Rainy Days, Good News and Jane

It poured this morning and is supposed to rain for the next few days and now our backyard is sort of a big puddle in the back. But everything is getting greener and greener and greener and buds are beginning to appear on the trees and shrubs. 

Don't you love the smell of wet earth? 

  

The rain makes me want to stay inside and quilt, but that's not what everyone else around here wants to do, so right after I walk the dogs I'll get some sewing in. I think I'm not the only one who's anxious for Spring . . .

You never know what you'll find in a puddle if you get really really close . . .

C'mon, Mom--hurry up already! (I've lost all my own "puppy" energy.)

So now I'm finally getting back to making a few more blocks for the Dear Jane quilt I started this year. I think I'll make an easy one today. The pieces are already cut out. Sometimes I spend time just preparing the blocks and then they're ready whenever I'm ready.

Some of the blocks are hand pieced, some are machine pieced, and guess what? I made one yesterday using foundation paper piecing. Good for me! I've always dreaded the thought, but I needed to learn. I'm thinking once I get it down it'll make many of the blocks a lot easier. I think I need to make a few before I get the hang of it. Right after I make some more easy ones, LOL.

I have to say, I'm loving the Dear Jane software by EQ. It makes it really EASY to make some of the blocks instead of tracing them from the book. I love easy. You can print out the foundation patterns or the rotary cutting directions for some of the more straight-forward blocks. Can you tell I'm trying to encourage everyone to make this quilt?? So much fun, can't tell you. I'm up to 18 finished ones already.

I'll be using these fabrics today:

You know I love red and blue . . .

With Dear Jane I don't need to go out and buy more fabric, my "old" scraps will do just fine, thank you very much.

*  *  This just in:  *  *

                        

 Picked up the mail today after our walk and guess what:  Remembering Adelia is now in its 4th printing!! What a nice surprise. I have all of you to thank for this--I knew you'd like her.

                                 

I was just thinking about Adelia today too--and the day in 1861 it rained so much the carriages couldn't get through the mud on the roads and the girls couldn't get to the depot to see the soldiers off.

                            

Thank you for liking it! (I promise I won't go into a Sally Field moment here. . . but I'm close.)

Happy Easter, Happy Spring

Look what's peeping out in my garden-- 

Won't be long now!

  

This is the time of year when a quilter's fancy turns to--PASTELS! Or at least mine does . . . I don't usually work with brights or pastels very often but I definitely get the urge in Spring.

This little Feedsack Flower Garden quilt (from American Doll Quilts) is one of my all-time favorite springtime quilts and honestly, it's so much fun I've made several over the years. If you don't have the book to follow the pattern, it's easy. First, get out your '30s scraps. 

         

For each block, trace five hearts ( I used a 1 3/8-inch template) onto fusible web (I used Lite Steam-A-Seam 2). Then fuse them onto the wrong side of assorted pastel fabric scraps, cut out and fuse onto a 4-inch light background square in a circle. (If you're making the quilt with 12 blocks, yes, that's 60 hearts you have to cut out . . . )

Sew the blocks together into 4 rows of 3. Hand quilt in the ditch along the blocks and along the outside of the "flower" about 1/16 inch away from the edge to make it puff up a bit and give it that hand applique look without the work of applique. Give the flowers a good shot of steam to make the fabric pucker a little. To make the scalloped design in the borders, I used a small cup to make the curves.

Gosh darn cute!

Today I'm making a Carrot Cake for Easter dessert:

Carrot Cake

3 eggs

1 1/4 cups oil

1 1/3 cups brown sugar

2 tsp baking soda

2 tsp cinnamon

1/2 tsp salt

2 cups flour

1 8-oz. can crushed pineapple

1 cup coarsely chopped walnuts

4 carrots, grated

 Still have to find a recipe for a good cream cheese frosting, yum.
 
 

 
I hope you all have a great Easter holiday! I'll let you know how the cake turned out . . . .

Nothing Too Quilty Going On

I'd love to show you all the great projects and fabulous quilts I have been working on since the book was finished and turned in. But I've been busy with life and other things and I'm also guilty of taking a break after working so furiously and so there hasn't been too much quilting going on these days. Oh, I appliqued another Dear Jane block in the car on the drive to take my son back to school last Sunday (my husband drove), but that's it.

I've also been working with my technical editor who's cleaning up the manuscript and patterns in my book so that all of you can make the quilts without any mistakes in the directions. Then she'll send the pages back to me for a revision/review. It will go through several edits before we see the page proofs sometime this summer--the final pages before printing.

I've been working on some boring but necessary things like collecting permissions for the photos and quotes and also documenting the sources of the quotes as well as hunting for and getting together some antique photos and other 19th century artifacts and newspaper clippings (this part is not so boring!). This is for the design department at Martingale & Co. so they can use them in the design of the book pages and as props for some of the photos of the quilts.

Newspaper ad from the 1800s

It's sort of difficult not to be involved in this process at all--I turn quilts and stuff in and then sit back and wait. I'm always pleasantly surprised to see how the book turns out, how the publisher makes my ideas come to life. The waiting  is hard for me too, trust me. But at least I know what's going to be in it so I do have that advantage. Sometimes I can't remember what the quilts look like and it's always fun to get them back months later, after they take photos.

In the meantime I  told you I was on the road again and so here are a couple of photos from two of my recent lectures in Illinois. It's so much fun to travel around and meet some of you! Look closely, maybe you'll see yourselves!

March is still pretty dreary in northern Illinois . . . and it was still really really cold and windy as of last week.

   

I love waiting for everyone to come in  and browsing through the crowd . . . Each guild has it's own personality. Will they like my little quilts?? I haven't had a heckler yet . . .

Nice to see a big crowd--you never know. I remember one time last year I had scheduled a lecture in mid-January and the temperature was -15 degrees without the wind chill. Only about 1/2 the guild braved the cold and came out to hear me speak that night.

Before I began, at my suggestion, the lights were turned out so everyone could see my PowerPoint presentation a little better.

The program was in a different location this time and my "hosts" weren't aware that the new building had energy saving lights. When they were turned off, they wouldn't go back on again. Oh no! My fault for making them turn the lights off! We were all worried that no one would be able to see my quilts. Luckily, by the time I was finished they were back on. Whew!

That's me up there, in black, in the center. 

The next week I drove to DeKalb, IL for a program and workshop. The corn belt.

Smaller crowd but fun ladies with lots of great stories! I get to see THEIR show & tell before they get to see MY show & tell.

Quilters setting up for the workshop to make the little Bear's Paw quilt from Prairie Children & Their Quilts.

                                   

Darn, I forgot to take pictures of their finished tops. Here's mine.

 

After the workshop, I visited a wonderful quilt shop that was nearby--Tammy Tadd Designs in Sycamore, Illinois.

                                      

Mostly brights and modern fabrics. I picked up some wonderful little bundles of pastel plaids and florals to go with my recently purchased sweet polka dot fat quarters for a little Springtime project.

Not my usual style, but I sure love these old-fashioned pastel prints. So romantic.

I'm a sucker for anything containing fabric that's wrapped up and tied with a pretty bow!

Two-Color Quilts

Even though I love scrappy quilts the best, with their wide variety of prints, lately I've become fascinated with two-color quilts. Hard to believe, huh? I was recently drawn to one in particular I saw in a magazine that had a white background with blue baskets. We usually think of two-color quilts as being made from white fabric combined with another color--red and white or blue and white being the most popular. In antique quilts, most often the color was a solid instead of a print or looked like a solid from a distance.

My friend Julia is lucky enough to have a couple of  antique quilts in her family that are two-color quilts and I wanted to show you photos. Don't you love them? Especially the redwork.This quilt is dated 1914 and labelled "From Mother." Quite a lot of work went into that embroidery.

If you look closely at the quilting on this one you can see that it's quilted with an orange peel design (on the left side). My next book will have a little quilt that I quilted with an orange peel motif in the blocks.

I made a little blue and white quilt that appeared in my first book, American Doll Quilts, using several different indigo prints and a variety of shirtings prints. I get more comments on this little quilt than you can imagine. I used blue thread and a decorative stitch on my sewing machine in the border as a fancy touch. In the 19th century, sometimes these blue and white quilts were made as heirlooms and for a special occasion--a birth, wedding or anniversary.

                               

There are a few reasons blue and white quilts were popular in the past. Indigo was a colorfast dye and didn't fade when washed. Plus, indigo was widely available, making it likely that more women had access to this color of fabric. I like to think that the women who quilted around then also just had good taste because blue is such a pretty color anyway. Some historians also think that another reason blue and white quilts were so popular around the turn of the last century or slightly before was because those were the colors of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, which was an extremely popular and important reform movement for women at the time. Many Drunkard's Path quilts from the time period were done in blue and white. I've included a scrappy little blue and white quilt in my next book too, yay! You'll get to see it soon!

Two-color quilts were also  made with 2 colors long ago, not just white and one other color. Pink and indigo blue seems to have been a favorite combination because I've seen quite a few of these.

                                    

Not sure if these count because the blue print below contains a little white, but I've actually made a few of this two-color kind of quilt myself:

                                    

                                                    

That's the great thing about making small quilts--you can try just about any style you like without expending a lot of energy, time or fabric. Experiment and who knows, maybe you'll find out you like a certain block or style so much you'll go on to make a bigger version, a real quilt. I'm determined to make an Irish chain quilt using blue prints and shirtings someday. Won't that be fun!

Clean-Up Week

Guess what I'm doing for National Quilting Day? No, not quilting or designing--cleaning. Yep, cleaning.

My son is coming home for Spring Break today and I need to make room for the mess he's probably going to bring with him. Better to start out clean so it doesn't get too overwhelming. Then, when it's done, it'll be done, and I'll have more time to play. When I was a kid in public school, Spring Break was always called Clean-up Week, so it's fitting. I've been so busy lately that I never helped get his room into shape after he left the last time, like I promised. A couple of his things need mending and maybe I’ll get to it before he arrives today, at the last minute. Hey, does that count as quilting? Didn’t think so.

My husband drove up to get my son this morning (in the snow, can you believe it? It's March.) and I get to stay home and clean. So I brought out some of  my favorite cleaning supplies--miracle cloths (lots of them), a feather duster, my Bona mop for the hardwood floors, and Zud, a good start. I'm looking at them now. I'll get going soon, right after I finish this, I promise.

When I woke up this morning, the sink was shining clean and that always makes me feel good, like I've actually accomplished something. Sometimes a clean sink just does it for me. That's a trick I learned  from Flylady and every now and then I go back to her for help. 

I love my sink. The divider is really low so you can easily clean large pans or cookie sheets.

I'll finally clean off the kitchen island too and organize some of my quilting stuff. I was too busy with other things this week to take care of it much. I love to spread out stuff on the island for cutting and organizing because it's a great height and close to my sewing area but then I get lazy and don't put everything away like I should. And papers and magazines get out of control everywhere else. Years ago, when I worked in an office I had a really neat, clean desk, honest.

There'll be laundry today too. I don’t believe my son actually does much laundry while he's at school, as awful as that sounds. I hear that he sometimes goes to Target for underwear when he runs out instead. So there'll be laundry and lots of it. And, good mom that I am, I'll probably help. He deserves a break—he's been working hard and getting really good grades, so I can’t complain. Also, he'll actually manage to graduate in 4 years, not 5 or 6, always the fear, so we really appreciate that.

I was working furiously on the book while he was home during Winter break and felt a little guilty that I didn't spend as much time with him as I would have liked—I still had to work even though he was home. Not that he chose to spend THAT much with us anyway, but every now and then when a friend was busy and he had some free time, I had to say no, I had a schedule to keep to and I couldn't just drop everything when I was in the middle of a quilt or had a chapter to finish. Sorry. Dad had to work and so did I, even though I was at home and it didn't look like I was working, looked like I was "just sewing."

Having kids means not always having all the time I’d like to spend on quilting. And even though the projects I make for my books are fun, they're still for work. Sometimes I really want to make something different, maybe a project or two designed by someone else that I see in a book or magazine, but don't always have time. The hard thing is juggling everything I want to do with everything I NEED to do, but it's the same with everyone else I guess. We all have our choices about the things we make and the time involved and does it take time away from family? In the end I'm really lucky to be able to call this work because I love it. Life's a tradeoff.

So I'm thankful my son wants to come home, even if it’s not exactly to see US. Last year he took a road trip during break and we didn't see him at all. I have more time now and perhaps this week he'll pencil us in for a lunch or dinner or maybe a movie or two if we're lucky. I promised him we'd go through my old record albums I saved from the sixties--I hear kids are going back to turntables and albums.

At the end of last summer he said he was anxious to get back home. I was confused until I realized he meant HIS home—college. Sad but true, he's all but gone and coming home now is just a visit. According to the census, he doesn’t even live here—the form told us to exclude anyone living away at college so they don't get counted twice. And, before you know it, my daughter will be gone too. Mixed emotions for sure, but ahhh, think of the quality quilting time I’ll have then . . .