Lemon Tree Tales

Glam Clam Workshop with Latifah Saafir

A few weekends ago I took the Glam Clam workshop with Latifah Saafir, The Quilt Engineer. (You know, that famous quilt that people couldn't stop talking about at the inaugural QuiltCon in Austin.) Wow, what a fun quilt. It's based on the traditional clamshells quilt that our quilting forebears used to sew by hand. Well Latifah designed some oversized templates with little triangle notches that make it easy to machine piece without pins. I tell you, it works like a charm. You can get the pattern for free from craftsy ... Glam Clam pattern. (There's a 4", 6", 8" and 12" version.)

With so many size variations to choose from I opted to go with the 8" clam and to make it baby quilt size. I began pulling teals and aqua fabrics from my stash. (You do know that's the biggest drawer in the closet, no?) When I saw the Phillip Jacobs Summer Tree bird print in aqua/pink I suddenly knew that I had to add in some hot pink accents. I think it just makes the entire quilt pop.

Our classroom was amazing, outlets everywhere, fantastic tables with a plug cutout and rolling chairs. It was in a little community center near Santa Cruz in an area called Aptos. Several people stayed late after class ended at 4pm and worked through the night. I didn't stay because Steve was just back from a business trip and I wanted to catch up. 

The night before at the Silicon Valley Modern Quilt Guild, Latifah gave an awesome talk about her quilt journey. She showed us quite a few of her quilts. I especially loved this one that she's calling Molehills. It'll be a new pattern soon. Can you believe that she was inspired by a flooring design in one of the big Las Vegas casinos. Goes to show you that you can find inspiration anywhere, and what happens in Vegas doesn't always stay in Vegas. Heh, heh.

So if you ever have the opportunity, take a workshop with Latifah, she's an amazing woman.

 

I still have 8 more rows to sew, but as you can see I finally have the layout nailed down. The next time you see it, it'll be a completed quilt.

Missing U blocks

I joined a mini group that's a subset of the larger quilt guild here in Santa Clara county. The mini group has a modern quilting focus and meets in Sunnyvale a few days after the main guild meeting. Last week I attended the first one. They're working on a charity quilt. The pattern selected is the Missing U quilt from the book, Sunday Morning Quilts by Amanda Jean Nyberg and Cheryl Arkinson. Three of us made red blocks and there are already two orange blocks so we went back with assigned colors for the remaining two blocks. I've made orange, red, medium blue and purple. Most of the fabrics were from my scraps stash that's stored in a shoe organizer over the studio door. Sadly the purples had to come from the stash. Even though I like it, apparently I don't use purple enough to have generated a lot of scraps. And oddly enough, orange is an okay color but I must use it quite a bit. The guild has a requirement of a certain size for their charity quilts .. they must be about twin size so we'll be adding a white sashing to the blocks on one side to make it a narrow quilt. I think the white sashing will make the white bits in the center of our blocks pop.

 

 

 

 

It's such a fun block to make. No hard and set rules. Just sew bits of colored scraps around a white scrap. Of course after the fact I wish that I had cut down the white triangle in the red block into a rectangle or square. I'm thinking that this is such a great way to use up scraps that I should make some of my own. It's now added to the ever growing UFO quilt list.