On Friday, I finished the quilting on this new piece and blocked it. On Saturday, I trimmed it to size and prepared the sleeve and the documentation tag, which meant I had to come up with a name. “After The Storm” won out.  The finished size is 39.5 x 24″.

I love to see this fleeting vision when after the storm everything is clean and sparkling, the sky is still dark but the sunlight comes in and lights the foreground against the dark storm clouds. It was a lovely fall day here, so I sat out on the deck to do the hand work and listened to my Art History lectures on the tape recorder. Perfect! I met the deadline and will enter it into the next Topeka Art Guild show with the Kansas theme later today.

You know that rare weather phenomenon where the sky goes almost black, but the sun is still shining and lights the landscape to a bright chartreuse-y green? That’s what I am trying to capture in this new piece. I finally found the right sky fabric and I already had the greens. This progress shot is a couple of days in and I have not yet decided on the foreground fabric.

Things are going well here in Des Moines; what a nice group! Now the weather, that has not been so great. VERY heavy rains have caused some flooding in the area and some drenching of quilters but luckily it was not raining for the unloading of the quilts. The rest of the week looks like it will be clear and cooler.

The brand new “Beneficial Burn” quilt sold after the first lecture, as well as the “Bluebird” sample quilt. I had announced my impending retirement and the fact that all of the sample quilts would no longer be needed and were now for sale. I have not even posted that to my website, but hope to get to it after I get home.

Today is the “Coneflowers” class and tomorrow we will work with foundation paper piecing the “Third Weekend” and “New Leaves” quilts. It’s been a fun trip so far with lots of pattern sales, and I’m looking forward to the workshops.

It is always so exciting to start something new! After pulling out all of the fabric possibilities it became apparent that the actual work cannot be the picture in my mind’s eye. Which is a let-down, I just don’t have those fabrics! But, never mind. I will make it work. (That picture is soft and dreamy, lots of soft peachy dawn colors, even paler shades for the bird.)

This first picture is at the end of the first working day, using the color palette that I have to work with. My artist friends don’t know how lucky they are to be able to mix up the colors they need!. I will change the head from cream to white for better contrast.  I decided that curved seam piecing would compliment this design.  It’s harder to sew but worth it I think.

The eye is an actual lucky find already printed for me in yellow, black and white. I will ink in some of the white center, leaving just a little white sparkle. And YES it is pieced in, not appliqued! For nice contrast, I chose dark brown for the beak, but checking the books, they all say the beak should be yellow, so I will have to change that. This is approximately 40 x 50″

After finishing the Woodpecker, I really didn’t have any inspiration to start something new. Sometimes I get blocked and nothing is there wanting to get out. Other times there are more ideas than I can possibly do.

We live near a Heron nesting colony and they often fly over. Sometimes they even visit our farm pond and even our water garden/fish pond (NOT a good thing!). They are pretty things, though and I have had a plan for a long time to do a Heron quilt. One rainy afternoon, recently, I felt inspired to sketch and came up with this:

Te next day I enlarged it and transferred it to freezer paper. I decided on curved seam piecing for this one. More difficult but worth it, I think.

At this point, it is hard to not cut a few pieces!

I finished the little 12 x 12″ quilt for the SAQA auction last week and got it sent off to them. It was adapted from a photo I took of the woodpecker on the sunflower seed feeder. I gave him a nicer place to sit. Well, prettier, anyway.

I used a variety of black and white fabrics, mostly zebra prints. Here’s what I pulled off the shelves in the beginning,

and here is what I actually used.

These little pieces don’t use a lot of fabric but still you need a lot of choices!

It’s been a cool and rainy week so everything is lush and beautiful. I try to get outside every day and weed or trim to keep it in check. Soon it will get hot and dry and it will be a different story, so we enjoy it while we can!

The first perfect rose

Kansas Blizzard Iris

Progress after the first day, nothing sewn yet:

Thanks for the nudge, Martha! I’ve been meaning to give you an update on BrownDog. For about 3 weeks before Christmas and a week or so after we didn’t see him at all. I was beginning to worry that something had happened to him. Then one day he showed up for a drink from the waterfall in the water garden that we leave running in the winter to keep a hole open for the fish. Now most days he comes by to get a drink, and we put out food which he usually passes on. I guess he prefers what the neighbor feeds. He has a very heavy coat and a good layer of fat, so I think he is not missing any meals!!  He looks like a fat hairy pig! So different from a year ago when he came to us.

Still can’t get near him. We had such a cold snap with temps below 0 and wind chills to 13 below, it’s hard not to worry, but our dogs love it and I know Mother Nature has prepared him to deal with it, so I am thankful for that..

Finally. It feels good to be creating again! Last week I finished the sketch

and started to pull some fabrics from the stash. We have thousands of different fabrics; isn’t it amazing that our brains have logged it all and we know what is there, and pretty much where it should be! So I spent extra time looking for the one that I could not find, and finally it turned up, hidden inside a stack of similar color – right where it should be!

There are lots more fabrics here than I will actually use and probably more still on the shelf that haven’t called to me yet.

The next day I transferred the design to the freezer paper in the reverse so that when the pieces are ironed to the backside of the fabric they will be in the proper orientation.

This step has to be followed by marking the pattern to aid in matching the pieces for sewing.

Before quitting for the day, I had to cut just one piece!

This is going to be another prairie fire quilt, to replace the one that sold after winning one of the top awards at Houston a few years ago. It will be of similar orientation, but with curved seams instead of straight, and perhaps a night scene instead of daytime. Stay tuned for progress reports……..

I got up really early yesterday morning to see the total eclipse of the moon. The sky was clear and the view was great! Then about half way through some clouds moved in and it was touch and go; but even then it was beautiful with the clouds all backlit. You can see the interesting reddish glow that was the shadow of the Earth.

Most of my pictures were pretty bad because it’s hard to hold the camera still enough but I’m sure you saw better ones on the news or online. At least I was there!

Here’s my latest masterpiece!

“Splash” 40 x 40″. The timing was right and the quality good enough, I thought, to enter it into Quilt National this year. They require that the work be kept undercover so I usually don’t have anything available to enter. They did not accept it so I am free to show it now. I used a combination of hand dyed and commercially printed fabrics in this entirely pieced, larger than life toddler.  I especially like the way the batik contains reflection colors and some white that looks like foamy waves. Most of the fabrics in the hair are printed “grass” fabrics. Heavily machine quilted with various threads to compliment the fabrics.

It is an honor to be invited to participate in the Silent Auction at the Quilt Festival in Houston and I usually try to send something, especially when I have something showing there…..This year I will have two things at the show, one in “Raining Cats and Dogs” and one in “World of Beauty”. I like to have my Silent Auction piece reflect my entry, so this year I am doing a dog.

I like to make my photo in black and white as it is easier to see through the tracing paper that I use to do the layout. I generally ad hints and clues that will help later on, like the direction of the fur and the darkness of the eyes and nose.

After finishing the layout last week I spent some time transferring everything to the freezer paper and marking the tic marks to aid in the sewing,  pulling fabrics that might work and did some cutting in preparation for the sewing. It’s good to be working again!