IN WHICH WE LOOK OUT OUR WINDOW AND SEE A WINTRY DAY

I know the sun will not do its solstice thing for another 22 days or so but, to me, winter begins just after Thanksgiving.  It is grey outside and the leaves which remain on the trees are shivering with the cold.  The squirrels have tucked away all the walnuts and other edibles.  And the landscape is taking on its stark, dramatic winter hues and outlines.

When I was gainfully employed I had a commute of about 35 minutes.  This was my favorite part of the day travelling through rural Missouri. At first the road was straight, running between corn, soy, and hay fields.  And then the road turned into a twisty hilly ride.  Each season was different.  Sometimes ice would cling to the barb wire fences and glitter in the sun like row upon row of diamonds.  Sometimes the new born calves would caper with each other over bright green fresh grass.  Sometimes the trees would be leafless and stark against the blue sky so dramatic with their dark twisting limbs and accented by dull orange and gold of winter.  That is the season we are now-beautiful in a remote, unfriendly way.

Last week was busy for me as it was for most women.  Aside from preparing the usual T-Day fare, I had to spend a day in Kansas city at the dentist dealing with a cracked and broken molar.  I have fragile teeth. On the day after Thanksgiving we had a lovely luncheon (I have to call it that and not simply lunch but because it was such a special time) where we saw friends we had not seen for awhile as well as other close friends.  A delicious meal was prepared for us and we enjoyed a lot of good conversation and reminiscences. My contribution was a french silk pie which promptly fell on its head before serving but was just fine after I rearranged the whipped cream back into order.  Luckily it was still covered in saran wrap!

So, all in all, I, like most, did not get a lot done work-wise. I completed a couple of the pieced triangles for Sweet Surrender.

After some thought and practice, I have decided to make these using the epp method.  I have worked out some angles to make it easier and this helps a great deal.  My main aid has been to use a clip to keep the two pieces together while I stitch.

The clip is very sturdy and holds the two pieces firmly in place while I stitch up to the clip and then remove it to finish.  This seems to be working very well.  This method also keeps everything out of the way of my right hand as it tries to stitch.  

Here is what the back of the pieced triangle looks like after it is stitched together: 

Two of the diamond epp have fallen out.  The next big hurdle with this quilt will be to stitch the pieced triangles and the appliqued triangles together.  All those biases-this has the potential to swoop and swagger.  I hope that does not become its new name:  Swopey swagger!

Free motion quilting?  check! did that.
I finished Lori Kennedy's Sunflower Sampler

I am exceedingly proud of this sampler-not because it is so great or anything but because I am beginning to understand how FMQ patterns are created and to be able to translate this knowledge into thread and fabric.  Here are some closeups:

All the patterns I choose were from Lori's FMQ tutorials (these are great!).  Some differ from those she put on her version but they are all from here tutorials.

This blog was visited by a lovely lady in Oman this week.  I always wonder about my visitors and what their life is like:  what will they cook for dinner, how are they dressed, what their home looks like, how the weather is affecting them, have their children been naughty.

I hope you get to do what makes you happy this week!!

Pinning my work to:

 Slow Stitching Sundays, Bambi's Blog

 Patchwork Times,  Em's Scrapbag,

 Esther's Wow, Let's Bee Social,

 Free Motion by the River, Whoop Whoop,

 and Off the Wall Friday.           

.IN WHICH OUR 43RD ANNIVERSARY IS CELEBRATED.

Our anniversary was a lovely day.  There were record warm temperatures of 77 degrees which at this time of the year can bode ill tidings.  A harsh winter storm to our north brought up gusty southern winds which blew so strongly picking up all the beautiful fallen leaves and swirling the up into the air in whirls.  The sky was a beautiful sunny blue.  For our anniversary dinner we went to a unique and lovely restaurant by the lake and and had a very sweet time.  

I have done some good work this week both in finishing all the appliqued triangles for Salty Sourmash (Sweet Surrender).  Juki came home better than ever and we worked on some free motion quilting.  My photography skills are improving as you will see and Microsoft (I guess) has downloaded a wonderful new photo finishing program into my laptop.  Who knows where it came from or how it got there but it is niiiicccee!! to work with.

Here are the five triangles I appliqued this week.  They are also the last so I have finished the applique on this quilt until I begin the border.

                                         

I added some flowers I designed in this last set of appliques.  I felt there were too many repeats of one particular flower motif.  I also changed the stem layout on a couple.  For the most part though, I have been faithful to the pattern.  I think it is a charmer with its whimsical flowers and twisty stems against the rigidity of triangular and diamond shapes which will also show up again in the border.  Next week I will work on the pieced diamonds.

Here  is the entire project so far:

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I am so happy to have Juki home again.  We have been practicing our FMQ and we feel we are really getting a handle on it.  I have been using a sketch book to draw out a new pattern over and over until I feel familiar with it.  Then I try out my skill on a practice piece.  If that goes well, I FMQ the pattern on my sampler.  Lately I have been following Lori Kennedy's sunflower sampler.  (http://theinboxjaunt.com/2016/10/25/sunflower-sampler-adding-petals/).   I am behind others in the group  because Juki was taking in the sun in San Diego for a while but here is what I have so far:

I am seeing so much improvement in our FMQ skills both in understanding how the motifs work and in translating them to thread and fabric.

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We had a goshawk in the back yard a couple days ago.  He landed in the leafless walnut tree, spent some time searching around, considered some squirrels (the birds made themselves scarce), and finally saw a small snake some distance away.  He majestically flew across the yard, radiating strength and grace, landing near our patio gathering up a small snake.  Here is a photo of said goshawk completing his meal.

Here are a couple more shots of this predator.

My camera is so cool!.. The goshawk was about 35 yards away all the way to the back of the yard.  These photos were at max telephoto.

Here is a photo of one of our beautiful fall trees:

And here is our outdoor cat Yoshi.  He may be a biter but he does the slow blink better than any I who has ever lived with me.

And lastly here a couple of other furry neighbors: 

These two photos as well as the goshawk photo were taken through the double pane, cat tv window which looks out over our back yard.  The texture of the bark and feathery tails of the squirrels is amazing.  That is some camera I have!

I have had some comments from followers who ask if I experienced culture shock when I moved from Berkeley to back to beyond rural Missouri.  I did and also we only knew each other for 2 weeks before we married.  Maybe I will tell that story next week.  In the meantime, I wish everyone a happy T-bird day!

I HOPE YOU CAN QUILT SOME THIS WEEK!

Pinning my work to:

 Slow Stitching Sundays, Bambi's Blog

 Patchwork Times,  Em's Scrapbag,

 Esther's Wow, Let's Bee Social,

 Free Motion by the River, Whoop Whoop,

 and Off the Wall Friday.           

In Which We Try To Move On..... 

Applique Paintbox received visits from three new countries this week:  United Arab Emirates, Estonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.  This reminds me of what I love so much about the internet and quilt blogging.  No matter the country, be it the USA or one of the 196 other countries, we are all connected.  We all want and love the same things.  My husband who plays internet chess has the same felling of inter-connectedness with the bigger world.
  
I was born and raised in California in the San Francisco bay area, and began studies in design and art history at the University at Berkeley in the 1960's.  Now I live in the back of beyond in rural Missouri.  Two diametrically opposed positions.  I have a foot in both camps.  I yearn for my lively diverse, culturally open, forward and outward looking coastal home.  Yet I live in the heartland of the US where people feel left out, left behind, betrayed by increasing globality.   Anger focuses on "otherness" be it racial, political, marital, or fear of foreigners.  

The best we can do is try to understand what is behind people' s thinking.  Change is inevitable especially with increasing automation.  But how we deal with change is up to us all.  Let us hope we can face change with love and understand that people are all the same and, at heart,  want the same things for their families and themselves.  Teresa Rawson's blog post of 11-12 at http://fabrictherapy.blogspot.com/ is  the most moving summation of this week. She is a wonderful writer as well as quilter.  Her sense of loss and letting go made me weep.

Personally, I have had a hard week.  I could not work for several days but, after reading some of my best-beloved bloggers, began again.  I would say I began  again with a vengeance but, while I have had new ideas and concepts spring up, vengeance would misrepresent my feelings.  I am not motivated by feelings of revenge but rather with hope that art, which is all I can do, can bring more love, beauty, and happiness into the world, and make us realize we are all the same.

Let us hope the best for 11/9.

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Lets move on the what all of us quilt bloggers care about: quilting!!

Here is some work I have completed since last we met:

You can see I have completed 4 of the large diamond triangles and the 4 appliqued half triangles for the edges.  There will also be 6 half triangles made up of one half of the large diamond triangles.  Here are closeups of the small appliques. 

 

For fun and to be different, I did some broderie perse using the peacocks on one side and a butterfly and worm on the other. 

I have also begun work on the last 5 appliqued triangles but they are only basted and may be changed here and there.  

The final score for Sewingmachinesplus.com is an A++.  I can recommend them as having good customer service.  My Juki has been repaired and renewed and will be home on tomorrow, Monday.  Apparently a whole nest of thread had wrapped around the wheel.  They adjusted the tension and the timing so looks good!  I am so excited to have my Juki back and resume fmq practice.

Well, another week in front of us as we slowly come to grips with a potential new world.  Do some quilting or sewing or whatever makes you happy and don't read any more news articles.

HAPPY QUILTING!

I am linking up with :

Slow Stitching Sunday

Patchwork Times

Em's Scrapbag

Easter's Blog

Let's Bee Social

Whoop, Whoop

Off the all Friday

IN WHICH THE AUTHOR REVISITS THE PAST.........

This quilt is adapted from a pattern by Maggie Walker called the Blue Collection.  I finished it about 3 years ago and never displayed it as I started blogging about 4 months ago.  Here is a photo of the original pattern By Maggie Walker:

Here are the quilts side by side you you can see what changes I made to the pattern-not necessarily an improvement but just more me since I was the one making the quilt.

The first change you will notice is that I used just one yellow for the background.  I could see the advantage of user darker shades as there are some light colored vases which show up better against a darker yellow.  The second main change is the border treatment.  I did not like the odd greenery growing out of the vases so I added a (to me) cleaner lined oriental filigree shape.  Flowers are growing out of my vases.

I adapted these flowers from a Dover Publication and stitched down honeybees to sip the nectar from the purpler flowers.  These were some earrings and I removed the earhook.

Maggie's pattern does not limit itself to just oriental blue pottery but also includes A couple English teapots and a country pitcher.  I googled oriental pottery to seek out some oriental shapes and replaced about 6 of the pattern pots with ones of my design.

In my search for fabrics, I could not always find what I wanted.  For instance I wanted a dragon fabric and also a stork fabric.  Being unable to find these in one fabric, I combined two fabrics and appliqued the shapes I wanted to the vase fabric.

 The Chinese greenery and the stork are broderie perse against the plain blue vase.  In the photo below, the dragon was taken from some fabric I had on hand and I designed some little squiggles, and added the trim.

The little pot to the left is a lidded Chinese teacup, one of the googled shapes as is the dragon pot.

I rearranged the upper part of the stems and leaves and moved the fruit around because I did not like the apple just sitting there on a branch.  The blue lotus flower pot is also a shaped I googled.  This was where the country pitcher sat and I wanted an all oriental pottery look.

To carry on the consistency of  oriental pottery motifs, I changed the fan that Maggie placed at the top of her quilt with a rice bowl and cherry blossoms made of little hexagons.

One fun happenstance was the lid on the blue and white floral pot on the bottom left.  I found a fabric with lots of mingled, overlapping Chinese pots but was able to pull out the lid having a Chinese lion as a handle and made the little floral pot to fit it. That little pot is composed of 2 fabric but looks like one.

The last photo is a pot decorated with a sashiko embroidery design of maple leaves.  Quilts give us all a chance to try out techniques about which we are curious.

So that is a blast from the past.  I loved collecting fabric for this quilt and making it.  It was a long search to find fabric which seemed appropriate and I find I am stilling looking at blue and white fabric for that perfect pot.

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Sweet Surrender was not neglected this week but not having my Juki really put me at odds with myself.  I made the 4 half triangle corner flowered appliques so that's progress.  The main event this week was the exploration of foundation piecing.  I watched a couple of you tube videos and got started.  It is trickier than it looks and requires some practice.  I still am not sure if I am doing it right.  

I ended up piecing in rows.  That is the first row of 4 diamonds and a triangle was one foundation piece.  The second foundation piece was the next row of 3 diamonds and a triangle....etc.  The I pieced the 4 sections together.

HERE IS MY QUESTION:  is it possible to make a shape such as this without breaking it down into sections?  Someone tell me...(Gretchen?)

Here is the right side.  Aside from the blurry photo, you can see it all came together well.  Apparently, before rotary cutters and mats and modern rulers, a lot of pieced quilts were made using this method.  

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That's all the news that fit to print for this week.  I have not heard from Sewingmachinesplus about my Juki but their allotted 3-7 days to repair the juki will not be up until Thursday so they still are preserving their A+ rating.

On Tuesday, election day, we are going straight to netflix without one glance at election news.  We will find out Wednesday morning  what the future will be.

HAPPY QUILTING!

I am linking up with my old favorites.  You can click on any of the buttons on the left to go to their link ups and see pretty quilts and interesting ideas.