Tic-Tac-Toe

Nope, not the game, the quilt!

Marei sent this quilt for me to work on after showing the flimsy (un-quilted top) at our guild meeting. Everyone loved it so much that she's now scheduled to make a presentation at next month's meeting on how to put it together. Apparently, it goes together quickly so is a great one for when you need a last minute quilt.

The bright fabrics in this one are beautiful and are really set off nicely with the black and cream. I wanted to push the black and cream to the background to make the other fabrics shine, so I did some pretty dense quilting.

Marei's only request on this one was to do "something special" in the top. This quilt is going to her grandson, Jakob, for his bed and the top will be over the pillows. I outlined the designs on the top with matching thread, so while nothing much shows here...

It does on the back! (click on the picture to really see the detail)

Thanks for looking!

Dory

The Big Difference

Today I discovered the difference between quilting for yourself and quilting as an occupation.  Are you dying to know?? Well, you have to read through this whole thing to find out the answer (or just skip to the bottom).

When I first started quilting (my good friend Lucy introduced me to it after our house had burned down), I had a really bad day. I had purchased a "box" Brother machine from Costco and I could not get the bobbin to load correctly. After trying for quite some time and still not getting it to work correctly, I gave up and got my horse, Elly, and we went for a nice, relaxing ride in the forest.

Today, I could not, no matter what I did, get the tension adjusted correctly on my longarm when using Bottom Line thread in both the top and bobbin. No matter what I did (changed bobbins, needles, adjusted the tension), the top thread kept breaking. Then when I finally go the top thread to behave, the bobbin thread started breaking! It wasn't making any sense, since the stitching was turning out beautifully. Finally, when working on the last two blocks, things were adjusted correctly and I made it through both blocks without having any broken threads!!  Go figure. *sigh*

The difference: If I were quilting for myself, I would have thrown my arms up in the air, changed my clothes, grabbed Kate and gone for a ride. However, since I have a business and this quilt has a deadline, I kept working until the end.

She needs to be ridden!!!

I Know...It's Not Monday

But, it is Tuesday morning and I didn't get back until last night so I haven't been ignoring my blog.

MQX was terrific! The venue was great and I got to catch up with my good friend, Lisa, from Canada. We only had one class together,  but we stayed together so we made up for lost time.

More about MQX in general later, but here are a few pics of the beautiful quilts I took while there.  Please note, these aren't pictures of the entire quilts as I don't think that would be appropriate; these are just some of the bits that I really loved.  Perhaps it has to do with the subject matter??

Look at the background quilting on these quilts; as a quilter, I find it so interesting to see what quilters do.

















Dory

Where's Waldo??

This doesn't mean you can call me "Waldo." However, guess where I am???

Click here to find out!!

I'm so excited to be here and will be posting lots of pictures when I get home on Monday!

And because blog posts without pics are "blah" posts...here are some cute pups for your viewing pleasure.

The gorgeous Border Collie, Chloe:

The Border-Mutt, Dasher:

And, the Labra-Collie, Cash (when he was a little, bitty puppy; before he turned into the moose he is now).

Such a cute family!!

Dory

On The Road Again...

Heading up to Washington again....hoping for more beautiful views like this one:

However, we probably won't be quite so lucky. Knowing Washington the way we do, I doubt we'll have the lovely sunshine that we had on our last trip up.

Dory

Ahhhhh...Look at the Puppies

Nope, not my puppies. These ones are in a quilt and a pillow top that Jennifer made.

Aren't they cute? I quilted the two pups in the quilt with the same tight swirl stitches to make them look like they were the same dog. The nine-patch blocks have a terry-twist and I swirled inside the dark purple circles to give a tufted effect in the light blue blocks. I used Quilters Dream Puff, so the effect worked quite well.

In the pillow top, I used a thinner batting and bigger swirls in the dog's body this time.

And a photo of the back. The quilting actually shows up a tad better if you click on the picture to make it larger.

Thanks for looking!

Dory