Sew Sunshine

One of my local quilt guilds had a chance to work with the International Quilt Museum here in town and Gallery 1516 in Omaha. The show is called Modern Quilting on the Prairie.  Modern quilts were paired with quilts from the IQM and some quilts were just in a themed section inspired by Prairie. This is my entry "O Praire Girl"  My quilt was inspired by part of the Carl Sandburg poem Prairie -  "O prairie girl, be lonely, singing, dreaming, waiting— your lover comes—your child comes—the years creep with toes of April rain on new-turned sod. O prairie girl, whoever leaves you only crimson poppies to talk with, whoever puts a good-by kiss on your lips and never comes back— There is a song deep as the falltime redhaws, long as the layer of black loam we go to, the shine of the morning star over the corn belt, the wave line of dawn up a wheat valley." and this photo I took several years ago of farmland by my home growing up My piece is improvisation, applique, with simpl...

" Crazy Memories" 34" x 33.5" scrap vortex slab leftovers in my scrap bin decorative machine quilted and some hand big stitch Project Quilting Challenge this week is 'You're Crazy". You can see all the entries  HERE  . So many interpretations.  I wanted to do scrap something? for my challenge since I am also doing  Sewthescrapoutofmarch  with Tea and Brie for National Quilting month (march) When I was digging in my scrap jar, drawer, bag(s), bin, shelf....um, I found a bunch of scrap vortex(vomit some call it) that is leftover from a quilt top I made last year that still isn't quilted. :) I had to slice and dice some colors and sew bits here and there to get enough to make my rainbow square in a square.  I dug out some variegated threads to top stitch around the black areas. The 40 wt ones really showed nicely. It was fun to use those again. I learned that a top stitch needle in my machine worked really well as some of those scraps are seam upon sea...

  My niece with her Elsa/Anna pillow I made for sleeping over at the Grandparents house! Grandparents each received new pillow cases to match...can there be too much Frozen in your life? :)   and     her brand new baby brother mmm...new baby snuggles!     Mason jar pincushions from my moms stash of flour sack material. I made hexi flower tops and then divided up some of the buttons she had saved.  All the kids used to play with her button can which was an old canned ham container.  This was one of four I made so far.     Signing up for an online Friendship Block Swap and asking a fellow blogger, Jen,  from my same city to join in.  We both had fun making our quilt tops and then we     had fun meeting Luke Haynes together. :)     My first entry into the county fair since 4-H days.    Tried my hand at value design of my own.   ...

You know how sometimes you get an idea in your head and you can't shake it? You might analyze the situation and say it is just not rational but then you really want to do it anyway?  This is "So Blue" a portrait of my mother when she was 16. The back building is the Joslyn art museum which I thought was fitting for my work of art! So you start and you see this is going to be a big messy project. You can almost see pieces of your hair turning gray but you keep going. Your iron is not trustworthy, you math skills are questionable but you stick to it and hope no one else in the house needs any clear space for the foreseeable future...so you keep at it.  Almost all the blocks are made up of 100 1.5" squares. The bottom row has one less row. 1960 cut 1.5" squares..yesserieeee!   Then, things start to happen. (I can tell you up close you have no idea what you are doing. Even stepping back I had to use my camera lens to look at it at such close quarte...