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A few months ago, I wrote a post about the reception of my quilt "Self-Portrait, Year 2: Beneath the Surface" at QuiltCon.  I also received two requests for interviews, which are now being published.  The first out is an interview by Bill Volckening in Why Quilts Matter .  The interview is long, so it has been divided in two parts.  You can read Part 1 here .  Part 2 will be published in June: now available here . I am honored and humbled that Bill found my quilt and its story worthy of an interview.  Bill is a distinguished collector of quilts and writes extensively about quilts on his blog and on Facebook--do check out his website:  http://www.billvolckening.com/ Thank you Bill!

In the midst of a long, slow process of doing trials on a large work in progress, I took some time out to dye a couple of T-shirts, one for myself, and one for a young friend.  First I dyed both shirts turquoise, then in a second step added pattern with black.  The patterning on the first shirt was done by loosely folding the dyed shirt diagonally, and then dripping black dye over the folds.  And here's the shirt I made for myself, in a different process that I was trying out for the first time.  I like how it came out!  Here's the set up (photo below):  I tipped a print board (foam insulation board, covered with fabric, and then a sheet of plastic) by resting it against a box of books, with the bottom edge draining into the blue lid of a large storage box.  I pinned the bottom edge of the turquoise shirt to the top edge of the board, scrunching the shirt into vertical folds.  (The shirt is wet at this point, so the folds hold.)  Then with a ...

I'll be teaching an improv workshop at my local quilt guild, Piecemakers (Galesburg, IL), on August 22.  The workshop is designed for quilters who are new to improvisational quilting, but those with experience are most welcome also; we'll focus on versions of the Log Cabin block.  Most of the time will be taken up with experimenting with different making a variety of blocks, but I thought people might like to have directions for a small project they could make with as few as four 6" blocks.  So I made several tablerunners, illustrating different fabric, setting, and quilting choices.  In the chartreuse one (below left), I used all solids, with a background of one color related to (but not in) the blocks, quilted with a 1" grid, and bound with a contrasting fabric.  In the blue one, I used print fabrics, a narrower blue/orange color scheme, I framed each block to set them off from the background, quilted in an overall free-motion design, and bound with fabric clo...

I'm delighted to be a stop on the blog tour for Sherri Lynn Wood 's new book,  The Improv Handbook for Modern Quilters.   I was one of the quilters who volunteered to follow an improv "score" assigned by Sherri, so that she could illustrate the range of quilts that could result from the same underlying guidelines.  165 quilts were submitted and 22 accepted; I'm delighted that mine made it in!  In this post, I'll describe the process through which I came to the final composition, talk about what I learned through the process, review Sherri's book, and, last but not least, offer a giveaway of the book to a lucky reader. The score that I was assigned is called "Modern Block Improv."  The basic idea of this score is to take a traditional block--here Flying Geese--and to work with it improvisationally.   My finished quilt:  "Wild Geese" (38 x 40") I had taken a class from Sherri at QuiltCon in 2013, and the class had focused on the same...

Today I finished this quilt, begun about a year and a half ago.  It's a version of a pattern by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr, "Plain Spoken," published in their book, Modern Quilt Workshop ; the fabric is Kaffe Fassett shot cotton.    I've written several earlier posts about the quilt, so if you'd like to read about the quilt in process, you can find those posts here .   I've been working on the hand-quilting since last July; it has been nice to start each day with a half-hour or so of this quilt on my lap.   Backing and binding are hand-dyed fabric.