Out and About ~ Part One: Emerging

As April draws to an end I am thinking back on how excited I was, looking at my calendar notes in late March and planning ahead to April. The weather is pretty awful but the world is stirring, fun things to do and see after winter's hibernation. The big flea opened! Sadly it poured rain, but I am still hopeful for a visit or two this spring.  Instead I have been back to the church flea which has proved interesting.
I've gone on Friday and also on Monday:  is it worth getting there early on Friday?;  do they restock on Mondays?, and so on. (No they don't restock or mark down on Mondays, too bad; it's okay to be early on Friday but not necessary, the ladies unpack all afternoon.)
I am limiting myself to $10.oo budget. Prices are high and they do not allow haggling. Looking for materials for etsy  items mostly. I got the green glass candlestick, for a velvet tomato pin keep.

Very pretty delicate etched glass, 1910-1930s?

And this damaged doily with perfect pansies, for a set of white linen, lavender-filled hearts.

This past week there were no inspiration bitsies. I did get treasures, though. Beautiful blue rustic jug or pitcher, probably Uhl.

The embossed motif is a little obscure or blurry. I think it is an open rose, with buds and leaves?

I have wanted a pitcher like this for many years. Usually they run about $ 75.oo, [though this is unmarked]; this was only 5.oo! I just knew it had to be filled with red tulips!

Off I went hunting for red tulips, found these amazing red parrot tulips, wow!

How fun.

Another find, an overpriced but lovely collectible seashell. A spiny whelk. For me or for the shop, not sure.

And a wonderful papier mache German Easter egg.

Too bad thechurch ladies taped it shut and the tape has damaged the surface, so stupid.

It is a classic style, unusual for its deep shiny chocolate brown color. Darling bunny and classic German storybook red toadstool.

The inside, once pried open, shows that this is a modern, new egg.

Not exactly a repro as it is made in/ by the German holiday resource of Erzgeburge that has made these eggs for over a hundred years.

I have a big collection but have not displayed them in recent years. I still buy though, I love these---full of dear childhood memories.

*****

Another much awaited event was the Quilters Guild biannual show. They discouraged photos so I only got a couple of shots of the display room, not any quilt photos.

The venue was very cool for me, at a rec center in my village! There is no parking there though. I had a friend drop me off. When we got there we found out that the marina had lent its big parking lot and opened a fence to allow access to the rec center. It was expensive to see the show, $10.oo each day, so I only went once. The quilts were very lovely, but very slick and professional looking. Such perfection, oh my! The guild seems small and the ladies older. There were only about 5 small scale vendors and not a single one with Civil War/ 1800s repro fabrics or even much to offer in fun fat quarters. Disappointing because I love to actually get to shop in person, in search of fabric and also small sewing gifts for stocking stuffers for friends. But no. Lots of big buck sewing machines though.

The only display quilt I liked [though not to make!] was this dainty  30s inspired embroidered doll quilt.

The embroidered designs were very cute and much smaller than  original embroideries of that era. The vendor gave me permission to take to photos, she was quite pleasant.

As mentioned it was a small show. I imagine the guild will fade away, and especially this show will; it is not a thing young people do here, make or buy quilts. Both my kids know how to sew,
but they have no interest in my hobby or collections.

******

Off topic: here are some close ups of the purple toile I'm using for Hideous. The toile is by Laura Ashley. I have two remnants, purchased at different times; both could be as much as 20 years old?

The boys look Up to No Good, in my opinion. Look at that slacker on the right. So funny. I guess hthey will be the fussy cut on next month's SG block. It will be published on Wednesday, tomorrow. Yay.

"Thief, thief!"
 purse snatcher on the far right.

Part two of Out and About on Friday, be sure to stop back.

love

lizzy 

gone to the beach...

[other springs, later, with roses, below...]

PS
At the quilt show, there was a set of challenge quilts called By the Sea, which oddly---and to me, offensively, seemed to be promoting the idea of wind farms off our beaches, in our ocean. Shocking to think the natural beauty here may  SOON be ruined by the need for electric power. There is a lot of empty interior space that could be used instead, though the windmills are a huge hazard to migrating birds, killing thousands [millions?]* of birds each year and we are a coastal flight path.
Imagine this view filled with hundreds of enormous wind towers. Disgusting. Makes me cry.

baby piping plovers

*Edit: Lori is correct: many more birds are killed by cell towers than by windmills. Approx 30,000 migratory birds are killed annually by wind turbines; the figure in total for cell and antennas is about 6 million. One of the main recommendations though is not to place the turbines in major flight paths.

Someone else mentioned that we would not even see the turbines. However they would be placed 5 miles from the coast. The ships you so often see in my photos are more than ten miles away, so the towers would be relatively close and very visible.

April Quilting

Good rainy Thursday, my friends! Oh the dreariness of a frigid day in April, a bright January day would be an improvement.  April is two/thirds over already, not getting as much done as I had hoped and planned. The focal project of the month was to be Silent Night,below, all those tedious  dark blue and white stars, yawn. [more on it later.]

The April SG block from Barbara Brackman is an 8-pointed Friendship Star. Very intriguing and fun to think about! A challenge that totally distracted me from my planned project.

Points like this are sewed by what is called  Y seams or set in seams. I don't mind them at all, much easier than getting a bunch of points to match.

The secret is a precision  pattern, none of that EQ [Electric Quilt, a computer pattern thing] how-to copy and print to scale stuff for me. I drafted both the 12" and 9" Stars.

Pattern templates: I am maybe the only person left in the world who uses scissors and who makes cardboard templates for hand drawn pattern. But hey, it works for me!

Blue, 12", was first.

Somehow I got sidetracked and had the notion that pansies would be appropriate:  Pensees is their French name, meaning ''thoughts'', and they were, in Victorian times, a symbol of remembrance of school friends, and so on. I forgot the quilt design predates that idea but I like them anyway.
[*LOL, I typed school FIENDS instead of friends! Yeah we all went to school with mean girls, right?]

I wanted to use the pansies from this bluework print, taken from the idea of rework embroidery a fad that began around 1880 and ran through about 1930, blue dating later than red. It was hard to cut into this small piece, a fat quarter I guess.

This worked so well I immediately began 9 '' Hideous the next day.

Garish purple and poison green with badly chosen red corners. The value is wrong and hides the star shape. Frolicking goats for the center circle. It was that or the kid smoking a crack pipe, lower right.

I love the purple toile and actually thought about using it as the setting fabric too. Too bad I didn't check out the motifs before I decided to fussy cut,

.....

Next up is a  vintage quilt top I found on a fun new FB selling page. I actually won an auction there!
[Happy Vintage Linens and Sheets?].

Plaids like this can be brand new, made last week, or date from anywhere back to the late 1800s. This top is probably from 1920-1940. The fabrics are not rough or thick like modern ''homespun'', a term quilters use for wovens* like this. [*The design is woven with colored threads, not printed on or dyed.]

The half square triangles are BIG, I think 5" --- bigger than the palm of your hand. A subtle autumn feeling.

I also loved the poverty blocks, where the triangles are carefully pieced, not cut from a whole.

I'm airing it out, it's a bit musty, and auditioning backing. This assortment came from Connecting  Threads. Clementine's Bonnet HERE  Their fabric, while not inexpensive, is less costly than regular online quilt fabrics.

These are the two front runners:

the tomato red is pretty, but I adore the duck egg blue. I want yardage of this print, it is sooooo beautiful, color, sheen/ hand/ the tiny dots on the background , called  picotage.

The meandering Oak Leaves and Acorns on the left is intriguing too.

Again beautifully engraved printing. But it reads beige/ boring from a few feet away. I like my backings to pop or do something, anything.

[so that makes three quilts soon for the quilter, the queue is getting too long! Discouraging in a way.]

....................

And then--back to Silent Night.  It's a quilt I'm making because I want a blue Christmas / Winter quilt with a snowman on it, not because I think it's fun to make.

This is not an entertaining project, it's quite tedious.

I am very glad I laid out the blocks today for photos. It gave me a sudden glimpse of the finished size of the quilt. Jan Patek has a way of designing HUGE quilts. I had already planned to remove one horizontal row to make the quilt square, but now I am gong to remove another horizontal row and  a vertical row. I'll reassess at that point but I think that will be plenty big for my queen bed; I don't like quilts to hang all down to the floor, do you? And size is money, a smaller quilt will cost less to quilt later on.

So now I must make 25 white stars; ten are done so far. That's 100 Flying geese blocks that must be absolutely 2/1/2 " x 4 1/2" or the Stars won't go together. That's a lotta not-fun Geese,  not at all like the wild and crazy random Geese on my When the Wild Geese Fly quilt, made last winter.

I also cut the ''sky'' cornerstones XL. You can see where they are hanging over the at the ends, untrimmed.  The blocks get trimmed to exactly 8 1/2".  I have 10 made so far, plus the appliqued alternates.

For some reason it's not a good start-and-stop pattern: I keep forgetting how to make it and also have cut the blocks wrong at least twice!
................
This is a wonderful photo from Weather Bug. Inspiration for a Star and moon quilt, isn't it beautiful.

...

.......................................

In Mo-Land, Mo has been naughty. He had a tantrum, tossed all the sofa cushions and throw pillows down and around. Then he dragged his blanky over to make a nest. Then he threw up. I sat in it of course, in nice clothes, when I got home. What a freakin' mess. Mo was bored, I suppose, he seemed quite pleased as he sat on the other, clean sofa and smirked while I cleaned.

have a good weekend. No snow, right? Please....

love

lizzy

gone to the beach......