Friday, February 22, 2013

Lesson Learned

I guess I am not too old to learn things. Unfortunately sometimes the lesson is not pleasant. Take my blue flower for example….I had it quilted and blocked and ready for binding and I did not like it. Well that won’t be the first quilt that I did not like that I made! So I decided to try to add a border. I read about the process and it did not seem too hard and it wasn’t. I made it more difficult by not just adding one border, but by adding two borders. However, the blue flower while it looks a lot better it certainly is not great.

The trouble with a thin yellow border against the dark blue is that every imperfection shows. Oh well at least it is done.
So what lesson did I learn? You can add a border after the quilt is done, but it is better to add it before you quilt it. I think I will ask myself if a quilt needs a border before assuming that it does not! I will think carefully the next time. And that is certainly a lesson worth learning.
Thanks for reading.
Chris

Friday, February 8, 2013

Missing You, Mister Grumpy Pants

We had to put our nearly 17 year old cat to sleep last night. He has not been doing well for a while….eating a lot, losing weight. The last couple of days he was throwing up every time he ate. Yesterday he did not eat at all and just moped around. Of course when you take him to the vet they want to run all kinds of tests to see what is wrong with him, but we declined. I figure that he has had diabetes for a while, but I was not going to treat a 17 year old cat with shots of insulin. He was old and this was his time.

So why do we call him Mister Grumpy Pants? He has always been a nasty cat that you would never know when he was going to go off and bite you. I have been seriously bit at least twice. So bad that I was on antibiotic for the infection. So for many years I looked forward to the day that we would be free of the terror in our house. However, he was not all bad.  In fact a lot of the time he could be really affectionate. But he was the reason that we kept our younger cats separated from him. We were afraid that he would hurt them especially when they were very small.

Right before Christmas we took down the barricade between him and the remaining young cat and they did manage to get along. I think after all these years Mister Grumpy Pants had mellowed. So his last month or so was spent having a friend….a friend to chase and a friend to sleep with.  In some ways I wish we had done that sooner.

But Mister Grumpy Pants is gone now and today I am really sad. it seems so strange around the house without him. Don’t get me wrong, I am not as sad as when we had to put our sweet little girl tabby to sleep that had cancer. She was only 2 1/2 years old and we had to put her to sleep on Christmas Eve in 2011. I was heart broken then. I am just shocked that I miss our nasty cat this much.

Our sweet cat, Chowder, has been looking all over the house for the mean cat, Meeko. It is a shame that he just got a friend and now that friend is gone.

Mister Grumpy pants (Meeko) is the black and white cat under the tree. Chowder is the sweet tabby. At least we still have him.

cats1[4] 

RIP, Mister Grumpy Pants!

Chris

Thursday, February 7, 2013

New Sketches

I was working on some more sketches for my class with Elizabeth Barton. The sketches are of a street in Edinburgh. In fact it is the street that has our favorite cheese shop. The first sketch is of the entire street and the others are crops of the first sketch.

edinburgh sketch

edinburgh sketch2

edinburgh sketch3

  edinburgh sketch4

It’s funny how you don’t know that you missed tracing some of the lines until you start to crop the image!  Thanks for reading.

Chris

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Is Blue Still My Favorite Color?

Blue by far for my entire life has been my favorite color. But as I look at some of my quilts I am not sure if that is the case anymore. I like all colors these days. I cannot think of a color that I don’t like and all of them seem to be important in quilts. I like them saturated, grayed, muted…they all have their role to play. I do find, however, that there are some colors that are missing in my stash. I have very few pinks, purples, and yellows. I have lots of greens and blues. I will have to make an effort this year to buy more of the colors that I was not too crazy of in the past.

Even in clothing I have branched out. I use to wear a lot of black, but find that my clothing is very colorful these days. In clothing I tend to like saturated colors…none of those pale mint greens, pinks, peaches, and yellows for me. To me they look too blah. One advantage that quilters have is that we are not afraid to mix textures and patterns in our clothing. Plus we know that things just have to go together and not necessarily match.

Besides finishing up my Flower Power class with Susan Brittingham I decided to take Inspired to Design with Elizabeth Barton. I chose the medium green background for my flower. It is the one that looks the best in person. Sometimes one that looks better in the photo is actually not that great in person. Photos are very deceiving.
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I have created some rough sketches for Elizabeth’s class. I like old buildings, arches, and narrow worn steps so I was looking for a photograph to work with that had these elements.
arches2 narrow stairs between buildings
arches
I have to decide which one excites me enough to work with and make a quilt from.
Did you notice that I changed up my blog page? I wanted a new header which I created in Photoshop. While I love my Halloween quilt I thought it was time for a change. I think I had that as my header for more than 5 years! Plus I wanted the header to go all the way across the page. What do you think?
Thanks for reading.
Chris

Saturday, February 2, 2013

Quilt Mulligan

I had a quilt that was making me crazy for the last few years. It was not hanging flat which was due to the borders. Also the black from one of the fabrics in the quilt had bled into the yellow inner border. This quilt has been hanging in our spare bedroom so I don’t see it often, but when I did it kept telling me to do something about it. So last week I decided to listen to it.
I thought the quilt would look better without the border so I cut off the border, blocked the remaining quilt, squared up the quilt, and bound it. I am so happy I did it because it looks much better now. It hangs flat and the wonky borders are now gone.
Before:  You can see how wonky the borders were. I am beginning to think quilts should not have borders! Believe me when I say that I am very careful when I put borders on a quilt, but sometimes they still don’t come out right. If you look closely near the black hill on the right side of the quilt you can see where the black bled into the yellow inner border.

After: Much better. Wonkiness is all gone. The orange fabric (both the sky and the water) in this quilt was hand painted by me years ago. The hills and birches are commercial fabrics.

Close up
 
The quilt is called “Orange Sky at Night.” Thanks for reading.
Chris

Friday, February 1, 2013

Beneath a Turquoise Sky

I finished a quilt started in my class with Gloria Loughman last September. For this class you just cut pieces of fabrics with smooth curves and then turned under the edges, arranged them on a stabilizer and then stitched them down. Last week I added the tree and grasses and the borders and quilted it. Now it is bound and a sleeve is sewn on. It is hanging where a boring quilt used to hang.


 
Chris