Sunrise Quilt Studio

I'm dedicating most of my time this week to cleaning my house. This is my deep cleaning where I steam carpets, etc. I have a white carpet in my living room and dining room that is really hard to keep clean, so I end up cleaning the carpet at least once a month-ugh! That carpet will be history soon as we are installing hardwood floor sometime this winter, but in the meantime I still have this compulsion to do something to keep it presentable. So I'm taking a short break from quilting today. The girls and I are visiting the library for more books for school, then I'm tackling the carpet. Here's a photo of a quilt I completed back in 2002. It's from the book Rose Sampler Quilt. I hand appliqued these blocks using Eleanor Burns method of stitching interfacing to fronts of the applique pieces and slitting the interfacing, turning the pieces, pressing them and securing them in place on the block. My interfacing was a bit too heavy and I didn't like the results, but i...

This afternoon I worked on the Simplicity layer cake quilt. I knew I wanted lots of feathers in this quilt and since I'm best at freehand feathers as opposed to commercial pattern feathers, I decided to just "go for it" and started quilting. This first photo is of a feathered heart. I cut a heart template from a piece of printer paper and traced around it in the center of the upper outer border with an air soluble marker. Then I freehand quilted the feathers using 40wt. Signature thread in Parchment. The feathers extended out from the feathered heart were a bit more difficult. I quilted and ripped out quilting 3 times before I finally got a feather that I liked. This border is 10 inches wide and I needed to add more extensions on the spine of the feather in order to fill up the space. I think it turned out well inspite of the 2 hours it took me to do one side of one border! The other 3 sides of this border should go faster now that I have this first one done and the patte...