Here we go again...

Basking in the completion of our Nigel Slater Quilt project, Kris and I embarked on our next joint project...this time with rugs.

Each of us created a design, and then passed our rug to the other one to take the next steps. Parameters: 

• Use yarn. That's about it. 

Here is my first round, using scraps from my prior veggie and leaves projects: 

And here is what I got back from Kris last week - Bunny! Kitty! Peas!

And in the "something completely different" department, here is Kris's trade rug...her green dots in the center, with my continuation of the theme in reds: 

Can't wait to see what comes next! 

The Nigel Slater Project, Blocks 3 & 4

Yes, so, back in the quilting arena...cousin Kris and I completed our blocks for our Nigel Slater project. Here are the two spring blocks. The challenge fabrics are the "moo, moo, moo" fabric on the white ground, and a chevron multi-colored fabric that both of us disguised by using in tiny amounts.

Tobi's spring garden block:

Kris's spring recipe block:

And here are the two summer blocks...challenge fabrics are the african batik and the christmas cranberry print.

Tobi's summer berry pie:

Kris's summer berry pie: 

Here are the final 8 blocks, 2 per season, laid out on my design wall. One of these days, I'll decide how to finish these and do the final assembly. 

Adventures in Glass

It's been a few years since Caitlin and I have taken our yearly lamp working class with Stephanie Maddalena at Hudson Beach Glass.  We spent two days in January making glass beads using a propane torch and some low temperature glass rods. Here are the results. 

Just out of the kiln. From upper left, clockwise:

Encased silver foil over black and blue; tiny jelly fish aquarium; blue encased swirl; medium jelly fish aquarium with green frit and encased with clear; implosion with green frit

Blurry close up of Jelly Fish aquarium

 Necklaces and bracelets. Original lamp worked beads, and commercial beads. Silver beads and findings. Strung on waxed cord. 

Close-up. 

The Nigel Slater Project, Winter Block

Sometimes the muse just strikes. The Winter Block for our cousinly Nigel Slater project isn't due to be traded until the first of March. I'd been playing with design ideas in my head ever since finishing the Autumn Block, but I'd been stymied by the challenge fabrics selected by the Andrews husbands for this next quarter.  Scottie Dogs and…glow-in-the-dark Space Bats. Really???

Suddenly my design ideas needed to make a right turn. And then, last week we woke up to this, a perfect day for French Onion Soup. 

The moon on the crest of the new fallen snow, and a big bag of onions, loaf of fresh french bread and red table cloth spawned a new design. These are all improvisational blocks…quirky log cabins, wonky drunkard's paths, and some skewed strip piecings and here it is..

French Onion Soup and Fresh Bread on a Cold Winter's Night:

And the other one in the pair:

And now…on to spring design ideas!

Welcome Kira Helen!

As I was posting the last entry on July 11, Kira Helen was arriving in the world! Here are a few photos of the quilt, with the binding on, and both sides showing. Hopefully, there will eventually be pictures of Kira *with* her quilt. :)

The Great Cousinly Quilt Adventure

When last we left our two intrepid cousinly quilters, they were feverishly piecing quilt blocks in hopes of finishing said quilt in time for the arrival of baby Andrews. Today, we pick up our tale...

The blocks are pieced, the sides are assembled, and the quilt is quilted!

Here is Kris's side, all blues and greens and perfect triangle points. Please note the high-tech quilt stand (Bruce).

And here is Tobi's side, all yellows and oranges and limes, and not a right angle to be found.

Kris's blocks with quilting:

Tobi's blocks with quilting:

Next up - the binding, and hand finishing, and we're done!

The Annual Glass Class with Caitlin

For the past 4 or 5 years, Caitlin, my eldest godchild, and I have celebrated her birthday by taking a lampworking class together. We really enjoy Stephanie's classes, and we've followed her to a couple different venues. We like the set up at Hudson Beach Glass best of all the places we've been. The 2-day format gives us 10 hours of torch time.



Here's my work station. Safety glasses, matches and shaping paddle in upper left. Torch, unlit, in the center. More shaping tools to the right of the torch. Glass rods to the right.



Stephanie doing a demonstration during class. Please ignore the "pooh" tshirt.





Caitlin at the torch. She's using the shaping paddle to steady the mandrel while she works the glass in the torch.
Caitlin's finished beads at the end of the first day.

A really blurry picture of my beads at the end of the first day. The two beads in the foreground have jellyfish designs encased in clear glass. I really need a better photo of these.

Advanced Improvisation with Denyse Schmidt

Yesterday, I spent the day in the Bridgeport, CT studios of Denyse Schmidt where she and her assistant Richard taught their new course in Advanced Improvisation. Part retrospective of Denyse's quilting evolution, part design concepts, this was a low-key, hands-on, personal exploration of design. There were two participants besides myself, so the teacher-student ratio was exceptional, and the high point of the 5 hour session was having both Denyse and Richard pulling fabric and ping-ponging ideas with me at the design wall.

Here's where the day started:

Sketching potential design ideas:

First-pass fabric choices, pulled by Richard, with greens added by Denyse:

Bringing in the berry colors:

Ending up with a rugby-striped theme and the pieced blocks in stripes:

Denyse in action with another student's blocks:

Denyse and Richard have a similar asethetic, but different approaches and they play well off each other. It was an interesting and engaging day, and I finished the day in a completely different place from where I started, and landed in an unexpected place, with an unexpected palette, and an unexpected layout. And, pretty much, that was the point.

The Great Cousinly Quilt Project

On Bruce's side of our family, there are 6 cousins. All but one are boys. Bruce was the first of the cousins to tie the knot (to me, obviously), making me the first "Mrs. Andrews" of this generation. The second "Mrs. Andrews" is Kris who is married to Chris. Kris is a professional embroiderer and quilter, and is one of the artists working on the Plimouth Plantation project of recreating a 17th century embroidered jacket. It's quite an interesting project. The third "Mrs. Andrews" is Esther who is married to Steven. Steve and Esther are expecting their first child, who will also be the first baby born into the Andrews family in about 30 years.

Kris and I have been looking for a project to work on together - and we've decided to do a baby quilt for Steve & Esther. Kris will make one side, I'll make the other, while swapping fabrics so that some of each ends up on both sides of the quilt. Here's how things are progressing so far:

Kris's perfect star with my Denyse-Schmidt-esque quasi-log cabin piecing.

Concept blocks with fabric palette.

Blocks in progress.

Blocks on the wall.

More to come...the baby is due in July.

Studio Tour

This is my room. We call it the quilt room, but really, it has all of my creative stuff in it. I thought I'd provide a little tour today, as I get myself reacquainted with it.

The first thing you see at the top of the stairs as you walk in is my sewing machine. It's a lovely Bernina, and I have a nifty sewing table that will let me sew completely flat (as shown here) or with the sewing arm exposed (if I raised the lower platform to table height). I usually leave the machine set as shown, because it's most convenient for quilting.

Here is the view beyond my sewing machine. It's a cold slushy day today, but within the next 3 months, the lake (which looks like white snow but is really ice in this pic) will rise and the water level will be even with the top of the stone wall across the cove. That's our ice-locked dock you see in the lower left of frame. Today is a perfect day to be in the studio.

I keep my ironing board set to the same level as my sewing table. When I'm working on blocks, I can swivel my (incredibly comfortable work chair) between the sewing machine and the iron without having to stand up or change work levels.

The baskets on my sewing table are full of scraps - part of the preparation blocks I'm working on for my upcoming design class in May. More about that in another post.
Opposite the windows in my studio is the fabric wall. Originally, this was a bedroom and the double bed used this wall as a headboard. I put my secondary work table here with fabric floor to ceiling on one side and quilt and design books on the other. The objects hanging from the cabinet doors are lovely handmade paper dolls that I brought back from Japan in 1993. The colors have faded but they came from the Berami Doll Shop in Matsumoto - a store I wish I'd been able to spend a lot more time and money in when I was there.
In case you thought my fabric stash was a little small, here's what's inside those cabinets. Some of it is organized by color, some by origin (for example, I have two shelves of Senegalese cloth, one of Japanese fabrics, and another of Hawaiian materials. And don't get me started on the antique kimonos with the hand painted silk linings...). I have a lot of fabric. To the right of the fabric wall is my design wall. I covered the entire wall with five yards of white felt, stapled to the original horrible paneling. This wall is where I do my big design work before I sew.

The wall opposite my design wall is the storage wall. The original homeowners built drawers into the walls, under the eaves when they dormered out this floor of the house. These drawers, and the closet, house the rest of it all - paper, paints, threads, yarn, beads, scrapbook stuff, buttons, ribbons, and all the rest.

It's a good room. I hope to see more of it this year.