Slip Slidin' Away

WARNING: Lots of pictures!!

*sigh* I wish it were last Thursday. Because then I would be on my way to the mountains for a long weekend of quilting and spending time with my best friends.

It is not at all unusual for there to be snow during Quilting in the Pines. Last year, I called my post "sewing in a snow globe." It was pretty much like that again this year. With one big difference. It turned treacherous to get back and forth from our cabins to the sewing room. We had snow, then it warmed up and turned slushy, then it got really cold and froze. So underneath all that pretty white snow was a layer of deadly slick ice. For the first time, we used the services of the resort SUV and driver to get us back and forth because it was just too dangerous to walk, even with snow boots. One poor lady slipped and broke her wrist in two places!

This was the view from our sewing table:

This is only about one third of the total sewing room:

And our little section:

Jennifer always makes the cutest placecards for our group. Deborah didn't like the picture Jennifer used so we tried to take sneaky pictures of her all weekend. Next year she will not be allowed to cover up her picture!

This year I didn't take many of pictures of other quilts, but this one definitely caught my eye. Super cute and lots of fun embellishment.

Here are some of the "challenge" quilts on the walls. I was standing there looking at the other quilts and someone said, "Oh, look. Someone used the fabric labels." Um, did you mean "selvages?"

Every year, we friends keep our challenge quilts totally secret from each other. When they are on the wall, we try to figure out which quilt each of us made. This year, other than mine, because my friends obviously know about my total obsession with selvages, none of us could figure out who made what. Everyone did something completely different than her normal "style." It was fun.

This was Dotty's:

And Jennifer's (she was in a three-way tie for third place. Way to go, Jennifer!). It had so many cute buttons, and I know she loves buttons. But it was machine quilted (by someone else), and Jennifer always does her own quilting on the challenge quilts. Very sneaky, Jennifer...

Jennifer spent most of the weekend working on her "gaggle of geese" because it was just so time-consuming, but also very cute and cheery.

Dotty seemed to work on a lot of different projects and accomplished a lot of different things. She even made two quilts from my Charm Parade pattern. The fabrics reminded us of Easter eggs.

Last year I was working on a quilt-along by Randi of Fresh Squeezed Fabrics. There is a basket in the sewing room where you can throw scraps you think someone else might be able to use. Well, someone did use some of my scraps and made this cute pincushion last year. This year she was sitting at the table next to us so I snapped a picture.  (Note to self: please finish the quilt because the fabrics are awesome and the pattern is great...and it's been a year.)

Are you wondering what I worked on?

While I had great intentions of working on Single Girl, the first two days I worked on Popbeads:

I'm so glad I chose Flea Market Fancy. Interestingly, not a single person blinked an eyelash when they saw that I was using FMF (FMF, people!!!!), on which I spent a virtual fortune slightly more per yard than the going rate.

I'm making two separate Birdie Stitches quilts (Central Park and Hoopla) and my thinking process was that if I had all the blocks made ahead of time, it would be easier to get the embroidery done. All the quilt blocks are finished and ready to embroider!

Sometimes odd things happen when you have been sewing for so many hours and it is 10 p.m. on a Saturday night. Dotty ended up sewing the right side and wrong side together on this block. Oops.... (Why is that non-bloggers think we bloggers take some "odd" pictures? Yeah, I don't know the answer to that one either...)

While we were having snow in the mountains, this is the kind of "snow" we have down here in Fresno. The orchards are in glorious, sweet-smelling bloom. (I asked Mark if this was a "drive-by shoot" and he assured me that he stopped the car this time.)

Sewing and friends: the perfect combination.

A slight change of plans...and a fabric marking tutorial

I was so excited when Corey of Little Miss Shabby decided to do a block of the month involving embroidery. I have embroidered a long time ago and it was time to dust off my skills.

Corey was using the Sunkissed line by Sweetwater, and I have to say that I had been anxiously awaiting this line for months. So it seemed obvious to me that I would do the block of the month using the same line.

But then the mail arrived: Central Park by Kate Spain and Hoopla by Moda. And the plans changed.

For some reason, the Hoopla line had some fabrics that read as "folk art" to me, and reminded me of the crewel embroidery I did in the '70s. I also knew it needed something more substantial than a light background for the embroidery.

I had some Robert Kaufman "quilter's linen"  in chocolate and liked the look of it against all the bright colors of Hoopla, and it matched the stems perfectly.

I knew using a blue water soluble marker wasn't going to work on the dark brown so I went to my local quilt shop, and the owner and I did a little experimenting. This is what we finally decided on and it worked like a charm.

My store receipt says this is "interfacing, tracing cloth red dot." I think you can use it for patterns that have multiple sizes and you don't want to cut off the larger size lines because you are making the smaller size. So you can trace the pattern size you want onto this interfacing, using the red dots as registration markers.

Got that? Anyway, it's pretty cheap. A yard was $1.50 and obviously I have lots left over for the rest of the blocks.

I traced the pattern onto the interfacing with a Sharpie. Next time I will use a finer-point Sharpie as this bled, but in the long run that doesn't even matter.

The next dilemma was what to use for marking. Sew Line is a chalk marker and it comes with interchangeable lead. I got both the white chalk and the grey graphite. I think it comes in multiple colors as well. It is awesome. I just laid the interfacing on the fabric and traced again with the chalk marker. It went through the interfacing and onto the brown fabric and made an easy-to-see embroidery line to follow.

Corey is using all six strands of embroidery floss in her directions. I have never used all six strands before, but for Hoopla I really like the chunky look. When I try the Kate Spain Central Park version, I will probably try it with three strands and see how it looks.

By the time I got the majority of the embroidery done, some of the chalk lines were a little faint. But I just looked at the pattern, got my chalk marker and made them again, free hand. Easy peasy.

Next up will be the Central Park version. But for now, I'm loving the look of the bright colors on the dark background. Chirp, chirp.

Wordless Wednesday--Sunkissed edition