Blogger's Quilt Festival Post - Rodeo Stars

It's Blogger's Quilt Festival time! While many quilter's are caught up in the frenzy of the Houston quilt market, some of us are content(?) to be at home blogging. I must admit that I am rather ambivalent about whether or not I would like to be in Houston for the International Quilt Market. While I would enjoy it for a short while, I think the massive crowds and OVERWHELMING amount of visual and tactile stimulation would get to me. I digress, on to my quilt!





This quilt is for my 7 year old son who loves everything cowboy. We go to rodeos as often as we can, and he stays as close to the fence as allowed, the entire length of the rodeo. After making a quilt for my 8 year old daughter, it was my son's turn for a new quilt. I asked him what kind of quilt he wanted, knowing it would be either cowboy or firetruck related, and he chose cowboys.

I finished this quilt at 1:30a.m. Christmas Day last year - just in time for Santa to get it under the tree!. It's now that I'm a procrastinator (okay maybe a little LOT) I just sometimes have trouble estimating how much time something is going to take. ;-) You don't have that problem do you?





I designed this quilt using EQ7. It was the first quilt that I designed start to finish and completed using EQ7. I even included the embroidery images on my EQ7 design. After designing the quilt, I used paper piecing to make my diamonds.

The machine embroidery is done on some denim that I had lying around that needed to be used. I was a little concerned about using the heavier weight of the denim with the light weight of the cotton fabrics, but once it was quilted, there are no worries.




My son has proudly displayed this quilt in his room. He was also proud when it won a first place ribbon at our county fair. He of course, felt like the ribbon belonged to him, since it was his quilt - never mind who made it! LOL.

Blogger's Quilt Festival

Thank you Amy for coordinating the Blogger's quilt festival! It is a great opportunity to get to know other quilters and to get inspired for Christmas!

It's coming!!!

Yikes! can you believe that there are only 70 days left till Christmas? To help us get there, SewCalGal has a fantastic Christmas Quilt show starting November 28th. This one is a little special to me, because it is one of the very first things I participated in on my journey in blogland. My Christmas quilt last year landed more hits to my page than anything else for the first several months of my blog. It was so exciting to see people coming to my little spot in blogland to see what I had worked so very hard on creating.

The show is a lot of fun, and certainly a little motivation for me to get quilting now.

Click here for more information.

Have you made your Christmas list yet? I haven't............guess that should be first on my agenda huh?

Let's get busy and have some fun! It's definitely not to early to pull out the Christmas CDs...and if you are hot flashing like me - then by all means go ahead and turn the air conditioning on until the family asks for their long johns! LOL

A little more eye candy

Today my closeups are featuring the white on white wholecloth quilt in this rack of hand quilted quilts.You might rembmer, these from my trip to Helen a couple of weeks ago. I hope you enjoy them!

Until next time, Piece!

Boo! - a free Halloween Pattern

I have another free mug rug pattern, or free embroidery design, or free mini quilt pattern for you.....what you call it is up to you - I just think it was a lot of fun to make!

 This one is a combination of applique and machine embroidery, but I am also including the outline drawing, so that if you want to do traditional applique or even hand embroidery, you have those options as well.

 I am quite please with how this stitched out.....now I just have to get it sandwiched and quilted for Will's teacher! I am always a day late it seems.

 If you don't want to miss out on future free quilt related patterns, please sign up to follow me. I would love to hear your comments and certainly would like to see photos if you stitch out the design. To get the files:

Boo! - jpeg for traditional applique
Boo! - .xxx embroidery file
Boo! - .pes embroidery file
Boo! - .exp embroidery file

Until next time - Piece!

Cross Stitched Whole-cloth

I promised more detail photos of the quilts I was privileged to see at Unicoi State Park in Georgia earlier this week. Here are some detail photos of the cross-stitched medallion quilt. It is 105-inches by 106-inches. It is completely hand stitched and hand quilted. Simply amazing!
 

 

I hope you have enjoyed this little bit of eye candy for quilters. Someone sent me an e-mail yesterday saying they were not able to leave a comment on the blog, which is a big bummer as you KNOW how important those comments are! Until next time,

Eye Candy - Gorgeous Hand Quilted

I took a little trip over the last couple of days to Helen, GA. We stayed at the Unicoi State Park Lodge where I was pleasantly surprised by a display of some amazing quilts! Each of these quilts are hand quilted. The piecing "may have been done by machine or hand."

I took a lot of photos - most quite good considering it was at night, inside and with my cell phone. Enjoy!

According to the gift shop personnel, these quilts are all made by "a few" local ladies that get together and quilt. She said they do not have a formal guild (what a shame!)

The quilts are all on consignment. Prices ranging from $500 to $1800. The hand stitching is amazing.

Each wall of quilts was about 12 feet high, so the upper quilts were the hardest to get.

I was so amazed by the stitching, that I of course took lots of close-ups -I hope you don't get bored......
Because there are so many photos, I will only include closeups of a few of the quilts each post. Today, I will start with the ivory wholecloth in the first photo. It is called Pineapple.

I will let you finish the tour, without any more interruptions from me. ;-)