Quilts and Books

Authors Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr run Modern Quilt Studio and I am an avid fan of their work. They've published several books now, as well as a magazine. This particular book is the first one I ever purchased about modern quilting. While there are a lot of great patterns and ideas for quilts, it was the first book that helped me understand what modern quilting is and how to think about design. I'd been anxious to use the book and I ended up choosing a pattern from it when I was given this group of Amy Butler fabrics by QBFFT. In my mind, those fabrics did not lend themselves to something traditional. With the exception of the one solid, they seemed to fight with one another. I had to find a way to get them to work together. As I perused this book, as well as other pattern books, I kept coming back to this one photo, despite how different my fabrics were from the ones used in the book. This quilt is called "Improv." The individual blocks are pieced usin...

Two years ago I blogged about a challenge the QBFFs and I had organized . We exchanged 2.5 yards of fabric. Each of us had to take the fabric we were given and make a completed quilt for the person who gave them the fabric.   These are the fabric collections we exchanged. The fabric for my quilt is to the left. The fabric I received is above on the far right. It took 2 years for the last of us to finish her quilt. I actually finished mine in late 2012, but I couldn't reveal it until now. Below are the finished quilts. The rules were pretty simple. We had to use some of each fabric, we could only add one more fabric, and the quilt had to be at least lap sized (bigger than a crib quilt, smaller than a bed quilt). QBFFA and QBFFC exchanged the two collections in the upper left above. Here are their completed quilts side-by-side: Here is the quilt QBFFT made for me. I absolutely love it! I think I need more yellow in my life: Finally, here is the one I made for...

Fellow blogger SonomaLass , did me the great honor of bidding on my Brenda Novak Auction item last year. She won a t-shirt quilt made by yours truly and I'm pleased to say I finally finished it. My first finish of 2014. The previous time I had done this , the winner was someone I worked with. When I needed to talk to her about fabric choices, I could just pop over to her office. This time all of the consulting was done long distance and I had a lot of fun going to the shop, taking pictures of various fabrics and sending them to SonomaLass for her to choose from. I even set up a Flickr page to document my progress on the quilt. (If you go look, the pictures are arranged in reverse chronological order.) So here's a look at the finished quilt: One shirt was "re-created" by printing the images on printable fabric. That stuff soaks up ink so nicely. It also soaked up some of the red dye when I washed the quilt. I was a bit surprised to say the least, becau...

Every now and then I get in a mood to make a batch of Christmas Tree ornaments. I've posted about them a couple of times in the past . I ran across the instructions to these stars and churned out a couple of dozen of them for family and friends. Here are the ones I kept for myself: So remember how I finished all of those UFOs earlier this year? By July I had finished 11 quilts. In October I made a quick wall hanging and that was the last project I finished in 2013 besides these ornaments. Not that I wasn't sewing. I've simultaneously been working on a full-sized t-shirt quilt (it's all done except the binding!!!) and a twin-sized bed quilt. But neither one got finished in 2013, so the year ended on a bit of a whimper compared to how it started out. Still, if you include the stars, I finished 13 projects last year. Not too shabby. I don't have the incentive of a UFO contest for this year, so we'll see what I can find to motivate myself. I went back to wo...

Hello friends! Sorry for the long silence of late. I'm still here, still reading and quilting, and still hopeful to find time to share more of it with you. I read this book the other day and am anxious to talk about it. So here goes. I have to start out this review with a little conversation about me :) I'm a librarian who has spent her career in the technical services (cataloging and acquisitions) departments of 3 different academic libraries. Despite spending a few years doing some fill-in Sunday reference work in a large public library, I really have no significant public library experience. Like many of you reading this, I am a huge user and supporter of my local public library. Most of us academic types are far more used to the Library of Congress (LC) classification system. It's very different from the Dewey Decimal system (DDC) used in most public and school libraries. The DDC was created in 1876 and while it has been revised and updated nearly 2 dozen times...

This month's theme is books that received lots of hype. I don't really have anything like that in my TBR pile, so I decided to go off in a totally different direction and review the first SF romance I've read in ages. This book was a finalist this year in the RITAs and the description was intriguing so I picked it up several months ago. I finally read it this weekend and I really, really liked it. Fisher was nominated in the "Best First Book" category. If this is her first book, I'm definitely looking forward to more. Earth is in a bad way as the environment has become extremely toxic. A new world has opened up that has incredible potential to provide the sustenance Earth needs. But there's a very strange phenomenon on this planet. Whenever a new human arrives on the planet, someone from that person's past is reincarnated into a very human-like body and is somehow tethered to their human. Everyone has a "ghost" trailing behind them. Th...

Yes, yes, I know. It's November. I don't want to admit how long I've had a draft of this post waiting to be published. 5. Her Best Worst Mistake / Sarah Mayberry . (2012) This book received a lot of attention when it was first released, so I was pretty eager to read it. Plus, I've liked most of Mayberry's books that I've read. This is an enemies to lovers story, and really interesting in the way Mayberry's characters, Violet and Martin, shed the assumptions each has had about the other. This book runs concurrent to Hot Island Nights (which I haven't read). Elizabeth and Martin had been engaged for years, when suddenly Elizabeth flies off to Australia in search of her biological father. She leaves her best friend, Violet, to break the news to Martin. Martin and Violet have never gotten along. Violet thinks Martin is all wrong for Elizabeth, and Martin objects to Violet's flamboyant ways. On the surface they seem so different for one another, yet w...