Here is the fabric that I purchased in CA. I am really making an effort not to buy too much fabric as I already have more that I will ever use!

But sometimes you just NEED it! Like that one with the colorful reflections that will be wonderful in this new piece. And the green leaf on blue batik, because I never pass up leaves on a blue background.

Yesterday was my day to volunteer my monthly six hours at the Topeka Art Guild Gallery, so this is what I did the day before after finishing the prep work.The size will be about 30 x 40″

Scroll back a couple of posts if you have not seen the photo I am working with.

Whenever I work with people. I like to start with the face. But here I knew I was going to have to know what I was using for the background that surrounds his face, so I decided to establish that first. I am anxious to get started today and see what develops! Stay tuned! This is always a messy process; I like to pull a bunch of fabric that may or may not work in.

I finished the freezer paper, including the tic marks yesterday for the new project and am anxious to start the cutting and sewing! But first I want to show you my students from “Empty Spools”. I am so proud of them!
I’ll go around the room in the order that they worked.

Joyce was working from a photo of her grandmother in her wedding dress, a very ambitious project for her first attempt at Picture Piecing but I think she is doing an amazing job! That little bit of blue in the eye is only laid in to keep Grandma from looking like a zombie for now. Joyce enjoys making portraits in various styles and she will probably ink the eye in later. The flowers with dark background fabric was a lucky find at Back Porch where we shopped Wed.

Susan is working from a photo she took of a Mama Robin showing her baby what a birdbath is for. This photo only gives basic information so Susan brought reference material and is really bringing them to life! This is her second Picture Piecing project. Another lucky fabric find is the Marsha Derse light green that she has laid into the birdbath to be the water. It has the perfect color and built in ripple lines. She will cut it up and add the reflections of the birds.

Linda is making this beautiful Sanseveria plant for her first attempt at Picture Piecing and I think it is going to be wonderful! That lovely hand dye is the perfect background to set off the leaves. She probably does not have enough of it so is trying to distribute it throughout, mixed with other fabrics which will only make it richer. Bits of lighter leaf edge fabrics in chartreuse and blue green will accent the dark leaves and add sparkle to the piece.

Janet’s rendition of this photo of her son in Ireland is being done in a combination of straight seam and curved seam piecing. She has done Picture Piecing before so she is up to the challenge and is doing a great job. I love that she chose to do that amazing tree with curved seams. Can you see that his red hair is a piece of autumn leaf fabric? Genius! Janet gets two pictures because I want you to see the curved seam part that didn’t make it into the first shot.

Barbara came to the workshop with no photo, just a sketch, because her inspiration came to her in a dream! This was her first try at this process and she made excellent progress. There will be a second elephant a little darker than the first. That batik she used really gives the illusion of elephant skin wrinkles and look how she found the eye and the ear within the print! Her very well behaved Boxer, Shelby was our mascot for the week!

Last but certainly not least, was Robin with her photo taken on a visit to Yellowstone. The orange that accents this scene is sulfur and there is steam from the geysers against the dark hills. She brought wonderful fabrics to portray the scenery and was able to find the perfect gray cloud fabric for the reflections on our shopping trip to Back Porch.  This was her first time using this technique and she made an amazing amount of progress in the time we had available.

It was a pleasure o work with these ladies and I hope to be able to share “finished” photos with you later!

Going away is always fun, but getting back home is best! The laundry is done, everything is put away, I’m still catching up on recorded Olympics Figure Skating, but yesterday I finished the layout for a new project.

While I was at “Empty Spools” In my spare moments,  I worked on planning the seams for “Jesse At The Lake”.

While shopping there, I found a perfect fabric for the reflections – well, almost perfect, I’ll have to change some colors.  Today I hope to get the fabric washed and photographed to show you, the enlargement finished and the freezer paper prepared.  It’s always exciting to start a new project!

I never imagined when I started INNOVATIONS that it would have been this good!

Every year when I finish up the books for taxes one of the things I enjoy is to tally up all of the sales for the year and for each pattern individually. Since it’s publication in 1997, Third Weekend In October has been my very best seller and continues to excel, having sold, over the years, 31,399 patterns! This is the only pattern that I have had as many as 5,000 printed at a time.

It was a rainy Sunday afternoon when I sat on the sofa with a piece of graph paper and designed this quilt to look like leaf litter on a sunny autumn day. Notice the slash of blue that accents the yellow/orange leaves diagonally from upper left to lower right against the reds.

Being from New England, I had always wanted to do a maple leaf quilt, but wanted mine to be different – not the usual repeated traditional block. I was designing for a one of a kind contest quilt, never intended to be a pattern, but after hundreds of requests I finally gave in and published the pattern. And thank goodness I did! It’s been amazing. Time marches on and I probably will not re order as it is time to slow the business down.

Maybe you already have “Third Weekend”, but if not it is still available over on the pattern page until this printing sells out. It’s 84 x 104″, a true scrap quilt . Lots of pieces, but all straight seams, partially paper pieced to make the odd angles easy.  I have never raised my prices, so this is a bargain at $7.00.

I have resisted getting on Facebook forever, but finally decided that I should probably have a business page, Ruth Powers Innovations, since I no longer go to Market. Just a good way to keep my patterns and activities visible, I hope.  I have been having a lot of trouble with it which is not a surprise to me as I am one of the most technologically challenged people I know. This morning I finally got a photo to post! Big milestone for me… If you are on Facebook, please like me—oh, how needy does THAT sound!!??

This week I have managed some quality sewing time and I believe that one of the hand dyes, the bottom one, created last week is going to work in the sky of the current work!  Linking to Off The Wall Friday.

Quilt It -today magazine has featured my “Early Birds” wallhanging in it’s Spring issue (March-April 2014), in Gathering Inspiration!

“Early Birds” was created for International Quilt Festival’s “Celebrate Spring” contest and it won Best of Show that year! It is owned by the Thomas Contemporary Quilt Collection.

Recently I attended a local art group gathering and we spent the evening dying fabric using baggies and a microwave oven – instant gratification!! I was specifically trying to come up with a fabric that might go with the scrap (shown) from the sky of the dog quilt that I am currently working on.  The results were not really what I was after, but perhaps some of it will work.  If not in this quilt, somewhere else. It’s always fun to see what you get, but I do not have the knowledge or control for predictable results!

Speaking of the dog quilt—I found out that I am not allowed to post pictures of it beyond what I have already done. So no more updates on that for now.

Here’s wishing you all good things in 2014!

Yesterday I finished up the 7 x 10 “Goldfinch in Winter” for SAQA.  I have also been working some on the dogs, but with Christmas, and all, have not made a lot of progress.  I’m still not happy with my available fabric choices for the sky and since I have no pressing deadline, I can take my time….

I had the goldfinch’s head all done before I remembered that the male has a black cap. The one in the photo I was working with is a female and that is how I made the one in the trading card, But I wanted the one for SAQA to be a male. So I had to lop off the top of his head and add some black!

Male goldfinches loose their bright gold color in winter and go sort of olive green like the females. When I see them at the feeder with bits of yellow coming in I know Spring is not too far away.

Linking up to “Off The Wall Friday” – go see what others are up to! Sorry it came through in caps – really I am not yelling at you and I don’t know how to fix it!

I see that “Comments” is turned off. I don’t know why or how to fix that either, so if you want to comment, and I hope you do,  it looks like you can do it in the next post.

Can that be true? Already it is the 20th of December? Where did the year go!

The little “Alaska” piece that I showed recently sold on the evening of First Friday at the Topeka Art Guild, and there has been a round of Christmas parties to attend lately. Thankfully the weather has been good for getting out and about!

I did work on changing backgounds on the dogs; the picture in my mind’s eye is a riot of color with a flower garden background. In reality it was a too busy mess. I first tried the red and yellow flowers and then tried white ones for better contrast.

The actual photograph shows the dogs with a mostly grassy background and flowers. I pinned up some green grassy fabrics and that is better, but still too much all medium tones.

I thought perhaps sky would be nice and I do think it sets them off nicely.

This hand dye is one I did myself and used in “Spring Encounter”, but there is not much left. Certainly not enough, so I have been shopping for something to go with it, since I don’t really enjoy the mess of dyeing, myself. I darkened and tweaked the the grays on the dog for better contrast.

In the meantime I developed a plan for the SAQA “This Is A Quilt” collection. This exhibit travels for a period of time and the pieces only need to be 7 x 10″, so I thought this would be a good time to knock that out. I had purchased a wonderful piece of Marcia Derse fabric that was a mottled mix of greens and yellows with some reds and black with the idea that it would work for the winter color of male Goldfinches.

It is so good, I want more in case I decide to make a bigger version.

So yesterday I drove to Lawrence to Sarah’s where I had purchased that fabric, but I guess I was not the only one to love it and it was all gone!! I did score a batik though that I think will do for dog sky, and some more of the border black print that I am using on the dogs. Not all bad news though, because it forced me to go looking on line and I found Meandering Threads which has a lot of the kind of funky fabrics I love, so this morning I found the fabric online and ordered a yard of it plus a couple more that I couldn’t do without!

The last “This Is A Quilt” exhibit has retired and they are for sale in the SAQA store. I purchased “A Lotus Flower” by Chang Hsu-Hsing of Taiwan. It is gorgeous!! My little pieced dog is still available; the sale goes until Dec 31..still good stuff left, check it out!

We are hunkering down for a wintery blast of ice and snow, possible 10″, so I plan on sewing for the next few days! Check out “Off The Wall Friday” to see what others are working on.

Quilt Market is currently in progress in Houston and I sort of miss the hustle and bustle, but not enough to consider going back! The morning weather report confirms that I am glad to be safely dry and at home, having experienced Houston’s torrential rain and flooded roads on a previous trip!

The Northcott Fabrics booth will be displaying this sample from my POPPY! pattern featuring their new Shimmer line of fabric.

Also on display in the exhibits area and staying through Festival next week are “Who, Me?” in “Celebrate Spring”, “Snow Buddies” in a special exhibit of pet quilts and “In The Bleak Midwinter” in “World of Beauty”. I do wish I could pop in to see those exhibits and Festival, but for this year, it is not to be.

Here at home I have been working on a small wall hanging commission. Each year in an attempt to entice folks to invest in art, the Topeka Art Guild Gallery asks for smaller less expensive works for sale during the month of December and January. A couple of years ago I entered a small landscape of a photo that I took on our Alaska trip and it was purchased by a lady who had lived in Alaska for a while. Ever since she has been after me to make her another, and last month she loaned me one of her photographs to render in fabric for her.

The next step is to quilt and bind it for delivery in a week or so.

Recently the Northcott Fabric Company contacted me about using one of my patterns. POPPY!, to feature one of their new fabric lines, SHIMMER. Of course they need it before Quilt Market in Houston the end of October, so it can hang in their  booth there. They plan to market the pattern to stores along with the fabrics for kitting, so hopefully we will both see the benefit.

I already use a lot of Northcott, especially their Stonehenge line which works wonderfully well in my nature themed work. Shimmer has gold added.  The fabric has a nice silky hand and is a pleasure to work with.

Whenever you work with a fabric company before market, it’s always rush, rush. The fabric didn’t even come in to them til last week, they cut it and express shipped some to me and I finished the top Monday. Started the quilting yesterday and hope to finish it today.

Better go get busy!!