whatever....

Our Disney Adventure

We had a GREAT time on our little getaway to Disney last week! Michael and I took our grand kids and their parents. My stepdaughter called a few days before we left to say that they were all sick, but were getting better and did we still want to go? We said Sure, let's go, if you are up for it, so they arrived on Saturday night. Abby was coughing, Haley was burning up but still smiling, David (Dad) was on a nebulizer! Mom (Loni) was stoic, carrying on, as Moms do in such situations. We left bright and early Sunday for the Animal Kingdom Lodge. What a gorgeous place! I knew I was going to love it there from the minute I stepped inside the doors and saw the aboriginal quilts hanging in the reception area. The Lodge had an African theme, and the attention to detail throughout the hotel was amazing. Mind you, I am not what you would call a Disney freak. But it was a fun place to go with the kids and this hotel was so cool, I would have loved it no matter where it was located.

We enjoyed a few great days, with the kids feeling better every day. First we went to the Magic Kingdom, the girls first visit. They are 2 and 4. Abby was fascinated, watching them monogram her Mouse Ears hat. Hmmm, a future quilter, perhaps? We had a great time, went on the tea cups, race track, merry go round, flying dumbos, Pirates of the Caribbean and It's a Small World. The girls got autographs from several of the characters. I think they were most in awe of Belle. All of the characters sign the autograph books in character, with a flourish. We agreed Belle's signature was the best. The day ended on a spectacular, but totally unplanned note. We all stood in line in Tomorrow land waiting to get on the rocket ride. When it is almost your turn to ride, you take an elevator up to where the ride begins. We were standing on a huge platform on top of the park when the fireworks started up, and we had the most amazing view. Tinkerbell flew from the castle, and went right by us. We couldn't have planned it any better. We ended the first day tired, but happy.

The next day, we wandered around the hotel. They have several wildlife observation areas where the Serengeti abuts the resort. They have these young conservation biologists from all over the world who are eager to tell you all about the animals. The animals all looked very sleek and healthy. They seemed inured to the tourists gawking at them, did not pay us much mind. We went to Epcot later in the day, spent a lot of time in the Ocean exhibit watching sea turtles, dolphins, and beautiful fish. Abby was a dive buddy in an interactive dive exhibit. Her shirt that day read Most Likely To Save The World, and she is. Michael is fascinated by the hydroponics in the Land exhibit there. We also saw the dinosaurs, rode the Race Track, ate in Germany. We left as the fireworks were starting up, as there were huge clouds gathering. Good move, by the time we got to our bus, the skies had opened.

On our last day, we did the Animal Kingdom. We went on Safari, saw a Bugs' Life, Loni rode on the Himalaya roller coaster, brave soul that she is! The girls were pretty beat by the end of the day, and...Michael and I were incubating our exposure to those lovely virus particles that we had come in to contact with when the girls first came to visit.

By the time we left, we were sick as dogs, and the girls and family were fully recovered and raring to go! We parted company, with them headed to Downtown Disney, and us headed home to bed, with a stop at the doctor's on the way for antibiotics.

(Still trying to figure out how to move the photos around in the blog text...)

Moving Day!

After much deliberation, I decided to move my quilting room from our house over to the guest house where I have my longarm, so that I will have a dedicated area where I can go to work and have all of my stuff together in the same place.
The advantages to having my sewing room under my roof at home were that I could just go in there and sew whenever I had a few spare moments, or late at night, or early in the morning, and still be near enough to my husband so that we were still together-ish, even if not participating in the same actual activity. I will miss that. He will too.
The reasons I decided to move have to do with noise, temperature, and the experience of having whatever I needed be in the other place! I work some of my day, most days, in a very cool environment. When I come home, if it is really hot, I am sluggish and uncomfortable. It is not fun to wrestle with fabric and batting in 80 plus degree heat! My husband loves to be outside all day, gardening. Yes, in the 90+ degree South Florida heat and humidity, I know! He HATES air conditioning, is in fact allergic to it. His bronchial tubes close up. In my guest house, I can control the temperature and the music. My husband has lately been fond of French music, sung in French. Some of it is catchy, but I like to listen to audiobooks, or my own music. I also have the experience known to anyone who has 2 homes of always needing/wanting the thing that you have left at the Other Place.
So...I am Moving Out. Still in the process of organizing, but I think it is going to work out OK. We moved the 2 twin beds out of the guest house and into my old sewing room. Tonight, Michael's daughter, husband and 2 girls are coming up to Sleep Over, so they can try out the new beds downstairs. In the morning, we are off to Disney for a few days, the girls first visit! Abby told us on the phone yesterday "I'm so excited, I can't stand it, Grandpa!".

Janey says...

That ever since Bill was a puppy, she would let him out when the lawn guys came, and they would play with him by blowing at him with their leaf blowers. He would bark and bite the air! So, he must have associated the rake with the lawn guys that he plays with. However, he has NEVER bitten a lawn guy!!
Last night, Bill gave Michael an apology note and a LARGE box of Michael's favorite Starbucks Coffee Cake as an "I am SO sorry about the incident with the rake" gift. Michael LOVES Starbucks Coffee Cake. It remains to be seen whether Michael will ever love a Wheaten...

Jungle Fever Quilt

These are some photos of a quilting design I am going to do on a customer quilt. Because I am still fairly new at this, I like to do a trial run of a design on a scrap piece before I actually start to sew on the customer's quilt to find out if there are any operator errors lying in wait for me. This one went pretty smoothly. The pattern is called Jungle Fever. I try to specialize in the organic shapes, leaves, vines and feathers. I love to play with different textures in my work. I bought all of these squares precut at one of my favorite fabric stores in Maine, Onboard Fabrics. They were all bundled together for $5. a bundle. The lighter green square is silk, and the others are different upholstery weight remnants. The brown one has the texture of a brain coral! I just sewed the blocks together randomly, and will use it for a throw for a couch on my porch. For the back, I used a solid brown Ultrasuede that I bought on sale at Joanne. I used a new thread, Isacord, that was recommended by one of my teachers in Nashville, Jaime Wallen. I loved the thread! It had virtually zero lint, was light and strong, and the rasberry color I used had a pretty sheen to it. It is polyester, but almost looked like rayon. I used it in both the bobbin and on top. He recommended using it for the bobbin, and he uses an unspecified Superior thread on the top. But, I didn't read that until after I was done, so Oh Well. I normally use Superior So Fine for both top and bobbin.

I was hoping to take this to my Quilt Guild meeting tonight for Show and Tell, but have not gotten the binding on yet, so I guess I will wait till next time.

On the judge's comment sheets for my Witch quilt that won Honorable Mention at Maine Quilts, all of the judges said that my bindings needed work. I was asking one of my teachers in Nashville for advice on doing better bindings, and she recommended a tool, the Piping Hot Binding Tool, which of course I bought. And lost!

My sewing room has just been re-located from dowstairs in my house to the guest house, so things are a bit topsy turvy in the sewing world at the moment. But stay tuned! I'll find that darned Piping Hot Binding Tool if it's the last thing I do!

It's All About Bill

This Sunday was our 6th wedding anniversary. Michael and I pretty much celebrate every day, so we don't really do a big celebration on The Day or anything. I made plans to work on a quilt on my longarm, and Michael is working on putting in a big vegetable garden on about a half acre he has recently cleared, building frames and trellises and planting stuff.

When Janey, Bill's Mom, told us she would be going to a trade show in Orlando for the day on Sunday, I offered to keep an eye on Bill while they were gone. Big sacrifice on my part, right? Any excuse to spend time with my beloved Bill! The day started off great, I picked Bill up, he hopped right into my car and we went to my quilt studio, where he hung out happily, running in and out of the house, playing with his little squeaky hedgehog. After a while we walked over to where my husband was working in the garden. Bill had a blast romping around the yard. I had high hopes that Michael would look at this cute fuzzy pup frolicking around, fall in love, and decide that we indeed needed a Wheatie of our very own, the sooner the better. I hopped in the pool. Bill ran back and forth next to the pool while I was swimming. I was sending silent mental messages to Bill "Go play with Michael" "Go bond with Michael". So far, so good! Michael came over and started to rake along the edge of the driveway, next to the pool, talking to Bill the whole time. Bill started to bark at the rake. I have never had a dog before, so I'm thinking, Oh, he wants to play with the rake. A smarter person than I am would have gotten out of the pool at this point, lead Bill away from the rake and gotten him interested in something else. Alas, I am not that smart. Bill then bit Michael on the hand that was holding the rake. Michael very calmly said "You can take this dog home now." I got out of the pool and drove Bill home, tout suite.
RATS!!!!
Haven't mentioned this to Janey yet...

Glad Ike took a hike!

I'm exhausted from the preparations for Hurricane Ike! My husband and I are just planners by nature...if you were stranded on the proverbial desert island, you'd probably be pretty happy to have us be there with you! I've been up since about 4:30 making lists, running errands, helping neighbors, watching the Tropical Update on the Weather Channel. I'll just bet they have cancelled all vacations until further notice at the Weather Channel these days! In some ways, I am glad that I pretty much know what to expect from a hurricane. In 2004, we had Jeanne and Frances each make landfall in my town, within weeks of each other. The next year we had a direct hit from Wilma. I have a whole hurricane commemorative T shirt collection from that year, my favorite being a swirling white hurricane aerial shot, with the smiling head of Wilma Flintstone superimposed on it.

So, there are stages we go through - the Before the storm, the During the storm, and the After the storm. They are all different, but equally intense.

Before the storm, you get cash, fill your gas tank, refill your prescriptions, charge all of your batteries, take pictures to document the "before", check your supplies - lanterns, candles, radios, batteries, a land line hurricane phone, TV with rabbit ears, lighters, heavy duty extension cords. Chainsaw blades and oil, trash bags, bleach, gloves, Ben Gay, Advil, groceries, beer, plastic sheeting, bug spray, water, pet food and crates, Gatorade. You move things around in the garage so the generator is near the door, and you make sure it starts up. You take down and put away umbrellas and throw the patio furniture into the pool. You trim all the coconuts off the palm trees, so they don't go airborn and turn into missiles. You dodge wasps and bees and put down your shutters and help with the shutters of all of your neighbors. You make up your guest rooms and gather extra pillows and blankets, because you will probably have some company. During Francis, our neighbor Dana's roof blew off, and she had to run to our house with her boyfriend and her dog during the peak of the storm, dodging flying shingles the whole way. You prepare a safe room, your interior room with no windows. You clean your house and make sure all of your laundry is done, because after the storm, everything will be dark and humid and wet and dirty, probably for weeks.


Then you hunker down and wait. We usually like to cook a big dinner, a last supper, if you will, because we know that we won't have electricity for up to 2 weeks after a big storm, and we usually have a lot of people to feed. This being Florida, we have a lot of elderly neighbors, who are single and live alone. We usually invite them to come to stay with us during the storm itself. It is a little easier if the storm hits during daylight hours. You can usually find a safe-ish perch to watch the storm go by from the side of the house that is protected from the first part of the storm. From this vantage point you can watch things sail by and crash into your house. It is so much nicer to be able to see what it is that is crashing, than to lie there in the dark and hear thud after thud, not knowing. Then the eye passes over, all is quiet, and you venture timidly outside to see what wrath has been visited on you. Then you go back inside and it starts all over again, the storm coming from the other side now, and the storms are usually much stronger on the back side. We try to watch a movie, play scrabble or gin, anything to distract us. My husband is usually racing around with a flashlight, checking to see what is leaking, what is breathing, what looks like it is not going to hold, checking in with friends on his cell phone. All of our doors are braced from the inside with 2x4's. During one storm, we had a ladder braced against the interior wall of our living room, to support the wall. (our house was built at the turn of the century) The wall breathed in and out so much the top of the ladder ate it's way about 2 inches into the plaster!


After the storm, we start to clean up as soon as we can. We live on 2 acres, and my husband's hobby is gardening. It is all highly landscaped, and when the top canopy gets broken off, it kills all of the hedges and under plantings. After Jeanne and Francis, we hauled 3 tractor trailer loads of debris out, including about 100 trees. When the trees went over, the giant root balls pulled up all of the stones in our driveway when they heaved over. Michael took up every stone, one at a time and built a stone wall, cut out the roots, then re-paved the driveway. We have replanted hundreds of more trees since then, and things have grown in nicely. After those storms, we were so fortunate to have help from near and far. Friends and even some people we had never met before packed up chain saws, ice, even a spare generator, and came to help. We were and are so blessed to have such wonderful friends!


Well, we are pretty relieved that Ike went away. Not to wish a hurricaine on anyone else! As you can tell, they are NOT FUN. At 10 minutes to every hour, you can still find us in front of the TV, watching the Tropical Update. We pretty much stopped at the Before the Storm phase, as the storm did not continue on track to hit us. But, as you can see, we take it seriously and get about as ready as we can be. Brandon is still on call for deployment by FEMA for the tactical rescue team. He is a firefighter/paramedic for Miami Dade. So far, has not been called out this year. We worry about him, he was deployed for Katrina. He is just the kind of person you would like to have there to help you though, strong, kind, and smart. We are proud of him!