Impromptu Shop Hop

Last weekend was Superbowl Sunday 50 and Blue Top Quilt Shop in Lamar decided to have a big giant $6 per yard sale on all their 44" cotton fabric.

That seemed to me a great reason for a little road trip.  I had plans to meet with Kathy B. and my aunt Debbie to discuss programs for the 2016/2017 Table Rock Quilt Guild on Friday so I proposed that we all hop in the car and do our program work in the car.  They both thought that was a great idea.  I love women who are up for a road trip at the drop of a hat.  My mom had to come because a road trip isn't complete without her.  She is pretty damned entertaining!!!!!!!  So the Chevy Volt was full and we were set.  YEE HAW.

We headed out a early and were ready to shop our little hearts out.  Now my aunt, my mom and I all have rather huge stashes and no one needs any fabric and we have probably all made resolutions to not buy any more fabric but I figure resolutions are made to be broken and at $6 per yard I meant to break the no more fabric resolution big time.  I really like Blue Top Quilt Shop.

It is in a building that was a landmark restaurant for years and is bright and cheery.  I spotted a great new fabric line as I walked in the door that was red and turquoise which I need for a new project I want to start this year.

I found some great grays which I need for this project I have had in mind since I started quilting and now that I'm retired I'm going to get it started.  Then I had to pick up some green batiks cuz my stash is really light on greens.

The store is well lit and has a great choice of patterns and a wide range of fabric choices.  The staff is very friendly and helpful.  What more could you ask?  Oh did I mention they were having a $6 per yard sale.  Mom was happy because they had a great selection of landscape fabric which is her jam and I know Debbie scored some great stuff.  Kathy showed great restraint but she bought one or two things as well so I considered the visit a success.

A few days prior, I saw that Bittersweet Quilts had opened a store in downtown Joplin featuring modern fabric, The Fabric Merchant.   So we headed to Joplin to check it out.  The shop is located in a great old building with tin 12 foot ceilings.

Plenty of room to hang samples.  I just love to see beautiful quilts hanging full length.  There were also some great displays in the store.

The modern fabric was lovely but I'd just been to a sale so I wasn't really up for $11 and $12 per yard fabric.

This store is worth another visit though.

Had a great lunch at my favorite Joplin restaurant, Woody's Wood Fire Pizza.  Love that place.  It is just a little hole in the wall but gosh they have great food.

We were heading home and going to stop at The Country Store Quilt Shop but found that it had closed in December.  I didn't buy much there the few times I had visited in the past but it is sad to see local shops close especially since Block By Block in Carthage had closed a few years prior.

As we stopped for gas and drinks on the way home, I remembered a shop hop I had been to a few years ago of little shops in the area.  I knew P-Dub's was in this shop hop and went to her site to find out the names of the other shops.  Tracked down The Thistle in Pierce City and the Quilted Garden in Aurora.  We'd have time to visit both,

The Thistle is a small shop in the back of an antique shop in a beautiful old building.  They are in the middle of taking over the whole building and should be ready in early March.  This is going to be a great little shop.  They have some amazing samples of recycled denim jackets and purses.  The quilt samples in the shop were wonderful and the prices were good.  They didn't have a huge inventory but the fabric they had was very nice and a wide range of styles.  I bought a little pad to put under the foot pedal of my sewing machine.  Great idea.

Then we were off to Aurora to The Quilted Garden.  

I need to add this shop to my regular rotation of shops.  The displays are lovely using antiques to house the lovely fabrics.

There were some unique hand embroidery patterns and the samples for their classes were awesome.

If they offer a class for the one block wonder that was on the wall I'm driving over there to take it.  It was awesome and the owner said the fabric they started with was pretty ugly.

Not any more.  I bought some more turquoise and red fabric.  There was a really nice variety of fabric in the shop with some great patterns.  The staff was very helpful and some unique samples were on display.

All in all it was a very nice day and the weather was gorgeous, not bad for an early February day.

How Not to Make This Quilt

My daughter, Bre, moved to Australia in October for a new job and could really only take about 5 suitcases with her, so things like quilts and couch pillows didn't make the cut.  She has always been interested in Japanese culture and geishas so when I found some Kimono fabric from Australia (talk about the long way around) I thought it would make the perfect quilt for her bed.  I sent her this picture of the pattern that came with the fabric from Kimo Yes.

She thought this pattern didn't have much movement so she sent me a picture of this quilt called Cascade by Christine Cameli of the blog "A Few Scraps".  I must really like this quilt too as I had it pinned no less than 3 times on Pinterest.

I looked around for a tutorial or a pattern and couldn't find one so I contacted Christine to see if it would be okay if I wrote a blog on my attempt to recreate her quilt.  She graciously granted me permission.  So I was off to the races.  After about two weeks of working on this quilt I found out that Christine had written up her process on her blog in April 2011.  Check out her blog to find out the easiest way to make this quilt.  I'm documenting the way I made the quilt based on the picture and my way is definitely the hardest most time consuming way to put this together.  Do not attempt this method unless you are into tediousness.

What is really cool about my daughter having chosen this quilt is I had just shy of 5 yards of navy blue solid in my stash as well as 1 yard of blue ombre fabric so basically I had enough fabric for the top.  That never happens.  When I looked at the photo, I thought the quilt looked a little organic so I thought it was appliqued.  That was a wrong assumption but by this time I was going down the applique road.  So I chopped the 5 yards of fabric in half and sewed the two halves together.  Now I was working with about 88" square quilt top.  That should be okay for Bre's queen size bed but it is one of the biggest quilts I've made.

Next I numbered each column of rectangles to try and keep them straight in my process to recreate this quilt.  There were 30 columns.

Then I created a spreadsheet with my best guess at the size of the rectangles in each column.  I also counted the individual rectangles in a column.

Next I spent a few days cutting out the rectangles from the ombre fabric trying to maximize the cuts so I could get everything I needed from the 1 yard that I had.  I used my wonder clips to keep them all together along with their column number.  All 30 of them.

After they were cut out only then did it occur to me it would have been much easier to put the Wonder Under on the whole yard of fabric rather than on each individual rectangle.  Geez, what a dunderhead.  Thus I had to iron the fusible to each tiny little rectangle.  Can you hear me banging my head on the table?    While I was ironing on the fusible, I figured I would do raw edge applique with a blanket stitch but then I thought with my daughter's cat this quilt might get quite a few washings so I decided to turn over the edges.  You can already see where this is going.right?  I had to iron all four sides on each individual rectangle.  ARGGGGGGG.  There was no way this quilt was getting shipped as the Christmas present it was meant to be.

I wasn't concerned that the rectangles weren't ironed perfectly straight as I was going for a little more organic look. The organic look was the excuse for all the choices I made on this quilt.   If I hadn't been going for the organic look I would have pieced the thing and the math might have been a little harder but the execution would have been 10 times easier.  Organic was also the reason I didn't bother to ensure the columns were perfectly straight.  I figured water didn't flow in perfectly straight lines so if the columns were off a little that was okay.

 After sewing on the first few columns I noticed that some of the corners needed to be trimmed so they didn't peek out.  So I had to clip every corner of each rectangle.  (Shaking head).

I repinned the rectangles on the top AGAIN.  This time I ironed about 3 columns down to the fabric to secure them better.  I didn't want to do more than 3 columns at a time because smooshing them through the machine made it difficult to keep the pieces in place.

After days and days and more days of stitching on endless little rectangles.  I finally finished.  Whew, it was not fun but I was pretty happy with the result.

The easiest part of the whole process was quilting this quilt.  It appeared to me that Christine had done straight line quilting so I put the quilt on the long arm sideways and locked the machine in the vertical position.  It worked great!!!!

I used bamboo batting because it doesn't get really cold in Melbourne so this light weight batting should be sufficient.  The batting and backing were the only things I had buy so I was pretty happy about that.  I used some of the excess backing for the binding and sewed it by machine both front and back.

I used one of the built in alphabets from my Janome to make the label and the "love" stitch around the edge.  So now I've used 14 of the 250 stitches on my Janome.  Can you tell I'm keeping track of that?

I'm pleased with how the quilt turned out and I'm pretty sure my daughter is going to be pleased with it but no matter what I'm never making this quilt again.

Birthday Class

OMG I had the best time the last two days!!!!!!  I turned 60 on Friday and my mom turns 80 on Monday and rather than have a big birthday party we decided to bring in a terrific quilt instructor, Kathy McNeil, to give us a class on landscape quilting.  We could have a total of 20 folks in the class so we opened it up to the Table Rock Quilt Guild art quilt group and quickly filled the 18 open spots.  We have been planning for a few months and finally on Friday a bunch of us set up the room at the United Methodist Church and Mom and I picked up Kathy at the airport.

Kathy's flight was due to arrive at 9:30 p.m. which meant mom and I were going to be out after dark. So exciting!!!!!  Geez, I'm getting old.  Her flight was on time but unfortunately American Airlines left Kathy's quilt stands in Dallas so it took about an hour to get all that straightened out which means we didn't drop Kathy off at the hotel until about 11:30 p.m.  Not a great start to our class weekend especially since Kathy is an early to bed woman.  But the weather was good, she was here and we were a go, plus American Airlines promised to get the quilt stands to the church on Friday morning. So basically it was all good.

I picked Kathy up at the hotel bright and early Friday morning and she was ready to go all bright eyed even though her toiletries were packed in the suitcase we left in Mom's car.  When we got to the church Mom and a few others were already there.  I brought in the lunch stuff that I'd made the day before, and received birthday greetings from the ladies.  It was delightful.  I just love my birthday unlike my daughter who would prefer to forget hers.  I enjoy my special day, nice to have the attention.

Kathy started the class right on time and gave a great presentation for about 2 hours.  Her presentation was so good.  How to give your quilt dimension, various types of applique, how to use color to your advantage.  I'm pretty sure everyone learned a ton.  I know I did.  She is a very good presenter, very clear, informative slides, and did a good job of reading her audience to make sure people were following along.  At about 10:30 the quilt stands arrived!!! (Thank you American Airlines) so we hung the quilts Kathy brought: one of her show quilts and 7 quilts that were the samples of the patterns we were making in the class. OMG they are gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous!!!!!!

After the morning lecture we all started working on our own quilts and I headed to the kitchen.  I'm not much of a cook but there are a few things I can make and I recently found out I can make my mom's favorite cheese soup.  A few months ago I tracked down the recipe for cheese soup from the Hotel Fort Des Moines and made it for her.  She thought it was orgasmic and proceed to tell the Art Quilt Group about it in a way that only she can.  So when we were trying to come up with a menu for the class, the cheese soup seemed perfect.   I think most everyone liked it and a couple of people even had seconds.  Yea me, I cooked for 20 and didn't run out of food!!!!!!!!  I was a bit worried about that.

The afternoon went quickly as Kathy helped us with our projects and new processes.  I was stoked to try two of the new applique methods she introduced to us, the sizing method and Apliquick.  Check out her video on Apliquick, such a cool way to do applique.  I found it pretty exciting and purchased the stick tools as well as the special interfacing.  I'm going to use it on the Jenny Beyer quilt I'm working on.  I wasn't happy doing a raw edge blanket stitch on such a beautiful quilt so this method is going to be the answer to that problem.

At about 2:30 p.m. Nancy Ryder-Frew delivered the cake and what a cake.  She took inspiration from Kathy's winter cabin quilt.  Not only was it a gorgeous cake but it tasted great.  I know everyone enjoyed eating it.

After the class, Mom and I took Kathy on a quick tour of the area while it was still light and had dinner in Branson.  Kathy liked the beer batter fries at Drafts Sports Bar.  She had an awesome looking Buffalo Chicken Salad and I liked my veggie burger, mom's burger was bit too big for her "little mouth" but it tasted great.  The conversation was pleasant too.

Day two of class Kathy hung another of her award winning quilts.  AMAZING!!!

Kathy packed in a ton of great information during the day.  We got a lesson on sewing your applique by hand or by machine.  I have to remember 1.5 and .03 zig zag.  In addition, she showed us how to free motion embellishments using, organza, and thread. Gotta love water soluble stabilizer.   I even helped in the demo!!!!  Such fun.

My aunt, Debbie Parks, made walking tacos for lunch and they were such a success that we decided to serve them one day of the upcoming Table Rock Quilt Guilt retreat at the library.

Later on in the day, Kathy gave a demo on the power of painting on fabric.  She demoed these awesome fabric crayons from Switzerland called Neocolor which she swears by.  They stay put and have intense color.  I'm looking forward to trying the ones my mom bought.  The last lecture dealt with ways to quilt your art quilt with some great pointers on horizon lines and borders.  Kathy is big on mitered corners. UGHH so hard to get those straight so they quilt nicely.  Something to strive for. She also gave us a hint about how she does borders which she doesn't share with most people so I'm not printing that here.  But I'm going to have to try it on my next quilt.

Here are some of the examples of the work being done in the class.

There was time the second day to continue working on our projects and even though none were completed I think most everyone was pretty happy with the results.  

I just wanted to thank everyone who helped set up the room and who stayed to help clean up.  It really helped us out a bunch.  Also wanted to thank Kathy for a great class.  What a wonderful birthday.  

The Gathering in Stover

The last thing I need right now is another quilt shop trip but I always need a day out with the girls so when I was invited to go with my Aunt Debbie, Juanita, Roberta, Kathy and Mom to the Gathering in Stover I was in.  We all headed off to Stover AT 6 A.M. to a gathering of quilt shops from around the area at the Stover Community Center. I'd been there one other time in the spring a few years ago and there were wall to wall shops and wall to wall ideas so I was excited to see some new ideas and determined not to buy anything.

Debbie drove her van so we were all comfortably seated and enjoyed the beautiful 3 hour drive up to Stover with a stop along the way for breakfast at McDonalds.  There seemed to be fewer shops at The Gathering this time vs. my previous visit even though every square inch was filled with shops.  Last time I think the spaces were smaller so there were more shops.  There were still some very pretty things but for some reason I was a little disappointed.

I did absolutely love the Kiddie Car quilt by Joann Webb.  I seriously considered buying the full pattern for $50 but I really don't need another huge project so I just bought the Blaze Red and Cool Blue Pedal Car blocks.  She also had panels of motorcycles.  I loved her stuff including the little elf holding spools of thread.

I also chatted with one of the Amish or Mennonite vendors (not sure which).  He was a good salesman and had a nice selection of wide backing at okay prices but nothing really in the colors I was looking but he told us that back at his shop there were about 200 more bolts of wide backing and the shop, Countyview Fabric Shop was only 35 minutes away.

Since we finished up fairly quickly, we decided to check out Countryview Fabric Shop and then go to lunch.  The shop was in the middle of farm country and the large building was on land that had a number of other buildings.   The lighting was limited to natural light from the windows but they had a huge selection of backings ranging in price from about $9.99 to $16.99.  Of course the one I wanted was $16.99 but it will be perfect for the Jinny Beyers Block of the Month from Craftsy that I'm working on.  It is such a beautiful quilt it deserves a pretty back.

The shop also had some other really nice fabrics as well at good prices.  Plus they also gave you a third yard of fabric for $4/yard if you bought 2 yards at regular price.  I don't think they have a web site but they are located between Clinton and Sedalia in Windsor MO.  1291 SE 1300 Windsor MO to be exact.  No phone number and they are closed on Thursday and Sunday.

We headed to lunch at Raymond's Cafe in Windsor which had a large selection and prompt service.  I had a grilled cheese and "onion tangles" which were fine.  Mom had some chili she thought was very good and everyone else seemed to like their food as well.

On the way home, we went through Boliver and decided to stop at Margie Pearl's .  We've been there several times and they have a nice selection with nice prices.  They also have a huge selection of flat folds.  I love to check out the large selection of loose buttons.  Plus they usually have some patterns I've never seen elsewhere.  I almost bought some their ombre star field fabric which was on sale for 50% off but I DON'T NEED ANY MORE FABRIC.  It is a good size shop and well lit so you should check it out.

Deb dropped my off at the house at about 5 p.m. and it was a very fun day.  I didn't hold to my resolution not to buy anything but at least the fabric I bought has a definite purpose rather than just an addition to my stash.