Some
quilting ladies were discussing the marking pens they use on their quilts, and
after one said she was done with chalk (because of the mess and instability of
the marks), and using only her FriXion pens from now on, I thought I would
again pass on this warning:
FriXion
pens might not be the best choice. The
ink can show up again.
One
lady sent a beautiful quilt to a big quilt show. It went by plane through the cold, cold
skies, and when it arrived, all the markings were back again, and her quilt was
disqualified.
Also,
even after the marks have been removed by heat, and again by washing to remove
the chemicals that make up those inks (a necessity that many don’t know about),
they can leave a light-colored ‘shadow’ line that never will go away,
especially on dark fabric.
I
have some of those pens, and I use them – but never where they will show when
the quilt is finished. Another choice is
washable Crayola markers. Those come out
very nicely in the wash. However, I
often do not wash the quilt after making it, so I rarely use them.
My
favorites are the Mark-B-Gone and the air-or-water-vanishing pens. Mark-B-Gone comes in white or blue, fine point
or regular. To remove the marks, just
spritz with water. I like to add a
teaspoon of baking soda to each cup of water, to ensure total removal of the
marks.
The
vanishing pens vanish often, and I can’t find them to save my life.
Oh,
that’s not what ‘vanishing pen’ means?
Okay,
okay... the marks will vanish in a little while, usually a few hours. When I want to take pictures of my work, and
the marks are still there, I speed up the process with a small spray of water.
I
have a variety of chalk pencils and rollers, too, and use them when the pens
aren’t showing up on the fabric.
Tuesday, I loaded Larry’s brother Kenny’s
Bear Paw quilt on my frame and started quilting it. By the time I quit
for the night, the top two borders were done.
Loren and Norma gave me a big piece of 100%
cotton batting for this quilt. Loren had bought it when they were moving
Norma’s things into his house after they married a year and a half ago -----
she’d asked him to go to Wal-Mart for some packing stuff, to protect furniture
and dishes and pictures and suchlike. He wound up in the wrong department
and bought an entire bolt of batting. haha So she wouldn’t let him use it for packing,
and they saved it for me.
On the bolt, it says the batting is 90”
wide. The quilt is 94” wide. I thought I’d have to piece a strip of
batting to the side, but when I loaded it on the frame, I wound up with an inch
and a half of extra batting at either side.
Larry went to Lincoln that day to have his
teeth readjusted. He missed his
appointment last month, but hasn’t been having too much trouble with the
dentures.
Wednesday, I looked through fancy pantographs
to use in those big, blank squares in the quilt. I chose one called ‘Pink Lemonade’.
I’m doing only a light custom quilting on
this quilt, so it’s going fairly fast.
Thursday morning, since we had quite a lot of
peaches from our tree, I made maple and brown sugar oatmeal for breakfast, and
sliced half of a banana and a couple of fresh peaches into it. Mmmmm, that was good.
I did a little more quilting after our church
service that night, and got almost to the halfway point.
Lookie, lookie what a friend sent me from the
Nebraska State Fair Friday! I got Best
of Show and Best of Division (whatever that is). I have purple and blue medallions, a gold
Best of County medallion, a blue First Place ribbon, and a red Second Place Best
of County ribbon.
I got several blue ribbons in Textile Arts,
too. 😃
I wrote back to my friend, “Oh, wow, I’m
famous! But what’s that silly RED ribbon
doing in there????”
I was kidding, but I did wonder how I
could get ‘Best of Show’ and not get ‘Best of County’, too.
That must’ve given me a burst of energy,
because I was soon washing cat beds... vacuuming the rugs... cleaning the
kitchen... and going to town for a stop at the bank, and then to do some things
on one of my blind friends’ computers.
Or maybe it’s because I feel like I’m wasting
my time, doing something that’ll just have to be done all over again before
long, and therefore I sing, in order to at least be doing two things at once. 😄
When I got home, I had a snack of fresh
peaches and a bit of mozzarella cheese with a small chunk of 12-grain bread. After posting pictures of my ribbons, I got
back to the quilting.
A friend wrote, “Congratulations!! I
hope Lydia is as excited as you must be!”
“Maybe she is,” I responded, “but she’ll
probably be more excited, when I’m finally done trying to win ribbons
and prizes with that quilt! hee hee”
By then, I was having fun doing ‘thread
painting’ on the bear panel itself. Thread painting is fun, but it’s not my
favorite. Is it rulerwork? Or
pantographs? Or free-motion feathers,
pebbles, leaves? I like all parts of quilting, from the designing to the
cutting to the piecing to the quilting to the binding to the label. 😃
For supper that evening, we had ancient-grain-encrusted
cod, green beans, macaroni and cheese, cherry tomatoes from the neighbors’
garden, and peaches from our tree. The Schwan man had come earlier, so we
had frozen yogurt for dessert.
Saturday, Hannah and the children went to the
State Fair – and she learned from one of the judges the story
behind that red Second Place ribbon.
The judge, wanting to 'spread the wealth around', chose a
different one for First Place Best in County. It’s hand-appliqued and hand-quilted. She hoped that was okay.
"Well, of COURSE not!" I said to Hannah. "I wanted all the wealth!!!!!"
I shall be gracious... but if one quilt is
considered better than another, it should get
the ribbon. We don’t want to live in a
socialistic community! I never mind
losing to another, when it’s truly fair.
 |
| Teensy |
At one
big quilt show, I saw some really, really ugly quilts – with poor
workmanship – sporting big ol’ ruffly First Place medallions. What in the world?
 |
| Tiger |
The
quilts that won ribbons at the much smaller show in Creede, Colorado, were
truly beautiful. Funny, how that works. Maybe tells you the political bent of the judges. Or whether they were quietly related to one
of the winning quilters. heh
Truthfully,
I can imagine that judging quilts for a show must be a hard job. What if you wind up with a whole pile
of quilts that you think are beautiful, unique, and skillfully made? Some of it just has to come down to
judges’ tastes and preferences, there isn’t any getting around it. But I believe that, for the most part, they
try to be fair. (Not fair, though, to
award a ribbon to someone just to ‘spread the wealth’. Nope, that’s not fair.) (I shall not have a tantrum, however.) 😉
 |
| Clematis |
Saturday evening, Larry was sharpening
a chain (for a chain saw) for his brother Kenny, until I called him in for
supper (filet mignon!!! and mashed potatoes, gravy, and steamed asparagus,
along with fresh peaches). He managed to
get his supper down, but then, whilst trying to text his brother, they both
fell asleep, mid-text, and nobody wrote to anybody for a long time. hee hee
Poor guys. They work hard.
I quilted a little while longer, then decided
I’d better quit. My back was protesting,
and I didn’t want to be trying not to fall asleep in Sunday School. Sometimes I catch a glimpse of some of the
teenage boys nodding off, and for some reason, if I was the slightest bit
sleepy, that wakes me right up.
The dark smudges at the bottom of my screen
have come back... gone away... come back... and gone away multiple times since
I thought they inexplicably vanished when I reset the touchpad on my laptop. Saturday night, after I shut down the longarm
and wanted to post a few pictures, the computer had a Big Bad Crash.
It locked up... I did a hard shutdown...
turned it back on... it tried and failed to update... and wouldn’t come all the
way on. Another hard shutdown... then
turned it back on... it allllmost came on, not quite. A third hard shutdown. This time it came on enough that after it
stalled I was able to click ‘Restart’ after pressing Ctrl Alt Delete. Finally it came on, verrrry slooowly. I started pulling up the windows and programs
I’d had up. Everything was extremely
sluggish.
It occurs to me that the lockups often happen
when I am working with pictures – especially when using Windows 7’s Photo
Gallery. I downloaded it to this Windows
10 laptop when it was new, and use it often, because it works so much better
than the Viewer in W10. But I suppose it
isn’t completely compatible with the system.
😕
Because many people have asked, I rounded up
a few choice photos and posted them – the highlights from the making of the New
York Beauty quilt: New York Beauty Highlights
Amongst all the nice comments, there are some
that make one scratch one’s head and wonder, How does she know how to type
if she doesn’t know how to read?!
And with some, you wonder, How does she survive in this ol’ world?
For instance, I typed below the above picture,
‘Venice lace’. Yet someone writes, “I
love how your quilting makes that look like lace!”
If you follow the above link and look at the
blog post, you’ll see that the first photo and the second-to-last photo are
shots of the entire quilt. It even says
‘completed’ underneath, with the date.
Nevertheless, someone wrote (in a snippy tone), “Why don’t you show us
pictures of the whole quilt?!”
I don’t suppose the proper response is “Don’t
be such a dingbat”?
I wrote matter-of-factly, “The first and
second-to-last photos are of the whole quilt.”
The pictures are in order. They are even dated. They show piecing, then quilting, then the
adding of the beaded piping... and then the sewing on of pearls.
But someone writes, “How did you get your
longarm to quilt through all those pearls?”
The pearls were not sewn on until the
quilting was finished, and I’d removed the quilt from the frame.
Others write, “How long did this take?” when,
directly above the pictures, there is a Grand Total of hours (639.5), and a
short breakdown of how long certain individual tasks took (piecing, 106.5;
quilting, 168.5; making the beaded piping, 42; attaching piping and binding,
63.5; sewing on pearls, 109).
One person responded before I had a chance
to, “She wrote that, in her description.”
The woman who’d asked the question replied,
“I don’t read those.”
Well, then, what would ever make me think
she’d read any answer to her query? 🙄
These are those about whom the teacher wrote
on the backs of their fifth-grade report cards, “Needs to work on comprehension
skills.” heh
I was surprised when I was
compiling those ‘highlight’ shots, to see just how many days it took for each
and every part of the process. For instance, I spent from February 8 to April 6
quilting, and I quilted for several hours almost every one of those days.
Yesterday after our morning church service,
we were invited for dinner with Kurt and Victoria, and a friend of Victoria’s,
Sonia, who lives in Washington State, visiting with her baby girl, Annalise. Anna has Down’s Syndrome. As is typical of so many who have this condition,
she is loving and affectionate, a happy little thing.
Victoria had a lovely meal of roast, carrots,
potatoes, and onions baking slowly in the oven all morning, and it was perfectly
done when it was time for dinner. She
had also made banana bread. Sonia had
purchased fruit and peach pies at the Farmers’ Market in our Town Square
Saturday morning, and altogether it made a delicious meal.
Our neighbor man
stopped by this afternoon and gave us a gift card to Applebees as a thank-you
for caring for their animals.
Today I was surprised to see a picture
someone posted on a big quilting group on Facebook – a photo of my New York
Beauty quilt at the Nebraska State Fair, with a man and woman standing there
looking at it.
A lady commented,
“People usually don’t get this close to any of the quilts.”
I responded, “There
are so many quilts entered at the Nebraska State Fair, there just isn’t room to
‘fence them off’, even in that huge room. They even have to overlap many of them, to
make room. But in the times I’ve been
there, I’ve never seen anyone touching them. White-gloved helpers will pull back quilts so
one can see some that are partially covered, or look at the back. (It is fun to get so close, I must
admit. 😉 )
“One time Larry and I
were looking at a quilt... he reached out to point ------ and at the very same
time, on the opposite side of the aisle, a husband and wife were also looking
at a quilt, he reached out to point... In unison, the other lady and I exclaimed,
‘DON’T TOUCH!!!’ Both husbands jerked
back like they’d gotten soundly thwacked. They looked guiltily at each other... and then
we all burst out laughing.”
The white hostas
around the yard are all in bloom. And
what a profusion of blooms it is! The
Sphinx moths are happy. The Autumn Joy
sedum buds are opening and turning pink, too.
Here’s a little Peck’s skipper sipping nectar from the new blossoms.
Tomorrow morning I should find two or three
big boxes of groceries on my front porch (or just inside my door, if the
weather is bad). I order most of them from
Wal-Mart, and a few things from Amazon. Shipping
is free, when one buys $35 from Wal-Mart, and $25 from Amazon. It’s so helpful, not to have to lug heavy
stuff around the store, out to the car, and then into the house.
Back to the Bear Paw quilt! I will be done in a couple more days, if all
goes well.
,,,>^..^<,,, Sarah Lynn ,,,>^..^<,,,
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