Home Again!

Going to Quilt Market and helping vend at Houston Quilt Festival was wonderful! I made some invaluable contacts and will be following up on them in the next couple of days. Right now I am exhausted, but am inspired to start designing and getting some classes and patterns ready for the first of the year.

At market I saw many new and interesting fabrics, threads and gadgets. I really wanted to buy, but had to restrain myself. I want to remodel my sewing room first before adding too many new items. We will be doing the remodeling after my brother's visit next week. We have already purchased the wood flooring and the paint, so now it is up to me to clean out the room so we can get started.

I see that I am making mistakes in this post, so I best get to bed.

When I get back!

We are leaving for Houston in the morning. When I get back I will give you a preview of the classes I will be offering after the 1st of the year. I will give you a preview of one now. It is shadow applique that can be done by hand or machine.

I design all the patterns I use in classes. Besides piecing and applique I also teach heirloom sewing including smocking.

Getting ready to leave!

I need 10 more days to actually be ready for Houston. Some things just will not get finished. I have some hand sewing ready for the road trip and hopefully tomorrow I will be able to cut out a few other things to work on during Market. I know I will only be looking during Market, so I may have some time to just relax in out Motel room before the mad house of Festival begins.

I need to get back to my work, I just needed to rest a bit before going back to the sewing machine.

Today's Work

Today I was working on a sample for the booth at Houston. It is an easy stain glass, but because of the way I had my glasses made for close up work I had a bit of trouble seeing everything I needed to see. So I just pinned things in place and will finish it tomorrow. The sunflower is one of my favorite late summer flowers. You will discover as this blog progresses that I love flowers and many other things in nature. My favorite color is yellow followed closely by purple, but I can't think of any color that I really dislike.

I found them!

Tonight I uploaded a few pictures from my camera to my computer and I found the pictures of the quilt tops I made for Mark Lipinski out of his new fabric line Katmandu. He is going to put pictures on his blog this weekend (http://marklipinskisblog.wordpress.com/), I can't wait to see what he does with the tops. I did not add borders, nor did I add the circle in the center of the Giant Dahlia, as he planned something special for that space. This is what I sent to him.

Easy Stain Glass Window Block

Tonight I put together the block I hope to teach in a Make It Take It during Festival. It is a pumpkin in a stain glass style designed by Diane of http://www.detailsbydiane.com/ She made this special design for Batiks by Design to use during the Houston Festival. If we don't get a Make It Take It class I will demonstrate it at Patti's booth.

I have a Sunflower design cut out and ready to place on the fabric. It is much larger and will take a bit longer to place on the fabric. Guess I better get back to making the samples.

Getting ready for Houston

Today I helped my friend Patti to get things ready for her booth at Festival, Batiks by Design.(http://www.batiksbydesign.com ) We work on kits today, but just seemed to run into roadblocks. Not enough patterns, imperfect fabric and items needing to be copied. One thing that did work was the mesh bags we picked out worked well for the small size patterns.

This will be our first time to attend Festival in Houston. We don't know how much to take with us, nor what to expect. We will also be going to Market, so at least we will have an idea about the layout of the Convention Center and hopefully make some great contacts prior to things being open up to the public.

I am working on some of my designs to have them ready for sale. One is a new apron with lots of pockets. I remember as a child that my step grandmother always wore an apron. She made all of them herself. She had nicer ones for Sunday, but always had practical cotton aprons of many colors for week days. These were always fresh and nicely pressed in the morning, but she loved to cook and bake. By noon you could see the flour from the bread baking and maybe a spot or two from her wonderful home made soup she was making for dinner.

I also have a fat quarter friendly quilt. It does contain one of my favorite blocks the Churn Dash. I think the reason I like this block so much is because it looks so different on point then it does straight. I have also in other quilts played with the coloring of the Churn Dash to create other designs elements. It is just a fun block.

Maybe I will show you some pictures tomorrow.