Sunrise Quilt Studio

My brother invited us to his cabin in the woods this weekend. We spent Friday night and Saturday there. The fall colors are so pretty there. We aren't getting many pretty colors here in Jefferson City. I guess it was just too dry this summer. It rained all Friday evening and through the night, but Saturday was sunny and cool. We spent all morning walking the property and enjoying the fall colors. I took plenty of photos to get ideas for landscape quilts :D I just love digital cameras where you can take as many photos as will fit in your memory card. That's a lot! And you can immediately delete those that don't turn out the way you like and then retake the photo until you get it right.

I spent all my spare time working on this mystery quilt the last few days of last week. I just had to see what it would look like. So, first here is a photo of the fabrics I chose for the quilt. The pieces are all cut out and labeled. The first 3 sets of pieces are the white fabric, then there is the black, the focus fabrick, the medium light, then the medium dark. Here is the completed quilt! I still don't have a place to photograph quilts in a verticle setting, so I had to lay the quilt on my bed to take this photo. One of these days I'll get a photo wall set up and will be able to take better photos of quilts. If you ever get the chance to do a mystery quilt, try it! I think it will be more fun that you ever imagined.

What will it be? I started the mystery quilt yesterday. I cut out all the patches and started sewing. Today I'm working on Step 3. I have one of the sets of blocks done and am working on the 2nd set. This is so much fun! It's fun to see how the pieces go together and make a block. This is a photo of the first block. The mystery quilt I'm working on is from The World Wide Quilting Page http://www.quilt.com/ It's the Summer Mystery Quilt. It has 4 steps to it and uses 5 fabrics - a focus fabric, a dark, a light background, a medium dark and a medium light. I chose fall colors instead of summery fabrics. I have white for the background, black for the dark, a dark orange for the medium dark and a lighter orange for the medium light. The focus fabric is a piece of commercial hand-dyed fabric left over from another project. Infact all of these fabrics are pieces from my stash. The 2 orange fabrics are pieces I hand-dyed myself. The others are commercial fabrics. Hopefully I...

The sampler quilt is finished! Yea! I'm so happy! The feather blocks were completed yesterday and today it took just 2 1/2 hours to complete the pieced blocks. This a such a pretty quilt. It's going to be hard to send it back to the customer-ha! Now on to a new quilt. I'll put another quilt on the machine tomorrow and see what ideas crop up in my head. I've been helping Hannah make a quilt for a friend of hers in Reeds Spring. This is an oriental quilt with dragons. Have I mentioned this before? It sounds familiar-hmmmm! Hannah gets tired of stitching the borders on the sewing machine and likes to take loooonnnngggg breaks between each border. This may take awhile to complete ;) She is fast when it comes to quilting on the longarm, though :D Last fall I took up crocheting again. I learned to crochet when I was in elementary school and have crocheted afghans off and on over the years. Last year I made scarves, hats and mittens for the girls. Paul bought me some yarn for ...

Autumn is slowing coming to central Missouri. Usually by now all the trees have lost their leaves, but this year most of the trees still have green leaves on them. We went to the nature center again today to go for a hike. I remembered to bring along my camera this time. Some of the trees are changing, but most are still green. I was fascinated by the huge trees there. I couldn't get the entire tree in one photo and still get the detailed shots that I wanted. So most of my photos of the large trees are taken in 3-4 shots. I think they will make good subjects for future quilts :D Hannah tells me that I turn everything into a quilt - ha! What can I say, it's an occupational hazard :D Speaking of quilts - the customer quilt I'm working on is coming along nicely. I took a long time deciding what to quilt into the alternate blocks. The customer wanted feathers, but I couldn't come up with anything that looked right. Paul had bought me a new quilting book for my birthday and ...

It's working :D Here is one of the photos I took of the sunrise this morning. You can see the heavy rain clouds at the top and the sun changing the color of the lower clouds. This photo was taken just a few seconds after the one above.

This morning was rainy, but the sunrise was beautiful. I had to take a couple of photos to share. It always amazes me how quickly the colors change in a sunrise. A promise of a new day. Shortly after I took this photo, the skies opened up and it poured. This view overlooks the Missouri River although you can't see the river due to the bluffs. In the evenings sometimes, we can see the mist rising from the river over the bluffs. Soooo pretty! The trees are slowly starting to change colors here. I'll have to get out and take some photos soon. The quilt I'm working on is going well. I'm almost finished with the borders and will quilt the alternate blocks next, then the pieced blocks. I'm using an Amish curling feather in the borders and another feather motif in the alternate blocks with some straightline ruler quilting in the pieced blocks. As of now, we are planning a trip to Reeds Spring the weekend of November 17th and 185h. Paul's parents are celebratin...

We didn't do much today. Hannah had the day off school, so we decided to go visit the nature center. The MO Conservation Department has it's headquarters here in Jefferson City along with a nature center. The center is about 5 miles from our house. We spent some time inside the building looking at their exhibits of Missouri wildlife. The most impressive to me was the stuffed mountain lion. Sarah and Hannah liked the snakes-ha! After looking inside the building, we took a walk along the nature trails. We had planned on a 1 mile walk, but it was too short for the girls once we got started. I think we covered every trail they have. We also climbed up the fire observation tower they have on display. We'll be making frequent visits to walk the trails. Next time I'll try to remember to bring my camera. After the nature center visit, we decided to drive around the rural areas here. We are right on the edge of a very large farm so we don't have to drive far to f...

The quilt is done! I don't have a place to hang quilts to take photos yet, so here is a photo of it on our bed. Here is a closer view showing some of the detail of the quilting in the basket blocks and the alternate blocks. Here is a close up of an alternate block. Tomorrow I'll be starting a new quilt project.

Do you ever get that nagging feeling that something just isn't quite right? You look and ponder and worry and still can't figure out what is wrong, so you just go on working on a project. What else can you do since you don't know for certain there REALLY is something wrong. I've been looking at my new quilt - over and over and over again - trying to figure out what is wrong with it. It just didn't look right, but no matter how much I stewed over it, I couldn't find anything wrong with it. So I kept working. I finished the blocks, stitched them together, added the borders, marked the quilting lines, loaded it on the quilting machine, quilted it, bound it, and tossed it in the washer to wash out the blue pen marks. As of this minute it is in the dryer on low to damp dry it. I have to say that the quilting went remarkably fast and easy. That's just one more sign that something wasn't quite right, but I attributed it to the fact that I had 8 weeks away from ...

We just got back home yesterday evening from a quick trip to Chicago, IL. We left Jefferson City on Wednesday and arrived home Friday. We had to go to the Royal Thai Embassy to finalized Sarah's adoption in Thailand. That appointment lasted all of 20 minutes, but it was nice to connect with some of the Thai people again. Sarah remembered how to wai. That's the Thai greeting of "Sawadee Ka". View of Lake Michigan from the Shedd's Aquarium. The rest of the afternoon Thursday, we spent at the Shedd Aquarium on Lake Michigan. You get really beautiful views of the Chicago skyline as well as Lake Michigan from the aquarium. Like most large cities, though, the smog obscured the view somewhat. This is a photo of the girls outside the Soldier Field Ball Park. This is a photo of Sears Tower to the right. This is a photo of the girls in front of the Soldier Field Monument.

Here are a couple more photos of the "Swans Around the Baskets" quilt. This weekend I completed the alternate blocks (white blocks) and today I'm working on the basket blocks. I didn't get as much quilting done today as I wanted. Oh, well, maybe tomorrow I'll get the quilt finished. Paul and I worked on building a doghouse this weekend. Those of you who have been to our house before may have noticed that we had a very large doghouse for our outdoor dogs. That's because they liked to get into the house together. We couldn't move that doghouse with us so we built another one. This one is a double doggy too :D Paul ran out of time to complete the roof before the rain started so he quickly screwed down a piece of plywood flat on the top of the house. He'll make a real roof later. Here is a photo of what I found in the doghouse this afternoon :D It may end up being a playhouse instead of a doghouse!