Before I get to the content, let me first mention that the book is a beautiful heavy hard cover. You know how a hard cover will just sit solidly open? Such things are important in a sewing book! There is really such a nice feel to the book itself.

And the quilts! Sarah’s lovely vivid style is all over the book in the 16 quilts included. So many great ones!

I was instantly drawn to her Bangles pattern.

You know that I’m all about the solids so of course they are what I turned to.

With templates and Y seams, this pattern isn’t in my wheelhouse but I so enjoyed working on it! It’s really fun to occasionally work on something that’s very different from my usual piecing.

And guess what? Cico Books have been generous enough to donate a book for a giveaway! Leave a comment and I’ll pick a winner in a week.

Good luck!

For Penny’s quilt, I received these blocks.

The whole angle is growth and spring…  I wanted to add something that was my aesthetic but matched the rest of the already existing blocks. To me growth is about those first pops of green and the first flower that blooms.

A litte improv piecing…

…and some tiny half square triangles…

…lead to this! And now it’s all been shipped off to Elizabeth for her addition!

Meanwhile, when I do grab 30 minutes or so I’ve been working on some class samples for when I teach up at A Quilters Affair up in Sisters, Oregon in July.

Are you going to be there? If so, I would love to meet you!  I’ll be giving a couple of talks too, so it should be a really fun week!

Anyhow – these class samples are coming along nicely and I’ll be sure to post them here when I’ve finished them up!

BTW – are you on Instagram? I’ve mentioned it before, but I’ll mention it again because I’m over there so much more than I find time for blogging… Follow me if you wanna. You’ll see a whole lot of my baby too so though maybe it’s not for you if baby pics aren’t your thing.  Ha.

Hope that  you get a good start to your week as April is here!

I finished it up by quilting the backgroud with dense straight lines. Then I went back and filled in the piecing with straight lines in the opposite direction that are set further apart.

I am so happy to have finished up this quilt. I often put my bee blocks to the side with every intention of putting them together into a top, and suddenly two years have passed and I still haven’t found the time… Thrilled to get to use this wonderful quilt!

The quilting on this is all straight line, echoing the piecing design. It took foreeeever, as this dense straight line quilting always does. Good thing there was a deadline to get it finished because it was hard to get it done!

I think that this quilt is a nice balance of clean, uncomplicated design, while also having interest. I’m really happy with it!

I pulled all of my photos from Instagram and put them in a folder on flickr. You can see them all here. My sister came for a good portion of it so she took a lot of the photos for me. A couple of highlights:

The registration desk, quiet the day before the show started.

Me and Heather Grant, focused and talking out some detail a couple of hours before the show opened. The amazing Denyse Schmidt exhibit is our backdrop. Heather and I have been talking daily for over a year as we’ve worked to make QuiltCon happen. She’s become a great friend along with being a coworker. It was her knowledge and abilities that made QuiltCon as organized as it was.

The one workshop I made time for was Yoshiko Jinzenji’s. She brought a lot of her work with her and it was amazing to see it in person and talk with her about it. A true inspiration.

Modern quilting is pretty amazing but it’s the people who really made the event what it was. The staff, volunteers, teachers and lecturers were all so giving of their time, energy and hard work. When we all worked together and put our time and energy into it, we were able to make something truly vibrant and exciting  happen. The modern quilting community all came together for a weekend and it was just amazingly fun.

Oh and I got a tattoo! (Hi Mom!) I was certainly not the only one – there were loads of attendees getting them.

It’s representative of my husband and son and for an extra lil’ quilty touch, the circles are set a perfect scant 1/4″ apart. Ha.

You can see a lot more of the show and the quilts in the QuiltCon flickr group.

Hope that those of you who were at QuiltCon has as much fun as I did, and I hope that the rest of you are making plans to go in 2015. As tired as I still am, I can’t wait to do it all over again!

I will be signing books in the Quilt Haus booth (booth 314) on Saturday the 23rd at 1:00 pm if anyone wants to stop by and otherwise, you’ll see me because I’ll be around. I’ll be workin’, workin’, workin’ and enjoying myself too. I hope that I get to meet you there!

Oh and yes, I do actually have some finished quilts that I’ll finally find the time to post about now!

To start, they ask for a photo… So here’s me:

And then they want five things about you… maybe a lot of you have seen how this is going on over on Instagram?

1) My sewing space is NEVER as clean as it is in that photo. I knew a photographer was coming. It’s usually a complete and utter disaster.
2) I’m an identical twin and live next door to my twin sister. It’s really great.
3) I’m left-handed and love that I am for no good reason other than that it’s just awesome to be a lefty.
4) I met my husband through an online dating site. It works!
5) I grew up in rural New Hampshire but have lived in LA for almost 20 years now.

How about you?  If you’re headed to QuiltCon at the end of the month (it’s so soooooooon!!) add your link and I can’t wait to meet you there!

I’m not the usual quilting story in that I came to quilting through the internet. Flickr and blogs brought on my love affair – not taking a class or a shop I visited. I didn’t have a local quilt shop until I was an avid quilter.

Sew Modern was opened up by a friend and fellow LAMQG member.

Next thing you know, the LAMQG is meeting there…

…and quilting there!

It’s pretty much the clubhouse! Aren’t we lucky here in LA to have such a wonderful shop to spend time in?

Nothing can replace the sense of community that seeing people in person provides. When I am at Sew Modern I always run into my quilting friends. Everyone loves catching up over some sewing machines and rotary cutters!

And I haven’t even mentioned the FABRIC! Being able to see it, touch it and mix & match with the bolts is a sort of fun that you can’t have when you’re shopping online.

So don’t forget that January 24th is Visit Your Local Quilt Shop Day. I hope that you’ll hit up yours!

It’s a big queen sized quilt. And look, I’m taking a flat photo of it! Very exciting stuff. This is because for Christmas my husband got me a great photography set up for my big quilts.

Until the day comes that I have some fabulous enormous studio space where I can shoot my big quilts, this will be my set up! I need to figure out a better clip and hang system than the clothes hangers but I will… and then I’m hoping that I get the gumption to take it different places beyond my sister’s back yard.

Here’s a detail of the quilt after I’d washed it (these first photos are before I washed it) and it got that nice crinkle. I’d say that the colors are truest in this photo.

The orange is Kona flame and boy is it bright! But in this sea of blue it works. I was thinking about using negative space differently in this quilt… sorta like I pieced it with all of the blue. I know it doesn’t really read that way, but it’s an idea I hope that I find more time time to explore in the future!