OH MY GOSH……….. I am in near disbelief, but I have the message on my machine and I talked to Houston just now…

I HAVE WON A CASH AWARD for Fields of Gold, and you better believe I’m SHOUTING!!!!!!   And yes, I am also in orbit and gaining speed.  (PS–I forgot to mention earlier that this is absolutely my first, major, national-mega-show award!) Here’s the quilt:

Thanks of course go to Lisa Walton of Dyed and Gone to Heaven in Sydney, Australia;  she sent me the metre of her glorious fabric as a gift (AND tells me that if you join her monthly fabric club, this is the sort of delectable goodie that comes in the mail!  and yes…she ships internationally and easily to those of us in the US, Europe, wherever!).  It was on my design wall along with the center window of the quilt while I was trying to decide what to do with the latter.  Then I realized that one portion of the rust-yellow-green fabric PERFECTLY matched the sky and ground……

While deciding how to quilt it, I gave my husband “Fields of Gold” by Sting for Valentine’s on his iPod, and was listening to it…..  that led to the stalks of wheat waving in the foreground.  WOOOOHOOO!  Guess I’ll spring for a more expensive haircut than the usual $14 with no wash at the barbershop!

I won’t know until Festival what I won, but since it is cash (and not one of the top prizes), it will be 3rd, 2nd or 1st in its category.  I *think* I entered it in small art quilts (it is 18 1/4″ wide by 20 3/4″ long)…which makes this all the more astonishing as that is usually a very competitive group and size.  Who ME??????!!!!!!!!!!!!  Shaking head, thoroughly enjoying the rattling!

OK….enough talk…I’m going back to floating around the house!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  Please join me in a raucous, really LOUD WOOOOOOHOOOOOO!

Download is available here: Windows and Sketches PDF.

The September issue of Machine Quilting Unlimited is now hitting mailboxes, so I thought I’d share the cover:

My article this month is about texture:  both literal and visual texture in machine quilting.  Quilts can be old-timey puckery like the 1930s quilts we know and love, but they can also be (literally) flat, like the fabric postcards made on Timtex or Peltex (a rigid stabilizer sometimes used in cap brims).  But there is also visual texture…what the eye thinks it sees depending on the type of line created by the quilting.

One fun exercise is to give yourself 30 minutes (at most!) to fill the 12 small boxes on a page.  Fill each square with a different “something” from around your house and garden; for a change of pace, take your sheet (or another one!) into town, walk in a park or look at the downtown buildings, and look for images that might make good quilting designs.  Check out the article for more information!  It is in the September Machine Quilting Unlimited magazine (ask your local quilt shop to carry it!) or order an issue / subscribe at www.mqumag.com.

Here’s the Windows and Sketches workpage I shared in the magazine:

You can download a blank template of this form using the link at the top of this post or here: Windows and Sketches PDF.  This is what the blank looks like:

No, I haven’t died this time either….just distracted by summer!   I had thought that if I didn’t schedule anything for most of August, I’d be OK.  Wrong…..  here’s the list:

• clean up messes from making Be Inspired
• send entry to Houston
• send quilts to AQS for photography
• do all final edits on book, send to AQS
• paint plywood piece that serves as a coffee table top on the back porch
• calculate yardage to make cushion covers for back porch settee and 2 rockers, but decide not enough disposable income yet to pay for the fabric….
• exchange sometimes five e-mails a day with editor (by the way, things are going very well!)
• prepare entries for local gallery show (and got accepted!)
• exercise regularly and continue to diet
• go on a ten mile bike ride–the longest since before I was pregnant with Eli who is now 11–and it wasn’t bad!!!! Reward:  ice cream! (SMALL cone)
• pay bills
• order supplies / items to sell when teaching in Houston
• help Joshua make a totebag/purse for his girlfriend…it was HIS idea!  (pictures and blogpost to come I hope)
• take Eli to buy binders etc. on school supply list
• take Joshua, Eli and J’s girlfriend to an amusement park (UGH) that is 2 1/2+ hours drive south of us; the good news:  it was SO HOT that after 3 hours, looking at looming thunderclouds, the kids asked “mom, can we leave and go to the Mall and do school clothes shopping instead.”  So we did… air conditioning, and three long road-trips (the only really big, really good mall in Maine–which would qualify as an average everday mall in the DC suburbs where I used to live–is near Portland and a 2+ hour drive from our house) turned into just one!
• prepare for dyeing fabric day with Frayed Edges (pictures and blogpost to come)
• have dyeing day with Frayed Edges and celebrate Kath’s birthday, dye shirts with Joshua and his girlfriend
• next day:  more fabric dyeing, including tie-dye with the teens and Eli
• massive house cleaning, including dragooning the entire family into the process.  House is somewhat less cat- and dog-hairy.  Sigh.
• start prepping kits for teaching classes in Houston
• start thinking about a few new samples for teaching in Houston
• prepare invoices for wholesale pattern sales to local store and for Middle school / Be Inspired quilt
• meeting with Middle School principal, who fortunately LOVES the Be Inspired, Panel 1, and is now all excited about fundraising again for the project, and (from previous efforts) can pay me some of the price on the first panel….hooray!  What a concept…getting paid!
• do all the paperwork (well, it was online but it is still paperwork) to be able to accept credit cards in Houston when I teach, order knucklebasher machine and credit card slips and metal imprint plate
• eat lunch with mom every week; she is still in assisted living, but her confusion grows weekly.  She is having an increasingly difficult time recalling names of things (including my kids…but she still asks about them every time…. sometimes every five minutes….), so sometimes it is a challenge to sit for an entire lunch that repeats the same few minutes of   conversation / answers to questions every few minutes, again and again.  I just remind myself the questions are new to her, even though she just asked them.  She can’t help it if she doesn’t remember…..I PRAY I take after my dad instead….
• take some time for myself, read Melanie Testa’s Inspired to Quilt (hope that will be a blogpost/review too)… it is excellent!
• try to keep up on e-mail; accept that I will never read all the blogs I would like to, or keep up with the news as well as I would like
• Revise “resources” section of the book
• List subjects for an index to the book

And that’s just the past two weeks or so….so that’s my excuse for no new blogposts!!!! Anyone wanna take a nap with me?

To do SOON:

• write next article for Machine Quilting Unlimited (www.mqumag.com) on Color / thread color
• prep more kits
• finish kids’ school clothes shopping, mostly locally
• prepare entry for Mancuso / PIQF show
• prepare entry for the Eye of the Quilter, a photography exhibit at Quilt Festival in Houston
• contact MORE magazines to see if they will accept an article proposal that will help promote the book
• think about book promotion… it should be out in late October/early November
• today:  lunch with Ma, grocery shopping, take Eli to Game Stop and WalMart, buy assorted stuff for house (like light bulbs and toilet paper!!!!!)
• clean house, again
• maybe another long bike ride when the heat wave breaks later this week…..
• get Nourish pattern prepped for printing, contact printer (hi Barbara!), and all that stuff so it is ready to take to Houston
• start some “slide show” stuff to use for class demonstrations for Houston classes
• prep more samples for Bindings class
• make pattern out of Little Brown Bird…send to Kay T. for testing, use for kits for Chunk and Jigsaw class in Houston….
• another nap sounds good; sipping a cup of tea and reading a novel sounds even better…sitting   on the settee on the back porch

OK…for the final installment of my Maine Quilts 2009 review, here are some quilts that I just thoroughly enjoyed.  I wish I had had enough time to snap a close-up of the labels to give proper credit to all the quilters!  Enjoy this last romp.  Next, I’ll give you some close-ups of the quilted version of Be Inspired…stay tuned!

Coastal Quilters (my local chapter) didn’t have as many quilts this year, but what we did have was wonderful…Mathea’s quilt of her husband and son was in an earlier post, and here is Louisa Enright’s glorious NY Beauty…she picked and chose from various patterns, drafted her own blocks, and designed the whole shebang…glorious!

The Coastal Quilters also had another fun, 10×10 inch Grab Bag challenge…you had to use EVERYthing (at least a little bit) of everything in your bag.  I suggested we also add a strip to show what we got so folks could understand where each of us began and where we ended up:

Another chapter, the Crazy Quilters, had a tea cozy challenge…think I can convince CQ to do that one year?

then, there are quilts I just plain liked.  One of the judges liked this one, too….and (oddly?) it had no regular ribbon, but DID receive (a well-deserved, I think) Judges’ Choice ribbon:

A Hawaiian style quilt that I loved:

And some fun other ones:

There didn’t seem to be as many art quilts this year in Maine Quilts, but I enjoyed the ones that were there!   From my friend Betty’s cat quilt (in the Cat’s Meow section—each year the show has a theme…last year was schooners, the year before lobsters, etc., this year the Maine Coon Cat):

To some of the quilts in the Art Quilts Maine section, there were some really wonderful ones.  AQM had a challenge:  black + white + one color… it was fun to see the results:

And down the aisle from my Be Inspired Quilt was Judy Anderson’s seals:

And Mathea Daunheimer’s quilt of her son and husband at the beach:

And some more quilts…alas I don’t know who made the lilies, but the tree is by Mary McFarland:

I’ll have one more post about the show in a few more days….