In 2010 Rich and I drove over 750 miles to visit my brother Danny and his wife Noemi, and daughter Kareli.  We wanted to spend Thanksgiving with them and I thought it would be fun to drive out there.  It was a nice long drive and we saw some amazing sunsets in the desert. 

This one I took a picture of the side mirror with the reflection of the amazing sunset.  I probably took 25 picturs of the sunset, and yes they all look pretty much this same.  This one really is my favorite.

My brother and his wife and daughter have four dogs.  Yes, you heard me correctly, four dogs.  If it was up to Kareli they would have more.  This girl loves dogs.

This is the whole gang including the four dogs, plus yours truly on the left.  Tigger is the one sitting on Kareli’s lap and I really just fell in love with this dog.  I would have brought him home but no one would let me.  But I did manage to get some close up pictures of him.

From one of those pictures I decided to make a fabric quilt postcard.  There was over 1500 donated pet-themed fabric postcards sold.

Here is the postcard which I donated to the Houston International Quilt Festival that was held this past year.   All proceeds benefited the  Friends For Life, a no-kill animal shelter in Houston.

I’m thinking about making another one of him, but maybe a little bit larger scale.  He was looking at me thinking I was going to give him a doggie bisket.  Yes, I did give him one.  What a sweetie.

Mu husband Rich plays the trumpet, flugelhorn, and guitar.  Yes, he is a very talented man.  He also loves to cook, which is great for me because I really do not cook, except out of a box.  Sad, I know.

But I do love to sew and create in several different mediums.  One of those mediums is fibers.  Thus, the art quilt.  An art quilt is by definition three layers stitched together with thread.  So you have your top which is usually a design of some sort, batting and a backing.  You have seen several of these art quilts of mine.  The latest is from a Jazz challenge from the quilting quild I am a member of.  The challenge goes out to create a wall quilt, aka art quilt, with the theme of Jazz.  It has to be your original creation (no copying from anything else), and has to be 14″ X 14″ sqaure.  It was a fun challenge.  Now on to the next one.  Stay tuned.

I love teaching.  I get so excited to share my crafts, skills, talents; whatever you want to call it.  I have taught several classes to women and children about fabric postcards.  I’ve taught several other classes as well, but recently I had to privilege to teach a seven year young lady how to make a quilt for her American Girl doll.  The thing about this adorable little girl was she was so excited to learn how to sew, and how to make quilts.  She even said later to her Mom that she would like to someday make quilts for sick people to make them feel better.  Can you see my heart melting?

So I pack up all my sewing stuff and head over to Emma’s house.  She wanted a pink and white quilt for her doll.  I had an assortment of pinks and whites, all cut into 2-1/2″ lengths.  I took my tools and my feather weight singer sewing machine.  She was so excited to get to work.  I had her pick which fabrics she wanted.  Here she is with some of the blocks put together and she is arranging them on the design board.

One of the things she really enjoyed was just sewing the fabrics together on the sewing machine.  And for being her first time and being only seven years old she learned fast and did an amazing job.  She was so focused on that 1/4″ seam that, of course, I was very insistent about.

I am so proud of her and her first quilt.  Way to go Emma.  Now she wants to make a blue one for her other doll.  I can hardly wait to continue the lessons.

I had the priviledge to know and be personal friends with Jean Chapman.  She was an artist, a really good artist.  She liked to paint, and draw, and collect, and share her talents.  She was also my greatest fan.  I loved showing her what I had made, or was working on.  She always liked it and lavished me with praise.  Who wouldn’t love that kind of encouragement.

Jean passed away last year.  She was 95 years old.  I really miss her so much.  I am also close friends with her son, Ed, and his wife Edie.  So Edie ask me a couple months ago if I would make a quilt out of Jean’s clothes.  She wanted a lap quilt for each of Jean’s daughters and wanted to give it to them for Christmas.  I, of course, said yes.  There’s not much I wouldn’t do for Ed and Edie.  When I received the bag of clothing I went through them and cried.  She had worn these clothes and they were so Jean.  The fabric were silks, polyesters, rayons, linens, none of which we use for quilts.  But I was determined to make it work.  So I bought fusible interfacing and got to work.  I cut all the clothing apart and took off all the buttons.  I cut everything I could into 6-1/2″ squares, fused the interfacing and starting arranging them on my design wall.  I did have one large 12-1/2″ square in each of the quilts.  And here is the finished quilt.  It is a labor of love and memories of a wonderful lady.

That’s a lot of stars

I haven’t blogged for awhile, but I’m back.  So what, you are asking, have I been up to? Well, for one I finished the quilt for Aaron and Vanessa.  I named it, “Stars to Light Your Way.”  I finished it by the hair my chinny chin chin in time to submit it to the San Diego Quilt Show the first of September.  I was so excited to have finished it.  I gave it to them and they were enjoying it, not knowing that I entered into a judged show, “Road to California”.  Well, I got into the show, which is not an easy thing to do.  Yes, they had to return it to me because now I have to send it to the show.  The show is in Ontario, California, the last week of January.  One of these days they will finally get it to keep.  But they are excited for me and they are being really nice about it.

I think I will buy a goose and roast it.  I made so many flying geese I seriously feel like cooking one.  To top it off my grandson, Nehemiah and I went to the San Diego Safari Park on Thursday and two geese chased us, kinda.  They were following us and honking at us.  They have the whole park and they have to follow us.  We turned around and started following us.  They didn’t like that much.  Oh well.

Ok, on to the quilt, with all th flying geese.

Did I mention I finished it.  Well, at least the top.  I still have to quilt it.  You do know what that is right?  If not let me know and I will tell you detail.  Hopefully, one of edays I will have it quilted and I’ll show you a picture of it.  Maybe I will do another post of the step by step process of quilting it.

So here is one step before the finished quilt

Can you spot all the flying geese?  There are big ones and little ones.

Well, here is the finished top.  Hope you like it.

I actually really like mystery quilts.  So most of my readers will ask. . . what is a mystery quilt Bodine?  (My maiden name is Bodine btw)   Ok, I’ll tell you.  I signed up for this Mystery Quilt class with my friend Pam Kay.  Yes, her last name is Kay.  That’s a whole different story for another day.  Anyway, I pay money to go to this class.  Pam sends us an email telling us what fabrics we should buy, how much and suggested color ways.  Next, she sends us an email with cutting instructions for the fabric.  I have no idea what this quilt is going to look like. . .no clue whatsoever.  So we show up for class with our sewing machines, and everything else we need to spend the day sewing.  She feeds us all day; breakfast, lunch and dinner with breaks in between with cookies and chocolate and lemonaide. . .oh my!

So, Saturday morning I started the day with this.

We are given page one of instructions on how to start sewing our squares and rectangles together.  So an hour later I have this.  Still no clue what this mystery quilt will look like.  But, it’s till fun.  I have some hour glass blocks and flying geese.

We keep sewing until almost lunch time and all I have are a bunch of hour glass block, flying geese and these rectangles.

Yes, it really does take that long to do all this.

There is actually a lot more of these than I am showing you.  There are 16 of the hourglass blocks, 20 of the sage and cream flying geese, 28 of these rectangles, 44 of the cream and plum flying geese.

Oh my aching back!

OKAY, back to sewing some more flying geese.  Yes, I did get tired of flying geese.  But I did sign up for this, and I did say I liked Mysteries right?  So some bigger flying geese in the picture above, 14 of them.  So what did I do with all these? 

Well, the first step was to sew the hourglass blocks together like this.

And then I sewed a 2 1/2″ border around it.

Doesn’t look like much so far, right?

Well, wait!  There’s more. 

Here’s the next part.  It’s with the flying geese.  Do you see them?

How about I put a border around it?  Ok, another 2 1/2″ border. 

Well, like I said, it’s a mystery.  So you’ll have to check back in later to see what’s next.  I promise I will finish it hopefully this week.

This was a lovely boardwalk to the beach

I just returned from a week of heavenly creating and quilting. I attended the Empty Spools Seminar in Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California. It is located right on the beach and I enjoyed walking the beach almost every day.

I really enjoyed going down to the beach and sitting on the rocks being mesmerized by the crashing waves.  I don’t know if there is any better therapy than just being still and watching and listening to the waves.

I took a class taught by Caryl Bryer Fallert www.bryerpatch.com and had just a wonderful time learning from this brilliant quilt artist. She took us through two days of learning her techniques and then set us free to design our own art quilt. We had to make 60 small thumbnail drawings on tracing paper. Then she had us pick our three favorite and then proceed to rework those drawings until we found a design we liked.

So this is 18″ of flying geese.  It took me over two hours of sewing this.  The bottom four geese are only 1/2″ going down to 1/4″.  When I got it all finished I decided I didn’t like the color so I ripped out the last six geese and redid it.  And yes, it really is curved.

So this is my design. I haven’t quilted it yet, but will show you the piece when I have finished quilting it. I plan on doing some practice pieces first before I start on the real thing.  The piece is 18″ square.