It’s been a while. In late February, I discovered that there was an issue with my website’s hosting service (although I didn’t know exactly what the issue was at the time). It took several months to resolve, and I have had to recreate my entire website over the last week. Fortunately, WordPress allows for backdating of blog entries, and I had all of the entries in Google Docs from when I wrote them (always keep backups!), so I was able to recreate the blog as it was before with perhaps some fudging of posting dates. Meh.
Since February, there has been progress on quilts! Let’s go through them one by one.
College Fjord
This quilt is, sadly, still not done. It took me a couple of months to get a second set of 100 buttons from Alert Bay, and the sewing on of all 200 buttons has been slow. I had been doing it by hand, and I have awful wrist problems that were exacerbated by the hand sewing. But someone recently asked me if I had thought of sewing them on using my machine. Honestly, I hadn’t. (Remember, up until a couple of years ago, I had a no-frills sewing machine made in the 1960s.) In the last couple of weeks, I have learned to sew buttons on with my machine! I have about 40 left to go, and then the binding. Baby steps are still steps.
Hus Ved Havet
I finished this! This quilt, the abstract iceberg quilt, and the Tracy Arm iceberg quilt all appeared in my guild’s show in mid-March. And as I predicted, I was still sewing the binding on the morning that I turned it in. Here’s the display:
I am exceedingly happy with this quilt. I ended up sewing the top together with appliqued clouds, and the words to the song appear in one of the clouds. There is some stitch-in-the-ditch quilting in the greens of the land in the foreground, and there is outline quilting around the house and the clouds. Once upon a time, I thought I might use a bit of visible quilting on this quilt to create movement, but when I got to that point, it didn’t feel necessary. The image stands for itself. If the elements of the quilt – the mountains, the land, the water – had been made of solid fabric, then I might have felt the need to do more quilting. But with the narrow strips of fabric, there was enough interest so that the addition of visible quilting seemed superfluous. Here’s a closeup:
Oregon Waterfall
I continued working on the vegetation, but the more I worked on it (and the more needles that got gummed up in the works), the less I liked it. It’s still sitting in the pile, but I don’t foresee finishing it anytime soon.
Acadia Sunrise
I started this one! I got it all planned out on paper and have all of the fabrics cut, and much of it is sitting on my design wall waiting to be sewn together. It needs a good weekend of work, and I can probably get it done. This one, I suspect, will need some visible quilting. Stitch-in-the-ditch isn’t going to cut it here. This is what it looks like so far:
I have two other quilts percolating. Both involve printing out the image on fabric and taking an element out of it to applique onto the rest of the image created with fabrics from the quilt store (much like the Tracy Arm iceberg quilt). Both are from my trip to the Lofoten Islands in Norway a couple of years ago. The images will (hopefully) go to Spoonflower sometime this week.
My guild has agreed to let me speak about these quilts in September, so my summer is going to be spent finishing up these four quilts and preparing the presentation. Now that my website is back up and running again, I will continue to update anyone who is out there keeping up with this. Thanks for (re)joining me!