My Diva

I had a hard time getting started on this challenge last year when we got our panels and the rules. The rules didn't bother me as there is not one quilt police person among us, we consider rules guidelines to jump start the creative process. My CP would not start or rather became overloaded with more ideas than I wanted to use. I really wanted to make a small piece and there were so many Divas in the panel I could not decide which 3 to use and the really cute frames around all  the the images got me hung up on the color yellow, which I love but didn't want to use. In the end it was the house idea inspired by Freddy Moran's houses in Collaborative Quilts that helped me get started. Choosing one image to represent me I could add the things I like around the house.

I chose this image to represent me because  she looks friendly and she is not as sophisticated as the other white haired ladies. Her figure is kind of soft and lumpy, not exactly "toned", and I often stand like her with my hands on my hips. My favorite food is fresh, ripe, home grown, tomatoes.  My favorite color is red but I think every other color is in second place there isn't one I don't like ( well maybe tan).  If I had a yard I would have a garden full of flowers.  Sunshine makes me feel energized, though I have never been a sunbather, I love sunny days and love to look at the sun filtering through the trees especially when there is a light breeze ( too bad I didn't think to put a tree on my quilt). I colored the background around my Diva a sunny yellow with a crayon as she would not have white walls in her house if she had a choice.

When I was finishing up the embellishments on the quilt I told my husband I needed to go shopping for a belly button ring. There was a pause and he said "You know.............. maybe you ought to think about it a while before you go ahead and do something like that".  How could I not love a man who thinks that I might actually do that?

Diva Challenge

Our Saturday basement study  quilt group met last Saturday for the Diva Challenge reveal. Not everyone finished and one person was missing and one person just couldn't get started. All of that is OK, life happens, motivation/interest doesn't come, inspiration takes us in another direction. We get together because we like to experiment and we like each other and we have fun. We started playing with all the different elements in the "Beyond the Block" book by Linda K. Johnson and Jane K. Wells and then we started playing with the parts department elements from "Collaborative Quilting" by Freddy Moran and Gwen Marston. When someone found the Sewing Diva panels the challenge was born.

 These are the rules

1) Use at least 3 motifs from the focus fabric

2) Add not more than 20 additional fabrics
3) It has to be finished and quilted by the next, Amish Retreat January 29 2010 or the next basement meeting following that.
4) At least 4 techniques from the book.

5) At least one embellishment

6) There is no size or shape requirement.

7) Keep it a secret until the reveal.

Kathy said she can see everyone sewing and hiding at the retreat. It should be noted that Jan and Ruth do not like the 10 extra fabric limitation (you can see above that the limit had already increast to 20) and Syd does not like the embellishment requirement.

Kathy said any correctionsor comments would be considered. 

This first quilt  of Judy's is really only the motifs and elements so far. That is Judy standing on the right and Jan sitting down helping to hold the quilt and admiring Judy's work. It looks like Judy is using a lot of different elements and her quilt will probably be "over the top" which is par for the course for her. Jan didn't finish hers and didn't bring what she had;  we will have to see it another day.

                                                                                                

The next quilt belongs to Kathy who is hiding behind it. Kathy keeps us informed about what is going on and sends us reminders before the meetings and newsy emails afterward. She is the one who wrote down the rules when we made them up and sent them to everyone so we all knew which ones to break what to do. She has dentil moulding and chevron elements in her quilt, which is finished and quilted.

Lori's finished quilt is below, she used squares on point and checkerboard and sawtooth borderes. She liked the same blond with the tomato hat and the sunbather that Kathy did.  All her Divas had really sparkly jewelry embellishments.

 Fran's quilt top below , like Lori's has checkerboard and squares on point frames and she framed it out with a narrow yellow border with some elements sticking out she likes the same blond and sunbather as Kathy and Lori

Lynn's quilt top uses Liberated stars along with her Diva motifs. Like Lori she also used a Diva from a different  panel, and there is that same blond again. I'm not sure if she used the sunbather as I didn't get a picture of the whole quilt. Some of her Divas are enbellished with sparkly paint.



The last quilt is my finished quilt. It is a self protrait (or maybe my complete opposite).
I use the required  3 motifs but only one Diva.

I wish my photography was better so you could see some of the details.

We all broke some of the rules and none of us finished by January 29, 2010.  Oh wellllllllll.............

Moved

We moved last Friday and that went well, we are just about done with all of the extra stuff like curtain rods, and shelves, and everything was in place in every room but the sewing room .
Then about 6 PM water started pouring out of our bathroom ceiling and it was a 1/2 hour before someone responded to shut off the water. the ceilings are wet in one end of our bedroom and my sewing room. The hallway ceiling is a mess and bathroom ceiling of course is a mess and will probably have to come down. A cleaning service came to suck up the water and set up a fan to dry out the carpet which will probably be replaced. I called our son to come and help us and we got Jack's computer amd the TV out   of the bedrrom.
At this point it is almost too much for us and I am not even going to think about who is going to move all the furniture out of the two bedrooms so they can do whatever. It will NOT be us.

I have been working on a post with our Diva Challenge pictures but Blogger is not working well and I am out of patience and out steam. The pics will wait.

A family birthday and getting ready to move.

These are from last Sunday. It is really hard to get 5 young kids together to take their picture. One of my GGK's had a birthday and this was his birthday present from his dad. The other three around the drum set are my GGK's; the boy behind the post is a friend. The photo below is the Birthday Boy and his cousin my other GGK.
It was a fun day. There were water guns and bubble guns and hundreds of water balloons and and electric cars and tractors for the kids to drive and just fun being together.

No quilt pics for a while; we are getting ready to move. We are only moving down the hall a few yards to a different apartment that is the same as our present apartment but the opposite layout. In case you think that is strange I will tell you there is reason to my madness.
We face due west and get full (hot) sun in the afternoon; the other apartment also faces due west but there is a large maple tree in front of it which shades the LR and DR. That is reason enough for me but it will also save us from having to move furniture around to get the carpeting replaced and then move it back again. Much easier to move it over a few yards down the hall once. I think this is the reason that sold my husband on the idea which he didn't think was so red hot to begin with. There are some other advantages as well.

Anyway my sewing machines are put away and all of the shelves around my sewing room are down and the rulers are all off the wall and the walls have been patched. Most of the shelves will not be going back up. I like the clean look without the shelves. A big plus for all of this is that I am cleaning closets and drawers and book cases and we are getting rid of stuff we haven't used or thought about in years. Because I don't always put things back where they belong, I find it necessary to clean closets frequently but it is usually just moving stuff back where it belonged. This is a step beyond that. I will tackle my sewing room closet next and I hope this time I will be able to let go of a lot of stuff I have saved "just in case I might want to do something with it".  All family members who are helping us move are also going home with at least one quilt (whether they like it or not)!

A visit with the GGK's

I have been having a busy week. Tuesday two of our great-grand kids (they will be 7 and 8 years old in the fall) came to spend the day with us. We went to lunch at Wendy's where they both got the kids meal with big glasses and a big nose. Grace's nose was crooked and one of the side pieces kept coming off so she threw it away but Ethan had fun with his, here he is with them upside down. After lunch we went to the arboretum and saw about 100 frogs, big ones and tiny ones and a few tadpoles.

They came again Yesterday and stayed over night. we thought we could take them to play miniature golf but the weather was just too hot for us to be out that long in the sun. After all, we are in the age group they have been telling to stay indoors during the heat wave. We went to Chuck E. Cheese instead where they were content to run around spending their tokens and we stayed cool. We had pizza for lunch which was surprisingly pretty good.and then used more tokens. When it was time to leave they took a long time to decide how to spend all their bonus tickets but eventually picked out a bunch of junk  some things they liked.  One of our grandsons (their Dad's cousin) comes to dinner every Wednesday. We were all delighted to see him, they swarmed all over him and I finished up dinner.  I keep only one leaf in the table and we can only fit two on a side. Of course they both had to sit next to him so he had to sit at the end of table so we could work that out. He likes the kids and I think he had fun too. After dinner we went to the library and picked out some books and a movie (the movie wouldn't play). The books kept them busy and quiet in the morning till I woke up. Their dad was picking them up at 2:30 so we didn't go anywhere today. We stayed home and they painted and made quilted potholders for their grandmother for her birthday. I set up my Janome Jem so they could both work at the same time and they picked out all of the strips and sewed them onto the batting. They used the decorative stitches on my Bernina to quilt them and I trimmed them and did the escape hatch finish. they wrote on the back with a Pigma pen and we were DONE. Phew!!!

Here they are with the potholders. Ethan was losing patience with having to have his  picture taken and Gracie is getting into posing with that great big smile. It is a vast improvement over having to sneak up on them to take their pictures.

The visit was fun. I love to see them and spend time with them but they sure do keep us busy. I lost my patience a few times and yelled at them for fighting and they informed me they were not fighting they were PLAYING!  As always, I am looking forward to next time.

Quilt Camp Day 5

Today was our final day of Quilt Camp. We accomplished all that we intended. There was only a little sewing left to be finished on the machines and then everyone spent the day tying their quilts. The kids helped each other to get it all done and then there was a pizza party for lunch. After lunch there were a few more ties to finish up and then everyone pitched in to get the room cleaned up and back in order. the kids helped carry all the supplies down stairs and back where they belong in the quilt group closet All the stuff the adults brought was down and ready to take out to the cars. We ended the day with cupcakes and a photo session and showed off the quilts for the moms when they came to pick up the kids.

The   photo  on the left is of all the kids with their own quilts.  For some reason, known only to the kids, some of them switched quilts for the second photo. They were all wound up in high spirits by the time we got ready to shoot the pics. The second photo has the adults in the back row. Betty is sitting on the end and Beth, me and Kim are standing on the left; Debbie is second from the right in the back row. Debbie  is a fairly new quilter herself. Missing from the group picture is Cathy who had another commitment today but whose help was invaluable the other 4 days.

Kim took these pictures and many more but I don't have them yet. My own photos are not very good so when I get some more of Kim's I will post them.  I think we had a good week. This was a big commitment time wise for the adults but I think we all felt is was worth the effort. My own thoughts are "where else could I have so much fun all week'.

Busy Day

Today was a busy day at Quilt Camp. I never got a chance to take my camera out of the case.We were all busy working all the time.  We got all but 3 quilts layered and stitched around the 4 sides and turned and pinned. They are ready to tie tomorrow. One more needs to be pinned and tied and the other 2 are ready to be turned. So our goal is in site and we should accomplish everything we need to accomplish tomorrow. We will have parents coming in the afternoon to see what we have done this week.

I live in an apartment so I have no garden of my own. I enjoy all the photos of everyones garden and we visit the arboretum often. My daughter in law has a nice flower garden. On Fathers Day we were there for dinner and she cut a bunch of Martha Stewart "Snow White" hydrangeas for me; these first photos are from the day I brought them home.

This is what they look like today, 11 days later. they are a little worse for wear but still look too good to throw out.  Today after dinner I noticed that the late day sun coming in the window cast a rainbow acroos the room as it shined through the water line in the vase. You can see it on the front door and on the ktchen walls on both sides of the doorway. What you can't see here is it also made a rainbow on the front of the refrigerator and on the dining room wall. It is a welcome embellisment to my all white walls and it is much more impressive in real life.