OK, Christmas is past and in a few hours 2020 will be upon us and winter is just getting started up here in the Northwest. You may not want to be thinking of Christmas 2020 yet but what better time to begin some projects for next year’s yuletide? If you start now you will have a whole year to finish your projects. To that end, I am offering my Hand Embroidered Folk Art Ornament class at Sharon’s Attic in Aloha on Saturday January 11 from 10 am – 4 pm. This has been a popular class over the years and I keep adding critters to the menagerie. The best part of these hand embroidered whimsies is their portability; everything you need to make one will fit nicely in a Zip Lock bag and with a few stitches here and a few stitches there, you can finish one between other day to day tasks – on your lunch break, waiting for an appointment, watching a football game, bingeing Netflix…
I have made quite a collection of these I could show you and you would say “Ah – but you are an experienced embroiderer…” so rather than show you my work, I would like to show you what has been done by my students. Keep in mind that many of these were made by stitchers who had little or no hand embroidery experience.
Feeling inspired? Come join me at Sharon’s Attic in a couple of weeks and see what you can do.
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Gallery Woes
A warm hello to all my fans and followers, I hope everyone had a marvelous holiday and is ready to greet the New Year with enthusiasm. I have been incredibly busy every since late summer with a few important engagements – being a featured quilter at Northwest Quilting Expo where I displayed the largest showing of my work ranging from first quilts to my latest work; organizing the quilts to hang was a monumental task and I was also an instructor at this event. This was followed by a week of classes in Blackfoot Idaho, and then back to my regular schedule of local classes and working on a commission.
I’ve also been working on a stack of UFOs, my New Year’s resolution for 2019 was to finish ten UFOs and I decided to qualify as a UFO, the project had to have been shelved more than a year ago, just finishing current WIPs (Works In Progress) would not count. As it turns out, I should have included them, to date I’ve finished five, only half my goal but I have finished many other more recently started projects. As for my second 2019 resolution – cleaning and reorganizing my sewing studio… HA! Ha, Ha, Ha… need I say more? Maybe I’ll get to that this coming year.
On to the main subject of my post. I am having troubles with my website gallery. It was working fine about a month and a half ago, but after the most recent updates to WordPress, the gallery plugin and a few other operational plugins on my site, now all I can get on the lightbox slide show are tiny images. I was notified by a visitor to my site about a week and a half ago that the slideshow on the gallery albums was not working correctly. I tried a ‘fix’ posted by the plugin developer but it did not correct the problem so I am working with their tech support right now to find a cause and solution; they think it may be a conflict with another plugin but it may take some time to find and fix the problem. I ask you all to be patient while we sort this out, I hope to have it resolved soon and be back to work posting additional gallery pictures.
And speaking of pictures, I am a true believer in photos. Images are the ‘eye candy’ that draw attention, text without images can be very bland so for your entertainment, I am posting the photos of the five UFOs I did manage to get done this year.
This project was from my Journal Quilt classes, and started about 7 years ago, I returned to the project and finished quilting it this year. 
This project was started in 2011 as part of a pattern for Asian Fabric Magazine called Moon Cranes. It didn’t make the final cut, and I remade the version that got published only returning to finish this one with Sashiko this year. 
I started this project for an exhibit at the Japanese Garden about 10 years ago. I abandoned it after my I ran into problems with the initial technique for creating the ‘windows’ for the bamboo chimes 
This little fellow is Cattus Romanus from my Garden Patch Cat series; he represents a head of Romaine Lettuce. He got lost in a stack of other Orphan Cat Quilts in various stages of progress about 5 years ago 
A sample of my Serene Marsh pattern from my Bella Vista Landscape Vignettes. This one features hand embroidered details and got shelved about 3 years ago.
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From Acorn to Oak
I am honored to be the ‘Featured Quilter’ at the Northwest Quilting Expo in Portland Oregon this September! The show organizers have asked me to display a retrospective of all my work from the earliest quilt to the latest. Those attending the show will get to see some of my early work from when I did not grasp that perhaps a mink coat was not a good material to include on a quilt. My plan is to hang about 50 panels of work in every imaginable style and technique.
Most of my early quilts are embarrassingly bad and few people ever see them but they are my roots from which all I now do grew. I really hope everyone – especially novice quilters who may feel insecure about their skills – will take heart from seeing my humblest most awkward attempts at making a quilt; sometimes when I look at these old quilts, I am amazed I did not give up in discouragement.
Over the many (47 at this point) years I have been quilting, I have explored many techniques and styles – traditional to contemporary but with an emphasis on pictorial quilts. This exhibit will be a sampling of all of these explorations from the smallest miniatures to my largest quilts. The show has graciously offered me table space to sell patterns and I plan to supplement this with occasional demos as time allows.
I will also be offering a couple of classes at Expo, one on Kantha embroidery and the other on small scroll-like wall hangings inspired by the stone pathways in a Japanese Garden that I call Zen Pathways; pictures of these class projects are below. You can get more information from the Northwest Quilting Expo website.
A kitty in Kantha stitching 
Folk Art cat stitched in the Kantha style 
Ardie’s Kantha Kitty 
Leaf design in Kantha Stitching 
Joy’s Kantha Kitty 
Stacie’s Kantha Kitty 
Mary’s Kantha Kitty 
Kantha Bird 
‘Under the Ginko tree’ – a Zen Pathway quilt 
Zen Pathway #2
