Tales of Tuesday

Before I get started on Tuesday's comings and goings, I should tell you I went to my second (actually, third) guild meeting last night. For as difficult as it is for me to subject myself to rooms full of strangers, I do enjoy the speakers when I attend a guild meeting. Last night's speaker was Rita Young Kilstrom, who lives on the other side of town from me in West Linn, Oregon. We were treated to a trunk show of her quilts and her "wearable art". Her quilts are inspired by found objects from thrift stores, antique stores, etc., in probably much the same way that many of us can look at a design and say, "I see a quilt there." The difference between Rita and me is that she actually puts her ideas into her quilts. Here is an image from her site showing her modeling one of the outfits we saw on display last night:

I looked for more information online about her, and could only find an abandoned website. I know it's abandoned because there is a brief message from a couple of years ago when she said she was doing fine, but moving along. Anyway...you can see some of her work on this site. Click on that link and check the gallery. Some of the guild members were modeling the wearable items. They were beautiful...many of them prize winners...but not necessarily to my liking. Still, it was an enjoyable show, and even when a quilt isn't something I would necessarily make myself, there is always lots of inspiration in seeing what others have done.

The other thing I enjoyed about the guild meeting last night was talking about the challenge quilt that we will make for August. Our challenge is called "Initially Yours". We are to take our initials, and then use them to make a quilt representative of them in the fabrics, the design, the theme, etc. With my initials being "BS" there is certainly "fertile ground" to cover. (Ha! Did you see what I did there?) Right now I have in mind to make a Bright Sun on a Big Sky made with Blue Scraps and to include a Bull doing you-know-what. Should be fun, no? Of course, August is a long way off, and so I could always change my mind. What would you do with BS initials?

Today I went swimming in the morning. While I never doubted I would go swimming, it was sure hard to blast myself off the couch and out the door. I'm glad I went, however. This afternoon when I got home, I went to work quilting the Outback Sunset table runner. I did some thinking about what to do with this quilt, and in my usual style, started with nothing in particular in mind. I just put needle to fabric and let 'er rip...um, sew. Ripping is highly undesirable. Anyway, here's what I did. To refresh your memory, here is the quilt top I'm speaking of.

Thanks to those of you from Down Under for cluing me in that the designer of this pattern is from Australia and the name of the quilt is a reference to that. Duh. Anyway...I decided to stick with an idea from the title of a Bill Bryson book about Australia, In a Sunburned Country, (good book, by the way). I started in the center of the block with a spiral and then spiraled out to make a sun, then quilted rays coming from there.

It's a little easier to see from the back:

I briefly considered using red thread, but in a surprise move, chose something that would show up a little better. Not hiding my light under a bushel this time around.

At the ends of the quilt, I did some wavy lines, some flames, a little triangular spiral, some pebbling...basically, a little free motion quilting sampler. 

I had a hard time deciding what to do in the outer border, but ended up doing some flames.

I'm about 2/3 of the way finished with this now. All the blocks are quilted, but I still need to do the half block at one end, and also finish going all the way around the outer border. Here are two of the blocks:

And here is how it looks from the back.

My wrist was getting tired, and Mike came home, and so I stopped for the day. I'm hoping to have time to finish the quilting and machine sew the binding tomorrow.

Finally, I'm enjoying the new linky party that started up at Val's Quilting Studio where we share old posts from the archives according to weekly themes. This week's themes are "Award Winners" and "Animals". 

Well, I have something for each category. I only have a couple of award winners, but I'm going with my first and only ribbon won in the Oregon State Fair last year with my "You Are My Sunshine" quilt. Remember this one?

You can see my original post right here.

As for animals...well, you might guess I have lots and lots and lots of cat quilts. For this party, I'm going with "Let Sleeping Cats Lie".

This is the image I posted as part of the Blogger's Quilt Festival back in October of 2011. You can see the original post right here. I'll warn you though: you'll see a picture of George there, so get out the tissue if you need to. Sniff.

And that's it from me today. Mike is waiting for me. Tuesday night...Justified is on. Gotta go watch it.