San Francisco Quiltaway

Every two years, the San Francisco Quilt Guild sponsors "Quiltaway", a 3-day quilting retreat. I went for the first time this year. It's three days of intense sewing and quilting, culminating in "Sew and Tell" of all the projects! Activities are a mix of group projects, working on charity quilts, classes, silent auction and door prizes, and socializing.

I signed up for a 2-day class on making this paper-pieced quilt, a pattern designed by the teacher, Deb Karasik. She is a paper-piece guru who has patterns and techniques for making this type of quilt, with sharp points. This is HER quilt that the class was based on. We brought the fabrics we wanted to use for the quilt, and everyone in the class had a different take on it -

I decided to make it in a southwest-looking color scheme. I didn't get close to finishing the quilt top in the class, despite hours and hours of working on it! Here's what I got done:

I'm not sure the outer blocks really work, and I might re-do them with a slightly different color scheme. You can probably tell that my blocks are not even sewn together yet - I'm waiting to figure out the final arrangement.

Here are some of the other quilts that people made in the class. We had some real over-achievers in there - one woman stayed up til 2 AM one night to get her top put together!

Another thing I did was participate in a Mystery Quilt, which was fun. It involves following directions given one step at a time, not knowing what the final product will look like til it comes together in the end. Here's my quilt:
Otherwise, I made some charity preemie quilts, and I won 4 beautiful skeins of wool yarn in a drawing! We also had to make little 10-inch quilts to exchange as "souvenirs" of the quiltaway - I forgot to take a picture of mine!

Fun weekend - a luxury to be able to sew and quilt and not cook or keep house for the weekend!

Dan is the man

Check out the prototype placecard holders that Dan created for our wedding:
#1 is a champagne cork with a slit in the top.
#2 is two corks sewn together and the card goes between the corks.
#3 is a single wine cork cut on one side with a slit on top.

The most amazing thing is that Dan burned (!) in the personalization with our names and wedding date. I think they're awesome but would love your opinions. Which should we choose?

Alex's photo album

These are the pages for a cloth book I made for Alex. It's a pattern developed by a friend of mine who has a little business designing patterns and selling fabric and kits. This is billed as "Baby's first photo album". It incorporates photos printed on fabric into the patchwork pages. I think it's really cute, though mine didn't turn out quite as well as I had hoped. I was disappointed in the quality of the photos printed onto the fabric. I played around with my printer settings and inks and everything, but couldn't get the photos reproduced very well. Anyway, I used the best ones I could get.
We didn't see Kelly, Marc, and Alex over the holidays, but are going down to visit them later this month, so I'll give it to him then.

Printable desk calendar

If, like me, you've been staring at December 2009 for a couple of weeks now, you might like to replace it with this calendar. It's from the same people who posted the 2009 calendar that I used a LOT. Now I have the desk calendar at my computer desk and my amazing village calendar at my student-interaction desk.

Happy New Year!

Christmas Crafts

I made a few potholders yesterday when we were snowed in. The two on the left are for Brian's grandma, Rose. The two on the right are for my neighbor. She made amazing peanut butter cupcakes on 4th of July last year, so the patriotic cupcake one is in hopes that she makes them again!

I'm also bringing my quilt home to work on using Mom's quilting sewing machine. I somehow made the backing way too big and putting the "sandwich" together was hard, but I think it will look great once it's done or at least partly done. Wish me luck getting home today and lots of productivity once I'm there!

Baby Quilt

I finished the baby quilt! And the baby hasn't even been born yet!

Here's a shot of the finished product. Many many small patches. I think the largest patch is 2"x2" and most are far smaller. I started in the middle and worked my way out. After the first few sections, I took Mom's advice and used fusible interfacing underneath the patches to hold them on just a little more tightly.
I fell in love with this quilt and loved putting it together in pieces so that I got to see it evolve throughout the project. No feelings of being let down after the initial design phase was done. I'm thrilled with the way it turned out and Hillary and Jesse seem to love it just as much as I do, so I was very happy to give it to them. I'll try to get a shot of it with the baby when he/she comes next month.

Brian's latest creation

Brian has been welding lately. He made the metal planter holder that I posted this summer and he just finished this coat rack. It's made of wood from a reclaimed beam from an old building and some metal curls that he cut and welded in place. I love how it looks like it's floating on the wall since the L-brackets are hidden. And I love even more that I have a place to put my work bag, jacket, and scarf when I walk in the door!