Material Girls Adventure: a journal quilt

     In late June, my friend Ann and I headed west to the Material Girls Quilt Guild show in Leominster, Central Massachusetts.  We took off the day for culinary pleasures and art. Certainly, Jessica's works at that show were a major draw. We started at a top diner, did the show in depth, and stopped for a seafood lunch and baskets of farm strawberries on the way home.  I couldn't ignore this outing when there is a strawberry challenge quilt to be made for the Journal Quilt Connection 12" x 12" group! (see last week's strawberry blog)

click to enlarge

     But sometimes things don't work out! I wanted a basket weave pattern (such as I found at the fabulous  Quilter's Cache/Marcia Hohn), alternating the yellows with the reds); but I didn't have enough basket yellow.  I thought I would have a learning experience this afternoon and gamble on two prints of no contrast. I learned my lesson :*{ I did a basket weave and I used some strawberries albeit accompanied by kiwis. I alternated the strawberries with cars and put a simplified strawberry pattern on the back and drew it around the sides for a binding. Let me tell you, the back looks better than the front. Why the cars? We drove and drove and drove! all over the place, having a good time looking for quilt stores, inspired by the fabulous show where we saw great talent and picked up inspirational books and fabrics. Such sweet memories make me fond of this troubled little journal quilt!

Diving Into the Ocean of Craft

Crafts are like the ocean...an unfathomable source of creative expression and pleasure. MANY people do not understand one's not sticking to just one area of crafting. On rare occasions one meets another with a similar drive. A month or so ago Susan walked through a room where Katie had many quilters starting to put together another quilt for Project Hope, this time an ocean theme. Susan, a sewer and crocheter, among other talents, had not quilted, but the next time we met, she had figured out how to do her first nine-patch block. Today at a mixed craft group she showed us the boat block and her plans for a fish block. Click the photo above to see. Next week she'll do needlepoint.

I continue to listen to and learn from podcasts downloaded from craftypod.com. Easy to download, they enrich crafting time and dog walking with business, skill and creative ideas, some as wild as a Church of Craft. The Internet is exploding with easy instruction. Susan probably didn't take a class but perhaps found a book at the library, or Internet sites such as Marcia Hohn's Quilter's Cache or quilting.about.com and added her own touches. Hats off to people who dive in, daring explorers of the ocean of craft.