Sketch: Flashing

My daughter and I bought some new pens and had some fun with them.  Its always nice to get new smooth writing pens. 

The thought behind my sketch was ideas flashing into my head.

My daughter Bella did the sketch below. 

Winter Table Runner

you can see the oops in my quilting at the bottom of the tree.  That is all fixed now as you can see at top.

A month or so ago, my friend Sandy of Quilting for The Rest Of Us took a ride to the Finger Lakes area to go to some Amish fabric and country stores.  I love to go there down Penn Yan way.  We kind went a little crazy buying fabric, for sure I did.

One of the stores, called the Quilt Room, sells some fabric but they are more of a gift store.  They have these table runners that I have been wanting for a while but I just could not hand over 58 dollars for them seeing how I coould easily make them.  After some research online I found a pattern suitable.  The pine trees are from About.com and the rest I kind of made up.

After that store we went to another store that has some wonderful fabrics and didnt I find the exact material that was in a runner at the other store.  I quickly came home and whipped it up.

This was before I decided to frame in the check boxes.

Weekly Sketch

I am going to do my best to sketch in my journal or doodle something every week.  One of the ways I hope to accomplish this is by following this blog and getting a cue every week.  The blog is called Art Quilt Maker.  This past weeks post was "wet".

This one here didn't quite come out how I wanted.  I was imagining a girl looking down into an umbrella that had a fish in it.  I achieved nothing of what I saw in my mind.  Rather it looked as if the umbrella was some kind of outgrowth of her body.  So I cut off the body but now it looks as though I caught a head and a fish in my umbrella.  Kind of disturbing.

Next week, flashing! Whoa.

Easy Street Finale

If I were to rename this quilt mystery extravaganza, I would not call it Easy Street.  I might call it What a Humdinger or Every Which Way But Loose or something... Not Easy Street.  I saw this with all do respect Bonnie.  It was a lot of work, I am not whining I am stating fact. THe piecing was fairly easy, the only thing that would be a challenge is the flying geese.

I told a friend of mine that my feelings about this quilt go something like this.

I am angry at it because it took away time from Christmas preparations and then Brthday preparations.

I am happy with it because it is done.

I am sad that I didnt pick more contrasty colors. Because I didnt know.  There are jsut some thing si would have done different.

I am grateful to have learned some new things and gotten over my fear of flying geese.

I have an overall bittersweet feeling that it all ended.  Meeting my quilting peeps on Facebook to discuss the quilt. And missing the surprise of seeing what is next.

In the end, I like the quilt. It is growing on me every time I look at it.  And I actually will save the pattern because I may make it again.  I never would have thought I would say that.  But I would love to make it as a scrap quilt with much more contrast and do it the way I want to do it.  I mean no offense to Bonnie but we all have our own way of doing things. I never follow a recipe exactly like it states, why should I follow a pattern?

In the end I think I am going to name it Zazzle Electric because it seems to have so much movement to me it is almost like nervous energy.

The adventure was fun, thank you to all who participated with me and to Bonnie for setting it all up.