Quilt Market I... in which I got to take a picture with a celebrity.

Yep, that's me with my mom.  

My mom's a rock star celebrity to me because she went with me to Quilt Market and braved the thousands of booths and looked at all of the displayed quilts with me.  

Every single one.  And there were zillions.  

She discussed color and texture and different threads and use of paint on the surface and construction and all those other quilt words.  

She even hula hooped with me to get entered into a contest.

I'll have more to post about Market through the week, but I wanted to put this one up first.

Oh, and Ty Pennington's in there too.

I got to talk to him about his fabric line, which is very cool.

More to come.

A wedding quilt

Just a note... if your name is Jennifer and you're getting married this weekend, click elsewhere or risk spoiling the surprise!

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I have a friend getting married, and I wanted to make a quilt for her as a remembrance of the event. I've been blessed to help with some of the planning, and it's been a lot of fun.  I've learned a lot about wedding traditions in the Jewish culture!  It's always fun to learn new things I think.

At the ceremony, they will get married under a huppah, which is a canopy.  Both paternal grandfathers prayer shawls (tallit) will be draped on the canopy.  They don't get to keep the tallit, so my idea was to create a quilt that would capture them together signifying the union of the two families.

And I had never seen one, so I was utterly fascinated.  I snapped these pictures and put them together into an inspiration board:

The angel charm has special significance for her, and so I wanted it to be included on the quilt as well.

Here's my palette I chose.  

And my initial sketch.  Sorry the edges of the paper aren't showing up on the scan....

Then I stuck fabric to the sketch to decide what color went where, and got to it.

I tacked the inspiration and the sketch above my sewing machine.

The piecing went rather quickly.  I wasn't trying to exactly reproduce the tallit;  I just wanted to create a piece that reminded them of the tallit together at their wedding.

The angel I did in freehand embroidery.  Here's my chalk drawing.

And here's the stitched piece.

All in all, I'm thrilled with how this turned out!

I put their names into it and the wedding date.  (The names are across the diagonal of the picture)

I was able to add some interesting machine quilting to add detail to the tallits.

 I enjoyed this project so much!

Linking up to Amy's Blogger's Quilt Festival.  Click on over and check out some of the other entries!

Shoe clips. Really, shoe clips!

I decided I needed some Very Cute Shoes for a wedding I'm going to.  Now, I am not afraid of high heels in general.  But have you see how high the heels are this season?

 For example, I thought these were darling.  Ordered them.  They arrived -- darling.  But wait.....

Yep, that's right.  The heel is 6 inches tall.  Guaranteed that I would break an ankle on the dance floor.

(I returned them)

So I started thinking.  I have a perfectly comfortable pair of black high heels (by high I mean 3 1/2 inch heel).  That I can walk in.  Dance in.  But I needed a way to jazz them up.  

I remembered shoe clips.  From the 80's, yes.  And I started experimenting.

Here's the tutorial I used for the flower.  I didn't go to all the trouble she does in the tutorial for the backing piece, just hot glued it to some felt and called it good.

I bought some shoe clip hardware on etsy.  Here's who I bought mine from.  They arrived quickly, they stay on my shoes, they don't hurt my feet.  Enough said.

and for the wedding, I went with vivid yellow!  

For these I alternated satin and chiffon and it gave the flower a nice texture.

Best of all?  I have Really Cute Shoes for about $10.  That I can walk in.

Machine quilting work

 I really love machine quilting for other people.  Here's two pieces I finished up and delivered this week.

Love the pattern she used for the top.  We decided that it needed a swirly pattern in the quilting to set off the boxy pattern in the blocks.

 Here's a closeup of the quilting...

 I love how it turned out!

This one was a 9-patch pattern, and she wanted straight-line quilting on the diagonals.  Boy, this one took a lot of patience!  I used my walking foot on this one.

And here's a closeup of the quilting.  

I'm just sorry I won't get to see these all washed and crinkled up!

Fuddy is not (quite) Duddy Challenge Piece

I like a good challenge.  Especially when it involves miniquilts....

So I decided to enter Cheryl's Fuddy But not Duddy Challenge.

The requirements were to use brown, green and burgundy + one color to make a modern mini quilt.

Well, here goes:

I added mustard.  I certainly didn't intend to add mustard, which is think is rather fuddy in its own right.

But when I pulled out my solids, it actually fell into the pile, and it seemed nice.

I pieced it to take the shape of a rock formation.  You know, those ones that seem to be a zillion years old but look like they could fall over any time?

I wanted it to have a sense of teetering as if it could fall, but wouldn't.

I tried to also modern it up in the quilting.

You know I love machine quilting, right?

This was a very fun project.  

Thanks so much to Cheryl for hosting this challenge!

What's next, Cheryl?  How about mauve and country blue?

Actually, I'm not sure anyone or anything can modern those up.....

I'm linking this to the challenge.  Click on over and check out the other entries!