I went on a quilt retreat with my guild.  It was so much fun!  There were thirteen of us in a lovely setting, with a cook who happily made me gluten-free meals, a massage therapist one day, and lots of sewing going on.

I started on my Christmas house quilt.  It was scary, because I had a picture, but I didn't know how to make it happen.  I got such good advice, especially from a woman who is working on a glorious crazy quilt.  I knew that I couldn't make that little cat out of fabric, or at least not in the way I usually applique, by hand with turned under edges.  The suggestion to embroider the cat with a satin stitch was perfect.  I admit here to using a very fine black marker to improve the outline of the cat.

Since the embroidery went so well, I got more advice about doing the wreath.  I used a feather stitch in two shades of green for the pine and little red berries of French knots.  I'm very happy with the results.  I did just a straight, black, machine stitch to define the windowpanes.  The next step is to hand applique the door and windows to the body of the house.

I also had a chance to finish the top of a T-shirt quilt that I've been putting off for a year or so.  It's for my public library.  The T-shirts were the prizes for six years of the children's summer reading program.  The thin sashing and borders are from a confetti print I bought at Hobby Lobby.  I'm hoping that the fabric stands up.  It feels fine, maybe a little stretchy.

I'm not sure yet how I will quilt it.  I'm thinking about a bubble-style meander in colors matching the t-shirts on the shirts themselves and something simple in black on the black sashing and the confetti-print sashing.

Once I give it to the library, it will be up to them what they do with it.  They may decide to display it in the storytime room, give it as a prize, or raffle it off. 

We took a weekend trip to Boston for my daughter's birthday, and I had a chance to spend a day at the quilt exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.  The quilts were all from the Roy/Pilgrim collection.  The theme of the exhibit was color theory, especially how backgrounds need not be white.  One room of the exhibit featured unusual quilts, and this one was certainly unusual.

It is an Amish quilt that includes some printed fabrics, and I love its story.  The woman who made it worked in a dry goods store, and the owner would give her fabric from the ends of bolts.  When she had gathered a pile of printed fabric, she went to the bishop and told him that she would either have to waste the fabric or break the rule that only plain fabric could be used in a quilt.  He told her not to waste the fabric, to go ahead and use it.  However, when the quilt was completed, she was so verklempt about the broken rule that she could never make herself use it on a bed! 

While in Boston, I worked on a sketch for my own Christmas House quilt. 

I'm not sure how I'm going to make it.  I'm thinking of using raw edge machine applique for the snow and then machine piecing the house and hand appliquing that onto the background.  I may have to starch the dickens out of the house to do that, or I may decide to foundation piece the house onto a piece of muslin before I applique it on. 

I'm not naturally very whimsical, so I'm still not sure about the rabbit out near the tree.  Somehow the cat in the window seems right, though.  Actually, the whole tree thing may change.  Possibly the big tree on the left will move down and I'll add a small one to the right of the house.  I may use beads to put lights on the outdoor trees. 

Thanks for stopping by.  All suggestions are welcome.

What to work on next???  Since I am the only member of my immediate family not to have or be working toward an actual PhD, I am glad to say that I have many quilting PHDs (Practically Hardly Done, for newbies).

With our guild show coming up in October, I need to make a mini-quilt for a raffle.  It can be anywhere from 6 by 6 inches to 24 by 24 inches.  I have it in my head that I should make a Christmas house scene.  I think that will be a popular theme in October.

I've been gathering fabrics.  I want it to be at night with a warm light shining out through the windows.  I've been thinking about this for weeks, and I think I'm going to have to combine foundation piecing with applique and a bit of hand embroidery. 

I found this dark, snowy sky piece several months ago.

I didn't think that I could use the dark sky for my foundation with the white snow on top of it, but I think the dark underneath really makes the snowflakes appear on the white.

Here is a very rough layout.  I'm thinking red door, yellow windows, green plaid drapes in the windows.  Hmmm, I'll have to be sure that the bricks are horizontal.  Vertical bricks won't make a very strong house, eh?

Time to get out the graph paper and draft it.  Any and all suggestions are most welcome.

The finished quilt actually came out the way I imagined it when I drafted it on graph paper.  That's a first!

AND, I won my first ribbon ever!  And it's blue!  Some of the other quilts were amazing, and I was surprised to win.  I think that the guild was surprised, too, since I'm pretty new there.  I wish I could post photos of the other quilts, but I can't do that without permission.

A friend - yes, she is a true friend - told me that some of the other quilts were more beautiful but than mine used the fabric in a unique way, which is probably why I won.  See, I said that she was true...and also truthful.

The finished top looked like this:

Then I had to figure out how to quilt it.  I am so fortunate to have a used longarm: a Handiquilter 16.  I'm pretty inexperienced with it, so I knew that there would be many opportunities to destroy the quilt.  I loaded some old pillowcases onto the frame and tried out lots of patterns.  I was able to do a decent woodgrain pattern, so I used that on the gray shelf pieces.

I took a longarm quilting class with Dawn Cavanaugh at the AQS show in Lancaster in March and asked her advice on how to quilt the white background.  I was so afraid that I would draw the eye away from the pots or that I would make a mistake that stood out.  She suggested trying to make the white look like whitewashed adobe with up-and-down lines that curved into each other and left some empty spaces.  I was able to do it, and I like the way it turned out.

The ivy leaves gave me fits!  First, I searched Google images for real leaves and drawings of leaves.  I'm pretty sure that I mixed up two kinds of ivy on one plant - five pointed leaves and three pointed leaves.  Mother Nature is not happy with me.  I use the applique technique of putting the sticky side of the freezer paper toward the back of the piece and pressing the edges to it.  This green fabric is not a batik, and it raveled like crazy.  I threw more than one leaf out.  I do like the way the leaves look as I sew them across the pot and down across the shelf.

I chose two shades of gray with a white center for the Attic Windows background blocks so that the pots would really pop.  This is the first and simplest pot in place.  It's hand appliqued on using the freezer paper method.  I use the freezer paper inside the piece and cut a slit in the back of the background to pull the paper out.