Birthday Present for Kate

Birthdays are such fun!! I made this fabric book with the theme of Insomnia for my sister's birthday. Parts of the collages were made in Photoshop and printed onto fabric. Other parts were printed first and sewed onto the substate later. This is the first time I've printed onto fabric although I've had the materials to do it for a while. It was so wonderful that I vowed again not to always be afraid to try something new.

The idea for the pieced spiral on the front cover was "borrowed" from a photo I had saved for years from a quilt magazine. The photo was so small I couldn't tell how the spiral developed so I scanned it into Photoshop at a 600 dpi resolution and then zoomed in on it to see how it worked. It goes together very slowly and I kept getting confused and thinking I had messed it up. I'm definitely going to make more of those. Got a whole quilt planned for them.

Paducah AQS Quilt Show - The Second Year (For Me)

My friend, Jean, invited me along on her annual excursion to the Paducah quilt show again this year. I think I remember Jean saying that the first year she went had the most exquisite quilts and that other years haven't lived up to it. If so, I think it must just be the wonder of it all the first time you see it. Because I wasn't as blown away by the quilts as last year.

Again my favorite quilts were the smaller wall hanging size. They seem more innovative, less repetitive than the bed size ones. The first one is "To Market" by Mary Diamond. I included it here because I know how much Kate is going to like it. The second, my favorite, is "Incommunicado" by Esterita Austin. Not only is it beautifully done but the theme made me laugh out loud. How often have you found yourself with absolutely nothing to say at the most inappropriate times? I have no information on the third quilt but love the colors and the motion of the quilting lines.
Most of my fabrics I got at the enormous Hancocks of Paducah; a bit of it from show vendors. I had just finished Kate's birthday book (next post) and had used a lot of black and white and was still in the mood for that. The other pile is mostly stuff I will use for landscape quilts. Whether I'm quilting or stamping, that seems to be one of my favorite themes.
Jean and I also set ourselves a challenge to make a Paducah quilt ala Judith Montano's cottage quilts. So we took one morning and traipsed around Paducah's "lower town" taking pictures of houses, yard sculptures and whatever else caught our interest. Lower town is an inner city area of lovely houses that the city bought up as they were starting to go to seed. They resold them, mostly to artists, on the condition that they renovate them and run studios or galleries out of them. This wasn't supposed to be a tourist ad for Paducah but I have to add that there are also some delightful restaurants in the quaint little downtown area.

Starting Seed #2

Our seed starting went exceptionally well. I lost most of the celeriac I started because I forgot to water it one weekend we were leaving. However, these four trays of asparagus, tomatoes, peppers, basil, dill and artichokes have been under the lights in the basement or in sunny windows in the breezeway for weeks now. Early this week they expanded to six trays as we repotted and split the tomatoes that had been started in tiny plastic pots. We had to hang another plant light and find another table for them. We still need to split and repot multiple tomatillos of out their tiny starting cells, but then in a week or two it will be time to start hardening them off. We've been told that is a crucial time to do it right, but Ken has done it many times before with "store bought" tomato plants so I'm confident he'll do a great job.

For most of these plants, we have almost twice as many as we plan to use. That may take care of hardening off mistakes. Otherwise, we are going to see if the new Ashland community garden program can use the extras for some of their participants.