SAQA Dream Collection #2: Brownian Motion

Earlier today I shared my first "SAQA Dream Collection" of quilts from the annual SAQA auction.  It's so hard to narrow down which to choose!  Today I was inspired by Dianne Firth's piece-  I love the transparency in her work and it made me think of atoms and molecules spinning in space.  Of course real Brownian motion isn't symmetrical, but the thought jumped out at me!  Click each one for a larger view and to go to the auction webpage.

Molecules and Molecules

There are so many great quilts in the auction:  click here to see them all!

SAQA Dream Collection #1: Fly Away Home

The annual SAQA auction is coming up starting in September and they always invite people to put together "dream collections".  I've put together a couple (the second one will be in the next post).  I'm a budding birder, and Judith Ahlborn's piece inspired me to put together this collection full of feathered friends.  It's so amazing to see the variety of work of so many SAQA artists all in one place. Click each one to go make it bigger and open up the auction page.

Fly Away Home

All the auction quilts can be viewed here, there are so so many fabulous ones, it's really fun to go look through them all!

Summer Donation Quilts

A while back I was in a scrap busting mood so I pieced about 6 or 7 baby-to-lap sized quilt tops and backs.  It didn't seem to make too much of a dent in my scraps but I did get to use up a bunch of fabrics that I'd inherited from others and that I probably wasn't going to use for anything else.  Two weekends ago (while my big quilt was trying to soak out the blue dye), I got my act together and quilted a couple of them.

On this one, the center block is pieced out of little triangles I had left over from another baby quilt.

I love the scraps of fall-scarecrow-tree panel in this next one.

This third one was just random scrappy squares, and I quilted it a while back but it had been sitting on my shelf since then.

I'm going to take all three of these to infant crisis services where hopefully they can be given to babies and kids who need them.  I've been frustrated with my big project lately, so it was really nice to finish some cute things and feel productive!

Cotton Robin

I've always wanted to participate in a round robin swap so this year when I saw the call for Julie's Cotton Robin, I signed up right away.  We each made a center block and then Julie sent them to two additional participants to add borders and one final participant who quilted and bound it.  It was super fun to work on other people's pieces, and now that we're all finished I can share mine.

I love it!  Thanks so much to the ladies who worked on it.  My center block was improv-pieced gold and pink, and the lovely pieced borders complement it very well.  I feel like it's pink and gold (my sparkly 4-yr old shining through) but with a more grown up feel.

Here it is on my wall of minis, I love the way they look up there!

Thanks so much to Julie for hosting and organizing, I know it's a ton of work.  I definitely recommend that you click over to her Cotton Robin blog to see all the other fabulous minis from this round.

The eyes have it!

I finished quilting my big dragon tile quilt over the weekend and soaked it to remove the blue marking pen.  Unfortunately, one of the blue fabrics in it bled all over one of the two white tile backgrounds, and I was horrified.  I followed Vicki Welsh's excellent tutorial (thanks!!) which primarily involves soaking in soapy hot hot hot hot water for many many hours.  My water kept turning blue so I guess that was good, but constantly boiling water and pouring it in the bathtub got exhausting. Plain hot water from the tap helped too, but I thought the boiling would be better.   After about 22 hours of soaking, the blue hadn't completely come out but it had evenly and lightly stained all of the white background.  I was really surprised that one of the two white background fabrics (both cotton!) just sucked up the blue and the other one is as white as ever.  In any case, now my tiles are white and pale blue and that's just good enough.  Unfortunately all that soaking made some of my other fabrics wear weirdly and the blue dye also backstained some of my gold fabrics which now look very dingy, but I'm just ready to be done with this quilt.  Incidentally, I didn't take any pictures of the blue/white but if you look at the first picture below you can see a little of the fabric that stayed white on the left and the one that sucked up all the blue dye on the right.

I blocked it, squared it up, sewed on the facing strips and then decided I should stitch the beaded dragon eyes on before flipping the facing strips around.  So here for your consideration are several different beaded eye options:

I started out with a red bead on a black sequin, but I thought that made my dragon look too mean.

I'm now trying to decide between the next four:

1. Gold eye on black sequin.

2. Gold eye on black sequin with short green beaded eyebrow.

3. Gold eye on black sequin with long green beaded eyebrow.

4. Black bead on black sequin with pink accent bead.

Which is your favorite?  Other suggestions?  I always appreciate the input!

Back for the moment

It's been a full month since I've posted here, and luckily three weeks of that time was a lovely vacation with Mike in Alaska.  It was a really wonderful trip- definitely relaxing and beautiful.  I'd love to go back.

Since getting home things have been crazy in both expected and unexpected ways. This week has been full of outside obligations, but I had a little time last week to work on my Peace quilt before heading to my parent's for the 4th of July holiday weekend.

I have a few things to post and share when I can get organized enough to take pictures, but at the moment it feels just like trying to keep my head above water.  So for today I'll leave you with a snapshot of my quilting from last week.

I hope everyone had a great Independence Day and that you're staying cool and dry this summer!  In keeping with the 4th of July feeling, here's one of my pictures from Alaska.