Sunday, August 30, 2009

Finishing Touches

The elephant and guitars are finished, complete with labels!


I settled on "Elephant Walk." There is a kids' music piece that was used for years on "The Buckshot Show" titled "Elephant Walk" as its intro theme music. Joe told me this. I remember the music, but didn't know the name of it.

I'll deliver the quilt next time I hear kid sounds at the neighbours - two active little boys, now with a baby sister!

I never seem to do a good job of the lighting. Hope the pix are good enough to get the idea.

And here is "Guitar Hero." You will recall that I ran out of the bright green and was lamenting this fact. When we were in the Jo-Ann Fabric store in Spokane, there was a few shades of bright green. I took a chance that I selected the right one and - Yay! - it was. So I picked up some more and did the border with it! I'm very pleased about that!
This is the backing for Guitar Hero.

Joe modelled both quilts in the absence of their intended owners. I hope to get caught up on the "modelling" pix soon, too!
In the meantime, the weather outside is great so I'm going to adjourn to the deck and doodle the concept for my next quilt! Enjoy the day!

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Pink Elephant

Our neighbours recently had a baby girl. I had some kids' fabric and I actually bought 1/2 m of pink (not much because I probably wouldn't use a lot of pink). Sew.... I thought I'd use the pink and some of the kid fabric to make a quilt. One of the fabric print themes I have is a circus print. I was fishing around for an idea to incorporate a circus theme - I'm not too focused on kids' stuff so needed a bit of inspiration. Off to the library.

One of the books I picked up is Lickety-Split Quilts for Little Ones by Laurie Bevan. On page 34 she has her "Baby Elephant" quilt, which, when I read the fine print, measures about 27 by 36 inches. Elephants are found at the circus. Good idea.


Laurie Bevan said "I changed the traditional Ararat block ever so slightly to make this wonderful elephant look like a baby." Well that made me wonder "what the heck is an Ararat block?" So off to Google I went.

Ararat is a mountain in Turkey with some biblical significance. I think I knew that somewhere in the back of my mind.

But what I didn't know is that the elephant is the symbol for the Republican Party in the US. I guess this has long been the case, but I'm always the last to know these important details.

There is an elephant quilt block called the "Ararat block" - apparently Ararat was the name of the elephant in a zoo and the elephant block was designed originally with no political intentions, but has essentially been adopted by the Republicans. The actual block is half square rectangles but I just copied it off in squares (I didn't use Laurie's).

And like the original, mine is intended to be only a circus elephant - no political intentions here. My elephant quilt top from border to border is about 52 by 40 inches. The backing will be a circus theme. I didn't take a pix of the backing tonight because it needs to be pressed and I'm out of time, but will put it up when the quilt is finished.





OK -here is the backing - still not pressed. But good enough to give you the idea. Will post a better pix when the quilt is finished.

Sunday, August 2, 2009

Guitar Hero

Eric is our musician son. He is my personal guitar hero.

Here is the top for his quilt - all done. Needs batting, backing and quilting. I'll be starting on that momentarily.

We'll be seeing Eric later this week, but I will be very surprised if this is ready to go that soon. Good thing they are experiencing record heat! I don't think he'll mind if he doesn't get his quilt until later!

I actually used a pattern for this one (!!! - I know!!!). I saw this pattern in Leavenworth WA before I actually had done any quilting and I really liked it so picked it up. The pattern is called Guitars Opus VI designed by Maureen Erhardt of Music In Our Hearts Studios.

The top is entirely from my stash, although I knew I had the pattern and I picked up music and guitar themed pieces when I saw them. I have many others, but these ones seemed to fall into place perfectly.

One interesting point is that I picked up the bright green just because I liked it thinking it would likely be one of the last things I'd ever use. Wrong. When I went digging for something to use for the guitar heads, this green jumped out at me and said "I'm the one!" (Does your fabric talk to you?? :) ) I had one meter. Used all but a few square inches of it. I would have liked to have done the binding with it, but nothing left. And of course there's none left in the store, either. Oh well.


The little black dots are bugs that jumped on the fabric the instant I laid it out on the lawn. I guess they liked it!


As an added bonus, here are a few pix of our flowers - petunias and lilies.