Valentine Heart Amulets

I have made some heart amulets for Valentine's Day.


When I have company tomorrow these will be on the tray with the round amulets and they will be able to choose a heart or a round amulet.
Some of my friends use these as a good luck token when we play cards.

This puzzle is my valentine to you!

Shibori - Designing With Analogous Colors

This is part of my collection of shibori fabrics I've recently created shading from yellows to blue greens.

I have at least twice this many.


This is one possibility of a way I could use fabrics from this group.
When I start to work on a design I usually start with a piece of fabric I love. For this composition I started with the long narrow green piece in the center.

I hope to come up with a composition that uses a majority of these fabrics. That may take a while. I feel I have a good start as I have assembled a group to work from.

Work In Progress - Shibori

This is a new piece I am working on.
I know it will take a lot of quilting to bring out the design.
It is on my list to quilt very soon.

Some of these fabrics were dyed with my 25-30 year old Procion dyes!

I think this section makes an interesting puzzle!

Potato Chip Quilt 2 Finished - Play A Simple Melody

I finished this last night.
I guess not having an internet connection for the majority of time the last two days allowed me to get many things accomplished!


I am very pleased with the final quilt. It is does NOT have straight edges and this was intentional.


I thought some of you might enjoy seeing a closeup of the quilting.

This was a perfect quilt to make a puzzle from!

Do You Know What These Are? Scissors Fobs!

I enjoyed making these and continued making them until I ran out of supplies. Each one has one of my polymer clay beads on it. Who knows what they are?


Does this closeup help you?


When I got my new DOVO scissors I wanted a way to find it easily and so decided to make a scissors fob. My first attempts were not successful but I didn't give up.
I am so pleased with all of these.

Our Art Quilt Group had a luncheon today. I gifted one to each member.

I hope you enjoy this puzzle.

Propagating Quilt Potatoes

If you are a gardener you may have used pieces of an old potato to grow new potato plants.

This is another of my favorite ways to create a quilt.

I put all my "Wonder Under backed scraps almost to small to use" in a box and take them with me when I know I will have to wait somewhere for an appointment.


Then I let the shape of the scrap determine what interesting shape I can cut it in.
I cut as many pieces as I can from each piece and throw away the snivels. My supply is very low right now.

I like to keep those precut shapes on a large tray so I can see what I have.


I often use these to jump start a new small quilt.



I start with a background. The background can be a solid piece of fabric. For this particular quilt I used commercial fabrics.


The background for this quilt is also one piece. This was created entirely from my hand dyed fabrics.


A background can also be created with more than one piece of fabric as I did for this quilt. You can do this because of the design or also because you don't have one piece of fabric large enough to make the background.

I fuse the background to my batting before I create my design.

Of course I don't always have enough shapes to create a cohesive design. I cut more shapes as necessary to make a balanced and attractive composition.

It's a fun and freeing way to work and I come up with things I never could with any other working method.

A Whole Lot Of Knitting Going On!

I've finished quite a few things in the last two months and I'm going to show you some I haven't shown before as well as some I have.


I think I may have shown you these socks before - knit with my favorite sock yarn - Sophie's Toes. I wanted to make a pair for the Christmas season but not make them TOO Christmasy. I feel I can wear these often.


This is a Baktus scarf - an very popular style with knitters. It is simple - you only knit - no purls!
Although my friend Melody knit hers with one skein of Sophies Toes, I used about one and one third skeins since I knit tighter. Fortunately I had extra leftover from my socks.


In the background you see the dish towel I knit. It is finished and I have worked in all the loose threads.
I knit this pair of men's tube socks for a special man in my life. I hope he loves them.

It's a great feeling to have finished all of these things.

Our weather has been too warm to wear the scarf and socks recently, but I'm not complaining.

32nd Anniversary Of The First Jinny Beyer Quilt Seminar At Hilton Head Island!

Around noon today Kaye Rhodes, Mary Nolan and I were reminiscing about the Jinny Beyer Seminar at Hilton Head Island.
The last seminar was held in 2009.

We each have wonderful happy memories from the years we attended.
Mary participated for 25 consecutive years - what a great record.
I now live in the same county Mary lived in many years ago!
Yes, it is a small world.

Of course Kay and I share a first name - even though she has an "e" at the end - I added an "e" when I was in junior high for a while!


One can not think Hilton Head Island without thinking of the iconic light house at Harbour Town.


My friends and I always arrived the weekend before the seminar began and spent our time shopping.


When we found this sign at a store we knew it was meant for us!


Even the coldest day ever on Hilton Head Island did not deter these us from our pursuit of 50% or more off!


This scene was repeated many times in the days before the seminar began!


Once the seminar began we were all business. Sally thought outside the box to create a "design wall".


I created this Violet pin in a class I took from Andrea Perkins.


This is the beginning of a Medallion style quilt from one of the first seminars.


This was the beginning of a King Size medallion quilt also started in an early seminar. I have scaled back my expectations and this will finish to be smaller than bed size.


This circular design created in a John Flynn class became the yoke area on a jacket. I finished the jacket and wore it to the Saturday banquet that year.



Each year on Friday there was a Beach Walk/Run and many of us created special garments to wear for it.


For many years we were privileged to see the Fairfield Fashion Show brought to us by none other than Donna Wilder. This was always one of my favorite parts of the seminar.


This was an outfit I created for the Fairfield Fashion Show and wore it for the banquet a few years later.


We had this photo taken of our group with Jinny Beyer at the closing of the 1985 seminar.

The banquet concluded the seminar each year and it was always bitter sweet.

The memories linger on, long after the last and final seminar in 2009.

Potato Chip Quilts From Blog Readers

This is a queen size Potato Chip quilt. It was made by Cassandra Philpot from Australia. If that name sounds familiar it is because this is her second queen size potato chip quilt.


These are the preliminary fabric choices Lynn Maher made for her Potato Chip quilt.


She eliminated a few of the original choices and added a few more. The spacers are screen printed animals that you might find in the woods. The animal squares were 3 1/2 inches so she made her strips 3 1/2" wide and adjusted the number of strips accordingly. She added a border all the way around to further increase the size. She made this for her daughter to snuggle under on her couch in the mountains of Colorado. She showed it to the "Lunch Ladies" on Wednesday and they all absolutely loved it. I am sure her daughter will be thrilled with it.

Quilt Seedlings

In addition to Quilt Seeds and Hybrid Quilt Seeds I also use Quilt Seedlings to design my work.


This group of quilt seedlings are primarily blues.


Quilt Seedlings are pieces of fabric that have Wonder Under on the back of them.


When I have small scraps of fabrics left I put a lot of them on a sheet of Wonder Under and that is one way I get seedlings.


I save the rest of the piece when I cut something from a piece of fabric. If I cut out a shape and don't use it, it also becomes a seedling for a future piece.

Having these small seedlings takes away the fear of cutting into a large precious piece of fabric.
I also get ideas to use those large precious pieces as I am making these smaller works of art.

These can also be used on larger works by combining them or adding them as details.

The Ladies Who Lunch Are Back!

Today was a gorgeous day and a group of us went to lunch at the Nancy Lopez Country Club in The Villages.

It is a lovely place with excellent food.
To top it off the service is always excellent.


All of us are snowbirds from Wisconsin although one of our snowbirds no longer migrates north for more than a few weeks each summer.

It is always so good to see everyone and catch up on what has happened in their lives since we last saw each other.

Hybrid Seeds For Quilts

Just like there are more than one kind of fruit or vegetable seed to plant in a garden, there are many types of seeds to start a quilt. There are also so many different sizes of seeds, from the ones you can hardly see to very large ones.
My hybrids fall into the large seed category.

I am creating a collection of "hybrid" seeds.


That is why I am concentrating on getting a collection of fabrics dyed to add to the ones already in my collection.


There are some hybrids that come from grafting various techniques and colors and give me surprising results.


Then there are those items I "graft" and hope I'll get the desired result.


Just like you don't want to grow all one color in your garden, I need both bright and subtle colors for my hybrid seeds.

As some of you are anticipating spring and ordering seeds from the colorful catalogs you receive in the mail, I am anticipating how to use my hybrid quilt seeds.

I have shown you less than half of the hybrid quilt seeds I have created in the last few months.
I believe I will be beginning to "plant" my garden soon.

I hope your seed collection will grow prolifically, whether you plant them in the ground or use them to make a quilt!

I put fewer pieces in this puzzle than normal since it does not have a lot of color contrast which would make it easier to put together.

I Planted Quilt Seeds!

There are days when I just want to sew, sew, sew.
I don't want to think, cut, design, quilt, or finish a quilt.

I had a good size bin of scraps. It also contained quite a few fat quarters.


So I decided to use my Accuquilt GO fabric cutter and cut them all into squares, triangles and strips.


Now the bin is empty and I have two trays full of seeds.

I can randomly sew these together and eventually they can become something.

Maybe they'll be utilitarian quilts, possibly art, or they could also become smaller items.

Normally if I start to work with the pieces in a scrap bin for a project, when I get done the bin is fuller than when I started.

This is definitely a first!

This time I threw away the "scraps too small to use" and it was a good feeling!

Maybe you can put my "scraps" back together as you do this puzzle!