It's Green and Purple Again

Look what's blooming in our front yard - our Wisteria.  And of course it's that beautiful purple and green.  Guess what I thought of?

My sweet little Purple Pickles.

In my ongoing quest to be a better photographer (really big LOL here!!), I took these pictures yesterday afternoon.  They look sort of "artsy" to me.  Can I just say again that green and purple make me smile?

The beauty of nature continues to inspire me.  

Happy stitching today,

Karen

My Four Patch Quiltalong

A few weeks ago I decided to join in the fun of doing the Four Patch Quiltalong after seeing it in my APQ magazine.  They featured 4 great four patch quilts and I decided to make Lissa Alexander's version, but I changed it up a little.  I've been calling this "Muted Tuxedo".

The four patches are made from 1 1/2/" strips and they finish at 2".  Tiny but so effective.

I had been collecting yellow and gray fabric and thought this would be a good pattern to use with them.  The original pattern had all the four patches going vertically.  Since I always like to change things up a little, I rotated every other row and set them going horizontally.  It got really confusing as there were lots of different blocks.  In fact, there is a boo-boo in one of the rows (picture below), but it stayed in.  Can you find it?

As it started to grow, it began to look like little bow ties on a ruffled tuxedo shirt.  But since some of them fade in and out depending on the value of the gray squares, they looked muted to me and so it became "Muted Tuxedo".

Since I was only using 2 colors, I had to be very particular where the values were, especially with the yellow fabrics.  If too many yellows touched each other, I got this big yellow looking piece.  Horrors!! We can't have that!  So I built this quilt one four patch at a time.  I'm sure it took a lot longer, but in the end I was much happier.

Making some of the four patches using 4 shades of gray helped with the blending.  It was finally ready to sew into rows.

I did decide to add the scrappy setting triangles but will not be adding the outside border.  It's a nice sized lap quilt.

And lest you think I forgot..............

her's the kitty.  I didn't have any yellow kitty fabric, so this was the closest.  He looks kind of scared just peeking out at me.  If you hadn't noticed him, he's in the bottom left hand corner.

And I couldn't end without a pictures from our recent trip to NC to celebrate my DH's birthday.

How I love these little people and the big guy too :).

Happy stitching,

Karen

Teaching at the Flying Needles Retreat

It's almost hard to see me - I'm surrounded by Pickles - Pink and Purple!!  What fun I had as I spent two days at the Flying Needles Quilt Retreat in Niceville, FL and had the privilege of  teaching a wonderful group of women.  A special thanks goes to my host Kathy, who was also the Chairman of the quilt show and retreat.  Needless to say, she was so busy I didn't even get her picture.  But I want to share a few pictures of the classes.  

The first class I taught was this log cabin variation.  The committe had seen a picture of the quilt and asked if I could teach it.  I designed it using EQ7 -it's based on an Accuquilt pattern.

We were at the Northwest Florida State College.  I had a small classroom and a full class but we made it work and had a blast.  We had several mother and daughter sets which was very fun.

Below is a picture of the West Virginia group.  They were so productive and helpful - thanks for the tips!

I loved seeing everyone's color choices.  They made fun of me when they kept hearing me say "Oh, that's my favorite color" each time I saw their fabic choices.  But their projects were all so pretty and so different.  

Isn't it fun to see everyone's strips laid out?  They had quite an assembly line going.

My class helper Shirlee was so busy and I somehow missed getting a picture of her - sorry Shirlee.

On Saturday, I taught a class on Pink Pickles.  I made the class sample Purple Pickles last fall using some different techniques so they could get idea possibilites.

This class worked very hard as they chose which colors would go where and then learned the paper piecing technique. 

We spent a lot of time discussing different setting options.

How I loved spending the day seeing Pink Pickles hanging in the room.

Here are 9 of the 10 blocks done - I was so prould of all their hard work.

My friend Janan sent this picture of me teaching - I sure hope I was saying something important LOL!!

A big thank you to all my students - you were great sports and I hope you learned a lot.

Happy Stitching,

Karen

My Wonderful Un-Birthday

I have had the most fun the last two days.  I will post about that tomorrow, but for now I'm sharing my birthday fun from last night.  As a Leap Year Baby, I get to celebrate 3 un-birthdays in between my "real" birthdays.

After a wonderful dinner with my DH at our favorite Thai restaurant, we went to my sister's house where my hubby gave me Victoria's new book!!  I've been wanting to get my hands on this for a while.  I'm so excited to read it and I've already picked out my next project :).

And then we had some birthday cake and cannolis - a perfect ending to my un-birthday.

Life is good,

Karen