How time flies when you are on the road and busy!   This week I had the great fortune to travel to the Burlington, Vermont, area thanks to the Champlain Valley Quilt Guild to give a lecture on Journal Quilts and Journals for Quilters, then my Fine Finishes class (all about bindings, alternative edge finishes, and display options for smaller quilts).   Alas, I was SO BUSY during the lecture and the class, that I TOTALLY forgot to take class pictures!  So if anyone from the guild has a few to lend me, please let me know!

To get from Camden, Maine, to anywhere, requires a lot of 2-lane highways through beautiful, EMPTY space.   Basically, in New England, all (large-ish) roads lead to Boston.  That means anything that runs east-west is small, twisty-turny, and takes a long time.  Even though it was only 300-325 miles one-way, it took over seven hours (including pit stops).  Luckily, there were some gorgeous places en route. As I drove through the lakes district in sorta-south, western Maine, with the snow melting and the air warming,  I passed this beautiful view

While at a rest stop in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, I was pulling back on to the road, looked to my right and immediately stepped on the brakes, grabbed the camera and lowered the window…. see the picture at the top, too!

Then, around a bend, I came across the White Mountain Lodge, which looks as if it must have been built in the late 1800s…. isn’t this gorgeous?  And let me tell you, there isn’t much near it!

After my lecture on Tuesday evening, was show and tell.  At least I had the wit to snap a picture of Andre’s gorgeous bird quilt, made from a pattern by a designer from Texas.  LOVE IT!

My hostess in Vermont lives just across the road from Lake Champlain, and from their front rooms, you can see between the big homes across the street to the lake and the mountains in New York.  After class on Wednesday, while the lasagna heated up in the oven, Janet, Claire (the two co-program chairs) and Claire’s son Noah (look for his unbelievable miniature quilt at the upcoming Vermont Quilt Festival! It is amazing!) and I went for a lovely walk on a causeway out into the lake.  The day before I had thought, as I made my requisite donation to the local quilt shop (Yankee Pride, with a lovely and WAY too enticing selection of batiks), it occurred to me that one way to deal with beloved batiks that go out of print would be to make thermofax screens and print my own designs inspired by the batiks.  So I took some pictures of the ready-to-leaf-out treetops with that in mind:

Plus, look at this COOL pattern in the granite….good quilt and screen and stamping inspiration:

On the way home, I dipped south a ways to Springfield, VT, where my on-line friend Jacquie Scuitto lives.  Known on the quiltart list as the Quilt Muse for her poems on quilt and art and life, her home is about 2 hours south of Springfield but, thanks to those twisty-two-lane-roads, only added an hour to my trip home.  I got a tour of her home and quilts, met a few of her quilty friends, and was treated to a homemade corn chowder before starting my trip home.  Here’s a picture of Jacquie with her Second Day of Christmas (Two TURTLE doves) quilt,

and another (with her hiding) behind this fun variation on the traditional Drunkard’s Path quilt… I love the setting:

Jacquie came to visit me a while back when she, hubby Lou and brother Don had come to Maine for a family get-together (blogged about it here), and I’ll get to see her again this summer when her daughter and two granddaughters visit from Germany and travel through Camden…yeah!

To wrap up my Simsbury, Connecticut posts, I’d like to share some photographs I took within two blocks of my B&B.  I find inspiration everywhere, and take COPIOUS photos… I have over 14,000 on my computer (in the process of being moved to an external hard drive to free up space, plus the usual back-up CDs) from just the past four years or so!   The first are from the B&B where I stayed:

The remaining photos are from the old cemetary and around the area.  The first building is the chamber of commerce and library, and had great details in the windows.  The second, multicolored building is I don’t know what, but cool.

And that’s it folks!  Here’s the glorious sky as I walked back for my last night…

looks like something out of an oil painting!

When I taught recently in Connecticut, my contact told me there was a great quilt shop…since I’m watching my pennies, I had thought I wouldn’t stop in so as to avoid temptation.  Hah!  And I’m so glad I did stop in…what a treasure of a shop!  Here’s a photo of what you see as you walk in the door of Sew Inspired!!!!

To backtrack a bit, the shop is located inside a small complex known as Fiddler’s Green, on the main drag in downtown Simsbury (well, I think it is the main drag!).  Here’s the entrance to the complex:

And the entrance to the store:

Once you get inside, it just gets better and better. The staff is friendly and helpful, and I had a great time talking to Viv  and Sandy.  Here is a close up of the glorious array of batiks:

And over on the left are Amy Butler, Kaffe Fassetts, notions, patterns, friendly staff, great lighting… in the back is a class room to die for:  great and adjustable chairs, the best lighting I’ve ever seen overhead, a big window for real daylight and a view of what is going on outside….

There is a good selection of notions and, better yet, art quilting supplies!

Then it continues, downstairs.  The shop opened 3 1/2 years ago in the lower level.  They’ve grown so much they expanded upstairs, and the lower area is now studio-for-rent space with 8×8 foot designs walls, a longarm (for rent also), a separate room for co-owner who does quilting-for-hire on her Gammill, and an office area.  They also have a die-cutting machine, again available for rent…..Can you say DREAM STORE?

The design wall area:

The for-rent longarm:

The store is also an authorized HandiQuilter dealer, and recently added a sit-down HQSixteen to the upstairs classroom….drool!

Clearly, I could not escape unscathed….here is my haul –and this was from two visits… I resisted the Goergia O’Keefe morning glory prints, an Alexander Henry that I lusted after when it was first printed 6 years ago… now that it is back out I had to indulge! Plus the three on the right are from Alewives Fabrics, in Damariscotta Mills, Maine (I’m teaching there in July, stopped to drop off patterns for sale, and had to add to the loot.)

Finally, I took my aching, throbbing feet (this was after the night lecture and the full day teaching) next door to the Japanese restaurant which had impeccable service and my favorite, Chicken Katsu, for dinner:

What more could you want…good fabric, good staff  (in both the store and the restaurant) and good food?  The store is just northwest of Hartford; if you’re anywhere in the vicinity, it is WELL worth a stop!

Today’s post is about a new pattern I’ve designed to help folks who want to start art quilting or for folks who are experienced art quilters but want an appealing yet fairly easy pattern.  The class to teach Birch Pond Seasons (when I get winter and spring made, I’ll have four views of the same pond across the four seasons) for the first time went swimmingly well as you’ll see by the photos!  The pattern itself will be available in about two months (guessing…have to send it away for printing the large sheet this time).

As you might guess by that rather extended absence from the blog, I’ve been busy! Between the first draft of my next article for Machine Quilting Unlimited magazine, getting together the stuff for taxes (not only ours but mom’s, too…bleah), attepting to get some sleep, going to wrestling meets, the usual family and household stuff, making a new small quilt for the article, and teaching, I’ve been rather behind the curve.  A while back, I got to teach my Birch Pond landscapes pattern for the first time at Maine-ly Sewing, and it was a gas!  I will definitely be polishing up the instructions, sending the pattern off for printing (it’s oversized, and copies at Staples are about 6 times more expensive than shipping it away and getting it professionally printed).

After showing the students how to fuse up fabric (both large chunks and smaller bits) they began composing their quilts.  The easiest way proved to be setting out the large pattern (the piece of paper is about 18×22), placing parchment paper on top of the pattern, then the pre-fused fabrics on top of the parchment.  Here you can see the pattern through the parchment on the lower half of this quilt.  This student did a fabulous job with her sky; she had one piece of fabric that was perfect, but WAY too narrow, so we cut, spliced and overlapped for it to look like a summer’s cloud-dotted sky.

Another student chose a dramatic lightning-streaked sky and dark mountains for her quilt:

Working from farthest away (sky) to the front (foreground), we began with the sky, then the distant hills, then what I have called “the woods behind the pond.” You could cut a single swath of fabric to go across the entire quilt, but I think by cutting chunks and “piecing/fusing” a band, you get greater depth in the piece:

Creating the woods behind the pond

To make the tree trunks, we created “new fabric” by cutting strips of white, cream and gray, then cross-cutting into tree trunks:

Using strips to create new "fabric"

One student decided to go for wild and funky colors… I’d love to see how this one turns out after she adds the birch trees, foreground plants and quilting.  Here is her quilt at the adding the pond stage:

Adding the foreground in the wild and funky one

After the pond, we added the foreground and rocks:

Adding the foreground and rocks

Or, you could add the birch trees behind the pond first:

Adding the birch trees behind the pond

Two sisters took the class together, and decided to combine forces.  Rather than both of them working separately, they decided by late morning to create one quilt together and get it to nearly-done stage, then make another at home.  Here is one of them “building” the scene and adding the birch tree trunks first:

Building the scene

Finally, a nearly complete top (minus borders):

Birch trunks added...next, foliage!

At the end of the day we discussed border selection, quilting designs (the ones on my quilts, which you can see here, are designed to be do-able by newbie machine quilters), and  using a facing to finish the edges.

And thanks to one student who went home and finished up, a finished student quilt…hoooray!  I REALLY like how she added red flowers going back to the sides of the pond…really helps lead the eye to the pond and the birch trees behind it:

Finished student quilt (thanks Martha!)

So, how do I know (besides the willow and oak twigs flushing yellow, and the maples sporting a tinge of red on the tips)?  The Library of course…. you see, it has this South-facing stone wall that gets warmed by the sun:

The Stone Wall at the library

The old part of the library is the building upstairs.  In the mid 90s, they expanded significantly the only place they could:  down, under the grassy slope.  Here’s the new entrance:

And the Amphitheatre park next to the library which, as you can see, is still quite snowy:

Amphitheater Park

Here’s the view across the street, over the rest of the slope down to Camden harbor:

Camden Harbor, early March

Well, the readers of Camden know quite well that the crocus at the base of the wall come up about three weeks before any other flowers peek their little green shoots above the ground.  Here is what I saw:

Buds on the climbing Hydrangea

And, for a tease:

Just a bit of green

And last of all, DRUM ROLL PLEASE:

White crocus!!!!

Actual BUDS!!! Soon, true open flowers…woooohoooo! Time to put away the snow stuff!