Happy Holidays

The boarder fabric on the wallhanging was our first bee challenge fabric. Its full of pink and purple santas, what a challenge. I decided to do a "city" quilt as most of my quilts have more of a wilderness feel. This is called "Christmas Eve in the City" All of the people are rushing home as Santa is coming down from the North Pole in his train. I hand dyed all of the buildings, train, and tree fabrics. The cars are quilters lame, the tracks are a wire edge ribbon. The rinestone tree was a vintage pin of my mothers. The wheels on the train engine are very old buttons. I also added lots of beads. This was such a fun quilt to make.
Here we are all packed (over packed) and ready to leave to Florida, to spend the holidays with our kids, grandkids and my parents. I think we're the only person in Michigan with a canoe on their R.V, ready to go.
This is a quilt I made called "The Florida we know". We have been traveling to Florida for the past 25 years for a break every winter. My parents winter on the Gulf coast. Now, our daughter lives in Jacksonville and our son lived in Miami and we love to snorkle in the Keys. This quilt shows our canoe as we canoe through the mangroves looking for little shells and secret beaches. The upper left water shows two little Horseshoe crabs I found dried up on shore. The four little Nemo fish represent our four grandchildren, my friend Deb made them from Fimo (I'm not sure of the correct name) clay. I used my wool fabric for the palm tree, mangroves, blue heron and alligator. Then I added glass fish and beads. This also was a fun quilt to make.
I hope you have wonderful holidays and will be back January 8.

Bee fabric challenge

Every year, my other quilt bee, picks a fabric at the beginning of the year and we have a year to make a project, then at our Christmas party we show them. This years fabric is the big flower print shown in the purse above. Mary (the over achiever) made this Ying/yang purse in addition to the wallhanging below.
Mary designed, pieced and appliqued this exciting piece.
This was my piece, I showed it before with my hand batiked pieces. I didn't plan on using my batik fabric with the challenge piece but they happen to lay next to each other and they went together wonderfully. It was a great opportuntiy to show comercial fabrics with my hand batiked fabrics. The batik mask panel was a piece my friend brought home from Africa for me. In all of our fabric challenges I have used my own hand-dyed fabrics, except for the 30s fabric challenge.

Lillian made this tote bag.
Kay pieced this quilt, she still has to put on the binding. Two of the bee members weren't able to be at the party, hopefully I'll get their quilt pictures. It's fun to see how the same fabric looks so different when put with other fabrics.

This is a wonderful bag Lillian made us. The black is a sturdy nylon mesh, with a fun quilters print fabric and a zipper. I'm packing it up with my hand projects to take to Florida over the holidays. We spend to weeks there with our children, grandchildren and my parents.

Beginning a new wool quilt

This is my first block for my "family tree" quilt. I'm using my natural hand dyed wool, blanket stitching the pictures on and adding some needle felting and embellishments. This is a picture of my childhood home (without the garage, woods and creek in the backyard) my father and mother built. In the lawn area I am going to embroider my parents names and birth dates, their wedding date, me and my brothers birth dates, the year the house was built, our address etc. Next, I'm doing my grandmothers little neighborhood store, I'm setting it at Christmas. Then I'll do my husbands childhood home, his grandparents, ours, and then our childrens, embroidering in all the family history. This is so much fun, it's like playing with paperdolls. My favorite quilts to make are story quilts.
Last night I met with one of my quilt bees for our Christmas party, my friend Cathy made us all these little sea turtles sewing kits. I love it. Under his tumming is an opening for scissors etc. I believe this is a comercial pattern.
My friend Jody made us a wreath, she used wire edge ribbon and looped it around a ring.
Every year I make up a different arrangement on our porch. This year I picked a lot of Christmas greens and holly branches. The white branches are the sumac branches I picked last summer and peeled the bark off them for a dye pot. The branches were so white I saved them for my arrangement. The little white snowflakes are metal. I also tucked in little white lights.

Quilting with friends

Lillian knitted the sleeves of her sweater and pieced the rest, its much cuter in real life.

My girlfriends and I spent the day at the local quilt shop, quilting together. The name of the shop is Quilted Memories and she has a wonderful, huge classroom that she lets us use for the day for $5.00 each. Below are some of the projects.

Kay with a quilt she brought for "Show and tell". The batiks are from Moda with no two alike and the pattern is from Laundry Basket.
Kay with a top she pieced today, it's from Ricky Tims book, Convergence. I believe it's his fabric line also.

I pieced this "Schlep" bag for my "adopted" daughter, Vicky for Christmas. She loves lizards, turtles and frogs, so I used them on both sides, all I could find, my friend Deb even sent me some of hers from Alaska. This is a wonderful, easy, big tote (it holds a good full size quilt), and its reversable. I can't remember who made the pattern, but I made a made a lot of them. My friend said they think its on the internet now, but I'm not sure . If you can get a hold of the pattern, try one, their like potatoe chips, you can't make just one. This is the reverse of the bag.
Mary with a simple table topper, from the Take 5 pattern. Makes a nice Christmas gift.