Lemon Tree Tales

Quilting in the Garden 2008

This past Saturday my friend Amber and I had the most amazing visual feast of eye candy and other delights at the annual Quilting in the Garden held at the Alden Nursery in Livermore, CA. The featured quilt artists were Joen Wolfrom and Melinda Bula. Alex Anderson was there too ... I even saw her but it looked like she was leaving her stand on an errand. So I didn't stop her to say a quick hi ... plus I didn't want to look like a silly quilt fan. :-) It was such an amazing day! Why don't I just show you a little taste?

Isn't this flower headed garden display a riot?!

Just an idea of how huge these grand oak trees stand.

Hidden garden sheds at every turn.

One of my favorite quilts ... Sparkle Like a Star by Melinda Bula.

Another beauty by Melinda Bula, Roses Over the Fence.

And the surprise back to Melinda's quilt. I love the sun shining through. It creates that gorgeous stained glass window effect - something that you just can't appreciate with quilts indoors.

Pieced quilt backs ... just as pretty as the fronts.

Quilts flying in the wind. From left to right: Chinese Dining by Mary Goroff and quilted by Darla Padilla, PBA Troubadour Quilt by the Pacific Boy Choir Academy, Shade by Mary Kay Davis, and Betty Norton Memory Quilt by Lisa Norton.

Apparently the PBA quilt was a choir school art project. The school's logo is a 16th note therefore they chose a 16 patch block. The colors are based on the school and performance uniforms as well as their analogous colors of green and navy. Twenty three boys between the ages of 9-14 and their two music directors designed and sewed their own blocks. The art teacher embroidered their names on their blocks and assembled the quilt top.

One of many beautiful succulent flower arrangements.

A bevy of begonias.

My favorite succulent display ... such pretty cobalt pots and balls. Yes, but sadly there were too expensive.

I'll leave you with this final image of a garden swing made only for use by a giant's child since it hangs so high above our heads. As you can see, there wasn't a cloud in the vivid blue sky. The weather was perfect for displaying quilts outdoors. I saw so many beautiful sights but the best part was being able to spend it in the company of a friend. Thanks Amber, let's do it again next year!

Strawberry Swap Knitting Needlecase

Remember quite a while ago I saw that Calamity Kim had signed up for the Strawberry Swap hosted by Chickenfoot? Well I sent the package off to Knit and Play with Fire (it's not a secret swap) and just had to show you pictures of the handmade item. It's a knitting needlecase. I found a tutorial here by Multicrafty. It turned out so cute that I'm having serious second thoughts of trying out knitting something more challenging than a scarf.

(Oops, I think that my first photo with the free downloaded Photoshop brushes may have corrupted this post. So I've deleted the brushes and have redone the picture. Hopefully that will work.)

Email Etiquette Pet Peeve

Don't you dislike receiving mass emails from your email contacts? Within the last month or two I've had three such emails darken my in-box. Two were political which really annoy me. Shouldn't you be aware of someone's political leanings before sending them such messages? Now I don't broadcast my political beliefs here because it's not the proper forum for it. People who come here expect sewing and art, not to see who I'll be voting for in the November elections. My only political message has been one of making sure that fellow Americans register to vote. Yet somehow people seem to think that it is acceptable to send mass emails to anyone on their contact list.

The really annoying thing about it? These emails are coming from people who couldn't be bothered to respond to a "hi, how it's going?" email from me. And I sent it over a year ago to these people! Hmm, if you don't deem it important enough to respond to me then I don't think that I should be on your mass email list. Oh, and the other email was from someone I haven't been in contact with for a couple years ... their email was a plea for money to support their charity run.

Isn't there some type of email etiquette for these types of situations? I wanted to reply but in the end thought that it was better to simply hit the delete key. Have you ever had similar emails? What did you do about them?

Paper Piecing a Star

Ugh! I'm going to run screaming out the door any minute now. This is my first try at a complicated paper pieced star. It's not going so well. As you can see the points just do not match. I thought that paper piecing was all about accuracy. Or doesn't it apply to a 3" block? Yes my friends, that is the size of that star block. Perhaps it is too small? It definitely uses twice the amount of fabric I anticipated and leaves a rather sizable pile of trash behind. I'm not sure if I should keep on experimenting with this or not. At any rate I'd say that a break would be good right about now.

My artwork is in a book!

I'm so excited! I have a piece of my artwork published in a great looking book! Around Thanksgiving of last year I heard about a blogger who was looking for artwork to illustrate her essays. I can't remember how I found out about this but for some reason when I saw it, I thought that it was something that I could do. We had only ten days to get it made and sent to her. She and her publisher would go through the artwork and select one for each essay. When they saw the artwork her publisher decided to use ALL of the art!

The book is called Life is a Verb by Patti Digh. It's a gorgeous book with bright colors, slick pages, and wide margins to make notes. Patti's step-father was diagnosed with cancer and died only 37 days later. This had such a profound effect on her life. What if you only had 37 days to live? What would you do? How would you live your life to the fullest so that you wouldn't die with regrets? Thus she began writing essays to leave for her two daughters. The book is a compilation of these essays and includes two different types of exercises to do at the end of each one. One is a short-term, quick exercise while the other one is designed to be done for 37 days. It's not meant to be read in one day. Rather than trying that, I've been enjoying it by just randomly opening the book and reading one essay. I highly recommend it! And of course, if you buy it, turn to page 95 and check out my digital collage artwork.

Here is mine:

Here's the lovely inscription from the author, Patti Digh:

And here's the book cover (no I didn't do that artwork):

Chihuly Exhibit at de Young Museum

Friday afternoon I spent a few hours soaking in the most amazing display of color, light and glass. The de Young Museum in San Francisco is currently hosting the Chihuly Exhibit through September 28th. WOW! There are no words to describe how spectacular this artwork is in person. Photography was allowed so I (and 90% of the other visitors) snapped picture after picture. I'm afraid that photography is not my strong suit. But I so loved the colors that I wanted to have visual reminders for inspiration. I also had fun moving the camera, trying to capture pure color and light minus the form. Go and see it! I promise that it's worth the price of admission!

Luna, Angela Jarecki's travel doll from Texas, loved the glass ceiling!

Miniature Booty Quilt from Lynda

Yay, now I can show you what my swap partner sent me in the Miniature Booty Quilt Swap. Earlier this week I was lucky enough to receive this gorgeous little quilt from Lynda in Australia. It's a beautiful paper pieced Storm at Sea block made from the most spectacular aqua batiks. Aren't the colors rich and vibrant? Thank you so much Lynda! I can't wait to hang it on my wall of quilts. (Hmm, I think I should have gone down to the beach to take this photograph rather than just go outside to my lantana bushes. But doesn't the orange contrast nicely against all that lovely blue?)

The gift of a sewing machine

After taking Ray White's basic sewing machine repair class this July, I didn't have much time to tackle one of the project sewing machines that was waiting in my closet. Earlier this week I took this two-tone White machine out that I found on craigslist. It was made in Japan and I think it's from the 50s or 60s. Most of it is very heavy metal but the blue parts are plastic.

After a bit of cleaning, oiling and a conversation with fabric covered pliers (one little knob was so frozen that it had to be gently persuaded to comply with my wishes) I discovered that it was a pretty decent little machine. It zig-zags, does a very nice blind stitch, reverses, drops its feed dogs and makes a beautiful straight stitch. It even came with its original sewing machine manual. Of course there was nothing that could be done about the bobbin winder which fell of the machine! It looked like someone had tried to hot glue it back to the plastic cover! And yes, the case has seen much better days - I think the previous owners could have been a bit more creative with the duct tape, don't you?

 

I didn't want to keep it because I prefer my other machines but I knew the perfect thing to do with it. A lady at our doll club started bringing a neighbor's young tween daughter to the monthly meetings. Miss D is learning how to sew and wants to make cloth dolls. At last month's meeting she was super impressed with a member's older sewing machine and took pictures of it to show to her parents. I thought that she could always buy one of those Sidewinder bobbin winders for about $20 and have a much better sewing machine than one of those plastic cheap wonders that they sell in the mega retail stores. (I know that a lot of beginners get swayed by those $99 price tags but they're just not worth it. It's not the plastic that is such a problem. It's the thin cheap metal that overseas manufacturers use. Once they get out of time they just can't be bent back into place more than one or two times and then they suffer a terminal failure. The parts are almost as much as the price of another new machine. You're better off saving your money to buy a machine that's several hundred dollars or get a quality used machine from the local sewing machine dealer.)

In addition to the zig-zag foot that came with the machine, I found an open toe foot (very useful for the template sewing used in constructing cloth dolls) and a darning foot for free-motion embroidery (also known as free-motion quilting foot, or hopping foot). Other than a zipper foot these will be all that are needed for a beginner.

Tuesday night at doll club I gave it to her. Wow! The smiles and oohing and aahing from the lovely Miss D told me that this machine is going to a good home!

Miniature Booty Quilt Swap in the mail!

Okay I'm very late with this, but finally my Miniature Booty Quilt is in the mail on its way to ... you? Since I felt guilty about letting my partner wait to receive her package I'm making a little something extra to pop into the mailbox at a later date.

[EDIT: A few of you are wondering what the Miniature Booty Quilt Swap is all about. I agree it's an unusual name if you don't know the background. The hostess, Toni, has a blog called The Quilting Pirate, thus her choice of the name Miniature Booty for her quilt swap. Miniature because these are all small doll-sized quilts. I don't think many people actually made miniature block quilts.  :-) ]

Without further ado, here it is:

I embroidered the quilt info on the two hanging corners ... my partner's name has been blurred.

A detail shot showing the three different quilting threads that I used. I'm almost out of the multi-colored spool of Superior thread ... it's great stuff! Just make sure to use a top-stitching or quilting machine needle. I opted to keep the quilting design as pure lines, no fancy swirls to get in the way of all that Kaffe Fassett fabric. I don't have hardly any of it left other than a few snips here and there. The color saturation level is superb!

Miniature Booty Quilt top

Thanks everyone for helping me decide which layout to choose. The majority of you preferred the Around the World layout and I kept going back to version three. So of course I'm way behind schedule since this was supposed to be mailed out at the beginning of the week to my Miniature Booty Quilt Swap partner. Hopefully she will forgive my tardiness when it arrives in her mailbox. It still needs to be quilted and bound but I'm pretty happy with how these fabrics work together. I may have to buy more fabric and make a wall-hanging for my house!