Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day to all. Hope you all had a great day. All the children came by today. We had breakfast with the younger son and his wife this morning with their grandpuppy. Just after they left the older son and his girlfriend came by. Then our daughter came to visit. We had dinner at the older son's house this evening, and visited with his two grandpuppies. He barbecued steaks and they were good, too. He is a good cook. The weather was beautiful today.

My picture is of the colorful hand towels my daughter gave me, and the cute little purple teapot that son and daughter-in-law gifted me today. The older son and girlfriend brought some beautiful red tipped yellow roses this morning. They are gorgeous! When they open up, they will be absolutely breathtaking. It was wonderful to see all the children today, and all the grandpuppies, too!

Yesterday I attended a guild quilt class. The teacher was Mary Mashuta. She taught one of the quilt patterns from her Confetti Quilts book. It is the pattern on the cover of the book. This is a two piece curved pattern. It is perfect timing because I am doing my next Quilting 101 workshop on curved piecing. She presented a different way to machine piece the curve without using any pins or clipping of fabrics. It is with a special machine sewing foot. It looked a bit difficult, but she said that after you do a couple, you begin to understand the relationship of the two curved pieces and they go together rather quickly.

There are no pictures of any blocks that I made in class. Yesterday we brought fabrics and cut pieces from the curved templates that Mary provided. It is so much easier to rotary cut from templates than to mark around templates and then cut them out with scissors on the drawn lines. She said no sewing machines were needed on her supply list. I could not understand why we did not need machines to sew quilt blocks. After hearing her presentation, I understood. She cuts all her pieces out and places them on her design wall. When she has a design she likes, she then sews the pieces together to make the quilt top. She also does her own machine quilting.

She told us to bring striped fabrics. After searching through my stacks of fabrics, I found a few stripes, but not too many. I have very few light stripes, mostly darker ones. But I took what I had. I bought some stripes on Friday to add to my stripe collection. Then is when I found that I had many more dark colors than light colors. I tend not to buy light colors. When I need contrast in a particular quilt pattern, I usually need to go buy the lights. I try to buy some when I am buying other colors, but I do not often find lights that I really like.

We cut the two pattern pieces after lunch. I don't think anyone had enough pieces cut yesterday to actually make a quilt top. A few ladies had quite a few pieces cut. A pattern was actually appearing on their design areas before they left.

Mary had us do a paper mock up of some designs before we started cutting. This is the same technique Margaret Miller does in her classes. I believe it helps to do the paper mock up to discover designs that we like. If all we do is follow the teacher's (or other quilter's) published designs, we would not come up with our own designs which is often times different than the teacher's samples. For me, this is a great exercise. It forces me to use my own design sense to come up with my own unique designs. It is so easy to copy the teacher's designs. But using paper mock ups is a fast and easy way to accomplish this exercise.

When I get enough pieces cut and placed on my design wall, I will try to remember to get a picture to post. I have a few pieces cut from yesterday, but not enough to make a pleasing design. I have way too many darks, and not enough lights. Without the lights, the pattern that I want to make will not show. It will be lost in all my beautiful dark colors.

Hope you all have a wonderful week. Until then.....

Happy Quilting