Turning Quilt Tops into Treasures
With my dad being in the hospital, it had been hard to get to my quilting frame to finish any customer quilts. Here are some pictures of one I finally got off a couple of weeks ago. It was a Christmas panel with an added border. I treated the panel inserts as applique and piecing. I like how it turned out, even though it seemed like it took forever!!! Quilting time is still pretty limited, but I’m finding a few more blocks of time now.
For all of you who aren’t following me on Facebook, I wanted to let you know what’s been going on in my life this week and why I haven’t posted any quilt pictures.
Last Tuesday afternoon, I got a phone call from my mother, frantically saying that she’d called the ambulance and that my 82-year-old dad had just fallen off the roof. No other info other than “he’s not good at all”.
Dad had been working on putting up new siding on the side of his house and when I found out what he had planned, I sent my son over to help. Hoping that my dad would stay on the ground. I should have known better – he climbed up on top of his metal roof last spring to fix some wind damage. I said, “Dad!, couldn’t that have waited until Ed (my husband) got home?” He seemed to think that it wasn’t any big deal. Yes, he’s 82, and I hope I’m that spry and active when I get to be that age. He putters around the house, runs a tractor for odd projects, tends to his chickens, and puts out a fantastic garden. He was trying to save a bit of money so they could vacation in Texas again this winter. Doesn’t look like he will make it there after all (pound foolish, penny wise).
He was transported by ambulance to St. Mary’s hospital and 3 hours later was transferred to Carle Clinic in Urbana, IL – a Level 1 Trauma Center. CT Scan had showed he had multiple fractures, and was being referred to a neurosurgeon because of them. Once at Carle, we were told he also had atrial fibrillation and needed to see a cardiologist also.
After several days in the ICU, he was transferred to a regular room yesterday and will be transferred to a rehab center of the hospital tomorrow. After about a week of rehab, he should be able to go home. He broke 5 bones in his neck and spine, two ribs, and his left clavicle. He remembers hugging the Joshua tree on the way down and that probably saved his life. Otherwise, he’d have landed on concrete or large rocks. As it is, he missed both of those to land on his neck and shoulder on the hard ground. Knocked himself out and scared Mom and my son into thinking he was dead. The good news is even with all those breaks, and a great big knot on the back of his head, he has no numbness or paralysis or anything other than severe pain from fractures. If he had hair on the top of his head, he would have none left now as he scraped the entire top of his head. It looks like he was scalped! His atrial fibrillation spontaneously reverted to a normal sinus rhythm. I’m ecstatic about that! That had us really worried.
In addition to this, I luckily avoided getting a speeding ticket when I slowed down from 80 to 65 mph to pass a state police car on my way to meet my husband to go to the hospital. After I passed him, the state trooper gave me every opportunity to slow down, but I just couldn’t seem to slow down. I think I was doing pretty good to keep it between 65 and 70. At the time, all I knew was that Dad had fallen from the roof and Mom was crying and said it was really bad. I managed to get just a severe talking to by the state trooper – no ticket thank goodness. Mom tried to grab a quick snooze in the truck while it was parked in the ER parking lot and was suddenly awakened when a car rammed her truck. Although she got the gal’s name and number and insurance company name; it turns out that the phone number is false (or the man who answered the phone lied) and there is nothing to do abbout holding that person accountable for the damage. The damage is pretty light, thank goodness, but it was the principle of the whole thing. Mom said the gal looked like she was honest and is disappointed that she was let down.
So, it’s been a pretty stressful week. I’ve camped out here at the hospital since Tuesday night and am planning on finally going home tomorrow. My mother and brother and I have been taking turns staying by his side. I’ve grabbed 2 hour naps here and there and it will be nice to sleep in a bed instead of a hospital chair. My sister just flew in from Germany today and will take over for me while I go back to work next week. The Red Cross assists military families in emergencies and they arranged for my sister and her husband to fly home. What a Godsend they are to do this. My sister is an RN and will be a big help when they discharge him (hopefully next weekend).
All ladders are going to disappear from their barn before he comes home, too. Just in case he didn’t learn his lesson the first time!
I’m also working when I can from the hospital room or visitors lounge on assorted job duties that can’t seem to wait and finally felt like I could take a breather and post a note to my subscribers on what has been going on this week. I want to thank LynnEl for your help, and thanks to everyone for their thoughts and prayers.
Joy
P.S. My Sunflower Stars quilt won 1st prize at the Illinois State Fair. Yeah!
I attended the Milwaukee show this past weekend (Thursday night through Saturday) with a friend and fellow mqresource member “Beema”. While there we ran into two other fellow members, dzinr1 Rebecca (shown at left below) and Sue suek. It was wonderful to meet them and I had a totally awesome time. I took a wholecloth design class from Karen McTavish that I’m totally stoked about. Now, just to find time to finish it! You can see pictures from the show on my shutterfly site at http://milwaukeemqto…shutterfly.com/ . There are pics from the fashion show/auction/quilts of valor presentations on Thursday night. What a fun night that was! We quilters are the coolest people! Friday night’s karaeoke was a blast. There are a few videos on facebook of Claudia Pfiel that are just hilarious! I just fell in love with Claudia. All the teachers were so friendly and approachable. I loved every minute. Thanks LynnEl for coming with me. Below are also pics of Sue Patten, Irena Bluhm and Karen McTavish. I have a quilt for Grace on the frame that should be finished tonight or tomorrow (depends on how much housework I need to catch up on tonight) and next is a quilt for Cheryl in Shelbyville! I’m scheduling some time for me to get some quilting done – probably after Christmas. I’m totally motivated after going to this show to get two quilts done before next year’s round of shows.
I finished this cute quilt. To recap what I did, I picked beadboard for the outer yellow border and a daisy, leaf, swirl vine in the inner purple border. I did this so that the two borders wouldn’t compete with each other and also because I knew that most of the quilt would be in swirls and feathers and it needed some vertical lines for balance. The white print behind the applique butterflies, received swirls and in the long strips, I added featered swirls also. The yellow print received daisies, and the light pink triangles surrounding the middle yellow print daisy I quilted a butterfly motif. I used purple thread for the butterfly and pink thread for the feathers inside the butterfly and the vertical lines behind the butterfly motif. I chose vertical lines so that the quilting motif would pop. I considered using a tiny swirl, but felt that the density of the quilting overall wouldn’t allow it and if I used a medium swirl as I did in the applique buttefly background, it wouldn’t make the butterfly pop as much and the design might get lost. The top and bottom pink bar got a feather swag and the top and bottom pieced prints got feathers and swirls.
Anyway, here are the final pics for this cute quilt. Next up is the same quilt top, but for Grace. I’ll be traveling this coming week, so I won’t get much accomplished on it.
Here’s what is on my frame this week. This is the first of two identical twin quilts. This one is for Isabelle and the other is for Grace. The only difference is the name appliqued on it and the backing fabric. Their mother asked for modern, fun daisies and butterflies. I added a beadboard outer border with a daisy/leaf/swirl inner purple border. I put butterflies, with background lines to make them pop, in the blocks surrounding the center square which has a large giant daisy in it. The pink horizontal block at the top and bottom will have a feather plume or swag and the white print will have small swirls overall.
I hope she likes it – it’s kind of hard to see the whole concept until I get a bit more done, but I adore this quilt! It is so much fun to quilt!
And there’s a pic taken from our deck of the sweet corn we raised this year. Hmm. It’s ready to pick NOW and of course we’re all busy with other projects! Nick is supposed to pick and sell it, but he’s at the state finals in Galesburg playing American Legion baseball. We have the Walleye Festival in Findlay tomorrow and Saturday and I’m leaving for Indiana on Tuesday to give a training class on software at a company called Jofco. Did I mention laundry, too? Aaack.
I love this cute applique wallhanging. My cousin Cheryl is SUCH a good quilter! I love her applique, her piecing and her choice of colors. And I love this little wallhanging. I wonder if I can get away with forgetting to let her know it’s done. 🙂 Probably not. Anyway, I did vertical lines in the border, a wavy feather plume in the 2nd border, and feathers and eggs in the middle. The applique was echoed and pebbled. Cute, cute, cute!
This latest quilt off the frame was a bit of a challenge. The top required 3 colors of thread – white, denim blue, and sunflower yellow. However, the back was white. While I can sometimes match the bobbin thread to the back of the quilt, I usually have problems keeping the bobbin thread from poking up to the top or more likely poking through on the bottom. I usually will try to match the bobbin thread to the backing fabric if I can keep the bobbin thread just a few shades away from the top thread. This time, however, the top thread was jewel tones and the backing was white. So, I used the same thread in the bobbin that was used in the top.
I learned a couple of things about this process though. If I’m going to match the threads, I need to use a very thin thread in the bobbin, rather than the same weight of thread as used on the top. I didn’t like how heavy the thread looked on the bottom; but, didn’t realize how much I didn’t like it until I’d finished several vines of feathers and stitch in the ditch. I started to rip it out, but after 2 hours of ripping I’d only managed a small portion. This quilt belongs to my aunt who said don’t bother ripping any of it out. I had told her that I thought I’d need to have blue and yellow thread on the back for the reasons stated above and she was ok with that when she dropped it off. So, I redid what I had ripped out. The other thing I discovered was that you should not do the hump and bump type of feathers in this situation (where the bobbin thread would be so noticeable on the backing fabric). So, I switched to the continuous type of feathers and that helped some also.
Anyway, here’s the finished product. While I’m not completely happy with the final result, it still looks nice. I did feather vines in the blue, crosshatching in the flower panels, and sunflowers in the 9-patches.
Next up will be an Easter wall hanging, then two twin-sized quilts from a new customer in Peoria. Wait until you see these next three! Wow! After that, it’s a large log cabin in Kaffe Fossett fabrics (I may have mangled that name) and a large GORGEOUS embroidery quilt. I’m going to wait to start it until after I return from the Milwaukee Machine Quilters Showcase in August. I want to get a close up of some fabulous quilts for some inspiration and I’m also taking classes from Karen McTavish and Sue Patten. Can’t Wait!
Earlier this year I met with two friends I had become acquainted with through online quilt forums. LynnEl lives in Champaign and the Connie recently moved to Mt. Zion. The first time we met, we made a trip to Rochester to King’s Men Quilting Supply and had dinner in Forsyth. We all hit it off great and I really enjoyed meeting them. Since then, we’ve met up at the Decatur Quilt Fest and recently we had a mini guild meeting at Connie’s home in Mt. Zion. Connie has an APQS Millenium and we brought projects we were working on or needed advice on and just generally had a really nice show and tell. After lunch, I gave a practice lesson on trapunto. Each of us quilted a feather wreath and completed the trapunto portion of the lesson. We each took our wreath home to finish. Here are pics from our meeting and my finished wreath. I really enjoyed the afternoon. Thanks Connie for hosting us! LynnEl, your mint brownies were wonderful!
I was inspired by an article in a recent Machine Quilters Unlimited magazine for this project. I took a fat quarter and cut out the parts I liked and rearranged them onto muslin and added a couple of borders. A friend of mine (Connie) told me this was called broderie perse! I didn’t know that at the time I did this, but it’s cool that it has an actual name! I trapuntoed some items – the birds, a few of the cut out roses, and most of the feathers/vines. When I was done quilting it, I used some paintsticks to add color to the rose motifs I quilted. I like how it turned out. I think next time I do this project or a similar project, I’m going to get some better painting materials, or at least get some more colors.
I recently completed a 2-day class in my home on custom longarm quilting and trapunto. Laurie from Arizona was the sweetest gal and brought an amazing stack and whack quilt to work on. The first day was spent designing the trapunto and marking the quilt. The second day was spent practicing custom designs and applying those designs to her quilt. We stabilized it with water soluble thread so that she could finish it later and stitched out the designs on a portion of it so she would have the to copy later.
Laurie was a great student and I thoroughly enjoyed this class with her. My first student! I hope all of them to come are as nice, sweet, and talented as she is! Here are some pics of Laurie and her quilt:
