Bus Trip Scouting Trip

On Friday Feb. 12, I delivered my daughter to the Kansas City Airport to fly back to Los Angeles.  I loved having her here for 5 days.  Even though I only saw her a couple times a year when she lived in the L.A. area, I just dread having her go back to Australia.  It is so far away and the time difference is difficult.  However, I am looking forward to visiting her in Melbourne later this year.

Since we were up in the area, Mom and I decided to check out some potential quilt shops for the bus trip we are planning in September.  It will be Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday Sept. 27, 28, 29.  After we dropped Bre off at the airport, we headed to Topeka to spend the night so we could be there to start our scouting trip first thing in the morning.  We did happen upon a fun diner for dinner, Spangles.  I had a very good grilled cheese and mom loved the chili.  I just love diners and the 50s retro vibe.

We had a little time to kill on Saturday morning because the first shop we were checking out didn't open until 10 a.m.  We started out at Stitching Traditions in Topeka.

 The shop was well stocked and had lovely, lovely fabric.  They also had some really great project bags that mom wants me to make with some of the vinyl left over from last year's bus trip project bags.

 The prices were a little steep for fabric running $13 to $14 per yard on the ones I checked out but I really did like the accessories and they carried lots and lots of patterns that were very well organized.  In addition to that they had some really great samples hanging in the shop which is always a plus.

 The shop wasn't huge but they did have a lots of fabric and it was beautiful.  Not sure if we'll make them a stop on the bus trip but if you are in the area they are definitely worth a visit.  Oh by they way, the shop is worth seeing if for nothing other than the cute yorkie mascot.

Next we hopped in the car and headed up to Holton KS to Quilting on the Square.  This charming shop is on the town square which I almost always find irresistible.  There are really high ceilings in the shop which means quilts can be hung so you can see the whole thing.

 I love that and this shop has some amazing samples of Jacqueline de Junge quilts that are breathtakingly beautiful.

 A beautiful high schooler who works in the shop made one of these quilts and had a feature article on her in one of the quilting magazines.  Astounding.  Jacqueline is going to be teaching some classes there in the fall which seems to me to be a coo for this little shop in Kansas.  They also have several Amy Bradley quilts hanging and I'm excited to be taking a class from her at Quilting on the Square in March.

 Turns out she lives not far from there, who knew???   The shop had some great block of the month quilts on display and I snapped up a panel with Rey from Star Wars: The Force Awakens because I think it is so cool this blockbuster super film had a female hero.  Love it all day.  This shop is definitely making the bus trip itinerary.

Next we were off to Leavenworth Kansas to visit Meadows Quilting and Sewing.

 Of course I liked this shop a lot as it specializes in bright and modern fabric.  Another shop with really tall ceilings so full size quilts were hanging in all their splendor.

 They even had a Tula Pink quilt on display which I just loved.  That Queen Elizabeth selfie fabric is one of my favorites.  They had some really nice patterns and books all pretty much concentrating on modern quilts.

 I have to say this shop was right up my alley but we probably won't put it on the bus trip itinerary since we try to visit shops that will appeal to everyone and this shop was pretty specialized.  I however, plan to make a return visit one of these days.

The next leg of the trip took us to Peddler's Wagon Quilt Shop in Parkville MO.  I wasn't allowed to take pictures in this shop which is too bad because it is very charming.  It has a cabin feel to it with all the wood.  They have great quilt themed jigsaw puzzles throughout the front of the store and a good selection of fabric but where this shop excels is in the pattern department.  They have hundreds and hundreds of patterns.  I was tempted to buy 4 or 5 but I didn't succumb since I'm trying really hard to use what I have at home.  I did get a couple of yards of fabric since it was on sale for $6 per yard.  The shop had a nice variety of fabrics and it is in the running for one of our stops on the bus trip because both Gana and Janice recommended it.

The last stop of the day was Prairie Point Quilt & Fabric Shop in Shawnee KS.

This was another great shop and will definitely be on the bus trip in September.  It is in a strip mall and is a nice big open store.

 There are huge amounts of fabric to choose from and they have some really cute embroidery patterns that I'd never seen before.  Both mom and I bought embroidery patterns by Blueberry Backroads.  The shop was well lit and had some lovely samples hanging around.

 While we were they about 5 women were staffing the shop and there was no shortage of help.  All very friendly and helpful.

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.