Finished Making 61 Quilt Blocks!

For 23 days straight I've been making, quilting, and embellishing blocks for my 2014 Travel Diary quilt. Today I finally finished all 61 of them!!! Here's the stack:

The next, and quite challenging, job is to figure out how to put them together to make a wall quilt. I'll write another post about that process later. For now, it will be fun just to show you a few more of the individual blocks. You can scroll back a few posts to see some of the others, and the inspiration for this quilt.

This one is a beautiful slab of rock with the route of the Dinkel River in eastern Holland carved on it. The dots are small towns, including Oldenzaal, where my friend, Lies Koster lives.

I've just ridden Lies' electric bicycle (a Swiss Flyer) 15 miles to the Bentheim Castle, across the Dutch border in Germany. I love that bike... most comfortable and still a decent workout, even with the electric assist. I want one!

Oh goodness, a giant chick visited the Emtinghousen windmill in Germany while I was there with Sabine Keichel!!!! Do you think we screamed and ran away or shared our lunch sandwiches with it?

Jan Knol, partner with Lies Koster, is demonstrating the Christmas and wintertime tradition of horn blowing in the Netherlands.

This is Jan's house and yard. A bird-lover, vegetable and flower gardener, Jan's runs a bed and breakfast place in his home in Denekamp, eastern Holland, where I stayed for a week. Lovely place, great breakfasts, happy memories!!!

In Germany, I spent an afternoon walking around the grounds of Kloster Wienhausen, a serene and beautiful abbey, a secluded and safe place where widowed women, women who need a home, women of the church, can go to live.

I've had this old pendant or charm for such a long time, I don't remember where I got it. It's the perfect embellishment for the abbey block, simple yet elegant.

My friend, Joska, in Sunderborg, Denmark has built a grape arbor in his backyard, with several varieties of grapes growing in large, healthy clusters. Although the bees had found the grapes, we managed to pick as many as we could eat.

 

The museums in Budapest are all housed in magnificent, old buildings, well maintained, striking examples of architecture. This is a bit of the mosaic floor in the entrance to the Museum of Applied Arts. I embellished the photo with a wool felt heart embroidered with a bouquet of roses because I love being in Budapest.

The above blocks are are pictures from my trip to Europe last October. Now we'll travel backward in time to June, when I took a month-long road trip, stopping at various national and state parks, attending my 50th college reunion, and visiting family in MN.

My brother, Matt, and his wife, Karen, are super flower gardeners! One of my favorite times in MN was sitting on their back yard deck, with Benny, the cat, on my lap, my mind calmed and refreshed by the lovely flowers and birds in the yard. These iris bloomed while I was there!

Minnehaha Falls in Minneapolis was in full flow in June, with enough water pouring down its 53-foot drop to raise a continuous, gigantic splash as it hit the pool at the bottom.

Heading westward again, I stopped at St. John's University, where I found this lovely surprise, a towering sculpture made of woven willow and ironwood branches, five "huts" all leaning on each other. The artist, Patrick Dougherty, named it Lean On Me. Here's a really cool youtube video showing how it was made.

A week in Yellowstone National Park was just not long enough to take in all the beautiful wildflowers, the animals, and the rock formations. This June I'm headed back there again for more!

Entering Glacier National Park on Hwy. 2 from the East, one has a panoramic view of the formerly glacier-covered peaks behind rolling plains where once bison roamed freely. Stopping along the highway to take this photo, I felt the presence of wild buffalo. Remembering that feeling, I tried to find a way to convey the experience on this block.

Guess that's enough blocks for this post. You can see more of them by scrolling through the previous 3 posts. In the next post, I'll cover the process of assembling these blocks, ranging in size from half of a playing card to larger than a greeting card. As I look at the stack of finished blocks, it feels like a daunting challenge to figure out how to put them together in a way that will look good as a whole. Wish me luck!

Travel Diary Quilt - More Blocks Complete!

Day 14 of work on my 2014 Travel Diary quilt.. and still loving it!!! I have completed 32 of 57 pillows (or blocks, the traditional quilting name for a component of a quilt top), most of them the easy ones, the ones I have a quick sense of how to embellish them. The remaining blocks are bit more challenging, forcing me to remember what I always tell my bead embroidery students:

 When you get stuck,

pick up a bead or a doo-dad you love,

and sew it on your piece.

Here are a few recently finished blocks... The one above is my God-daughter, Emese, with her husband, Jacob, ready to drive me to Sonderborg, Denmark. Since just prior to departure for Europe, I had been in a one-day workshop with Sue Spargo (waaaay fun), I took my wool applique with me on the trip. In Denmark, I had a number of happy stitching hours, and the interest of Emese, Jacob, and their kids to keep me going. So, of course, I had to put a chick on this block.

Generally the pictures are about 3-4" x 4-5", but the close-up pictures of people, I generally printed smaller, about 2" x 2.5".  These were challenging to embellish, because there isn't much room to tell a story with the beads. Here are four of them grouped together. You may recall, I made an "I Spy" quilt for Emese's daughter, Olivia (below, top right).

I had a great time with Sabine in Bremen, Germany (above, top left). In the block below, I am standing by the Four Town Musicians of Bremen, the donkey, dog, cat, and rooster. As the myth has it, I have my hand on the donkey's hoof, and am making a wish. Although I dare not tell the exact wish, it did have something to do with Donkey-oti, my dear donkey friend back home.

You see the adorable donkey, bead embellishment? I must tell you about it!

I guess you can get an idea of the size! It was made by Shelly at Ginko 305, who makes and sells miniature animals on Etsy. Although she had not made them as beads previously, when I messaged her with the request, she readily agreed. Now she's thinking she'll make more of her animals in bead versions!  I've got to have more of them... a reindeer will be the next one.

The above blocks are grouped together, because they are all at Anna Feher's home in Felsöpakony, Hungary (except the selfie of her and me taken on the train from Budapest). When I'm with Anna, my friend and best bead companion for 25 years, I feel totally at home, and as her chalk sign says, totally welcome. We beaded and talked beads and got together with other beady friends for a whole week... pure heaven!!! With her husband, Attila (lower right), I share a love of Hungarian folk and American blues music, so we found time for that too!

I also had a great week with Lies Koster, above. We share love of beading, quilting, folding paper, and full moons, among other things.

In closing, here is another block from last summer's road trip, from the northern unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, where we saw perfectly round boulders, 3 feet in diameter, and wild horses (although not together at the same time, as the embellishment suggests). There were only a few humans in the park that day. Shhh, don't tell anybody what an exquisite place it is...

You can see what I will do with these quilted blocks here, and view a few more of the finished blocks here.

Travel Diary Quilt - A Few Finished "Pillows"

I'm working like a madwoman to get this quilt finished in time for a show at the La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum during the month of April (a one-room exhibition of my work)!!!

Fifty-seven "pillows" in all. Thought you might like to see a few of the ones I've finished in the past couple of days.

These are my favorite tigers at the Point Defiance Zoo in Tacoma, WA. Dumai (top) and Berani, raised together (as non-biological brothers) by zoo-keepers, are now just over 2 years old.

Roland, a knight of Bremen, Germany, is a central figure in the annual Freimaak (free market) celebration. The lucky penny was given to me by a very tall, handsome chimney sweep. I used thread embroidery to decorate the cookie and added threads to represent the strings on the balloons.

These two are both from my visit last June to Yellowstone National Park. The hiking and the animal sightings were fabulous at that time of year!

I had a wonderful time exploring the Bentheim Castle, a large, early medieval, hill-top castle in NW Germany, definitely recommended if you are ever in the area!

My bead-sister, Anna Fehér, in Hungary, took me to several really great bead shops in Budapest, including a shop that mostly sold beautiful, finished necklaces patterned after traditional folk designs. This was the window display at the shop. While there, I purchased a pattern for one of the necklaces, which I used to embellish this "pillow". The beads are size 15s.

By the way, looooong ago, Anna is the one who gave me the 2 tiger kitten, the peacock, and the 2 rucksack stamped-metal charms I used in three of the above "pillows." Thank you, Anna!!!


It's waaaaay fun to embellish each of these preserved memories. The embellishment part goes fairly quickly, taking about 2-3 hours each for most of them. Let me know if you like seeing them... If so, I'll post more as I go along.

Quilting + Beading = Fun!

As a fund-raiser, the La Conner Quilt & Textile Museum issued a challenge last year at the Quilt Festival, offering the sale of a little kit containing 2 small pieces of fabric, one a Japanese silk print and the other a dark blue, indigo-dyed solid. I decided to "go for it" and bought a kit, thinking maybe I'd make a small quilt with it. Below are the two fabrics in my "kit," although the colors in this photo are a little "off."

All of the entered pieces will be displayed this year at the Quilt Festival in October, and the attendees can vote for the one they like best. The 2 pieces winning the most votes will be on display at the museum for 2 months. Each of us can decide if we want to donate the piece or keep it. If donated, the Museum will sell it either in the gift shop or at a fund-raising auction.

My quilting friend, Lunnette, went right to work with her kit, and soon produced a lovely mountain/water/full moon wall quilt, which we delivered to the Museum last week. Me? I couldn't think of a thing to do with my fabrics... blocked completely...

But at the Museum, the curator, when she took Lunnette's quilt, said to me, "You know, it doesn't HAVE to be a quilt... It COULD be beadwork..." And suddenly an idea popped into my mind.

What if I could make quilted fabrics into beads and put them together into a necklace? Ah-ha! Sounds like fun... quilting + beading! So I gave it a try.

First I pieced the fabrics together, adding one of my own Japanese indigo-dyed prints. Then I made little "sandwiches" of pieced fabrics + lightweight batting + backing fabric, and hand-quilted each unit. The picture above shows the flat, quilted units, and one that I've rolled and stitched into a tube. Below are two of the units.

Here is what the units look like on the back side, after quilting.

Then I started playing around with how to make the pendant and how to form the tubes into beads. Also I had to look, and look, and really LOOK through my stash to find beads that went with the Japanese theme, more-or-less matched the orange-indigo color scheme, AND had holes big enough to accommodate the large, cotton-covered cord I planned to use.

Above is the "playing around stage." About 20 hours later, below is the finished necklace.

And here is a detail.

The Museum wants a name for each of the pieces, which was tough for me... I finally decided to call it "A Crane in the Window." How do you like it?

If you want to have it and support the Museum,  you could get in touch with them about when and how they plan to sell it (and the other entered pieces).