Creative Life Sampler

Child sized quilt in Snail's Trail blocks I've been going through some fabrics to get more organized and I'm finding a lot of U n f inished O pportunities (UFOs.) This was a stack of 24 Snail's Trail blocks that were left over from a twin sized quilt I created back in the early 2000's. It has been a while since I've done precision machine sewing. My latest projects have either been improvisational, meaning that the block units have no perceived pattern and are cut after they're sewn together to square them up, or they are appliqu éd, so I can manipulate the fabric at my fingertips. I'd gotten rusty at finessing the seam allowances to make everything fit together.   Four of the squares were smaller than the rest. They were saved for the backing: a modern setting for a traditional block:   The fabrics in this quilt were either water themed or they had motion to enhance the motion of the block. It seemed appropriate then to machine quilt this one in various

 Just an up-date on my newest project: appliqu é  phase is complete! Now it's on to the quilting phase, . . .

  I've started a new project in my "Q is for Quilt" series using Kona solid fabrics in lapis blue and lime green. I'm finding that these two colors photograph very differently depending on the lighting, (as you can see in the three photos I'm sharing here.) This will be something to pay special attention to, if I decide to enter the piece in a show. Juried show entries require good photographic representation of the quilt and that means a color match between the photo and the original is really important. The first step for this piece was the design: Rough sketch Then my drawing was transferred to my darkest fabric. Here I use either a white chalk technical pen, or a tailor's heat erasable pen, for line drawing on fabric.  I've learned from judges' comments that they really pay attention to the shadows created when a dark fabric shows up under a lighter fabric. So, I've decided to place the darkest fabric on top in the appliqu é  process, whenever