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One thing about growing up in a small town where your next door neighbors were your grandparents, you had 5 sets of great aunts and uncles within a few blocks and countless numbers of your mother’s cousins spread throughout the town; you really couldn’t get away with much. By the time I made it home […]

I figured out the shapes and numbers for the pieces for the quilt for Elsie. Cutting out the pieces is always tedious and difficult, but tedious and difficult in a good way. I’ve always enjoyed geometry, it’s part of what I love about traditional block quilts. I get to get out my rulers, protractors and […]

Fail, fail again… If you are going to fail it is best to fail quickly and learn something from it! This week I’ve been working on adding the trim to the quilt for my great-grandmother Cassie Hodgman (a.k.a. Nan). It was meant to be done with the pages of an old Sears & Roebucks catalog, […]

So I figured out how to handle the trim around the edges of the quilt for my great grandmother Cassie. I was inspired by the christening gown she made (above) to bring ribbon work into the quilt in some way. I also needed to decide on a book for the quilt. My strongest connection to […]

And there is more than one way to do trapunto quilting.   In the hand-quilting method you hand-sew a piece of cloth (generally muslin) onto the back of the quilt face, following the pattern of the trapunto quilting you wish to achieve, leaving a small opening. You then stuff cotton or wool quilt batting (the kind […]

It’s been a productive if somewhat uneventful week. I finished the square for the dowry quilt from Grace’s quilt. The idea behind the dowry quilt is to take one extra square from each of the quilts and join them together to make a single “Sampler Quilt” that will form my Dowry Quilt.  Sampler quilts were […]

A couple of people have asked if sewing the waxed dipped paper and the encaustic prints causes the sewing machine to gum up. I’ve answered back that, no it doesn’t really but I have to stop from time to time to clean off the footer. After a while sewing I start to feel the footer […]

I thought about calling this one, “A Woman’s Work is Never Done”, but that seemed too cliché. Over the Christmas vacation I cleaned out my studio of a bunch of  stored up yarn and knitting needles. My mother called before we headed up to ask about a sweater pattern book that she knew I had and […]

One of the things that intrigues me about working in wax is it’s ability to preserve things. Flowers are pressed between pages of waxed paper, bronze sculpture is sealed with wax to prevent tarnishing and fruit is covered in a wax coating to keep it appearing fresh a little bit longer. In his treatise, “On […]

Ok, to clarify things, I keep referring to these ‘things’ I’m making as ‘quilts’. I know they are not really quilts and to any quiltmakers out there among you this is probably annoying. A ‘real’ quilt has a front, (typically of cloth, yes) some sort of batting (typically cotton or wool) and a backing. That […]