Making Progress on the BOM Quilt

It turned out to be a snowy day – a perfect day to spend working on the Holiday Chorus block-of-the-season quilts. Toni Foster and Mary Wieser both sewed on the blocks for the bed size version of the quilt (pictured) and I worked on machine quilting the smaller throw size version of the quilt. The three of us had a nice day in the studio sewing, chatting and watching the quilt grow on the design wall. It was an unusually quiet day, the phone didn't ring much so we made lots of progress.

Double Life

Good morning. I woke up this morning feeling conflicted. I'm sure there are many creative people out there that go through the same thing in their daily lives. Yesterday afternoon was spent with several friends critiquing their fiber art – as a result this morning I woke up feeling the strong urge to spend the day creating/painting a new art piece. But I have a job, although working for myself but none the less responsibilities and deadlines keep me from spending the day in the raptures of creating.

Most days I don't feel this tug of war with in my soul but every once and a while I have the yearning to be free of responsibilities to paint and create at will. And it's not like I don't spend many of my days working creating new quilt designs, fabric collections and patterns. But it is a different kind of creativity than when I am in the studio painting/creating an art piece. Vary rarely do the two lives ever co-exist. Mostly I feel firmly planted in one life or the other, and so I feel I lead a double life.

The New Fabric is Here!!

I am so excited!! My new fabric line, "Holiday Chorus" for Andover Fabrics has arrived. After a bit of a bumpy road getting the bird panel printed just right, I feel it was all worth it and are so happy with the end results. It's always so exciting to see something I created make it all the way to fabric.

I've scanned in the Titmouse to show here and on this snowy day the titmice are all over the feeders outside the studio window. A cardinal, wren, chickadee, christmas robin and nuthatch round out the other birds on the printed fabric panel.

I couldn't waite to dive in and start cutting and sewing the Block of the Season quilt.

I've gotten all the pieces cut out and sorted for the four parts of the quilt. The four blocks for the first part of the quilt are all sewn and I've put them up on the design wall with bird panel blocks. Here is the block from part 1 of the quilt.

Things have been pretty busy around the studio here lately. Mary has been busy cutting some kits for the website and Toni has been putting together a series of updates to offer more helpful information to the website. I've been designing up a new childrens collection for Andover and finishing up the writing of a few new patterns for the spring. I'll try harder to keep you all up todate more frequently. Thanks for all the support.