Thanks to Linda Frost for a swell idea! Sitting on my back porch, Linda asked if the privacy fence around the back garden belonged to us or the neighbor. When I told her it is ours, she brightened and said she had seen a photo online of just such a fence with marbles in it. Not long after she left that afternoon, Linda sent the link, and I was pretty knocked out.
Yesterday my husband helped me drill holes in a section of our fence where afternoon sun streams through the slats. We made two basic sizes of holes and then customized most of them with a burr to accommodate the somewhat-less-than-uniform small and medium marbles. Here is the happy result:
Bobbi Finley and I are winding up a new book, which C&T Publishing will be releasing in August 2012. We are very excited about it and will tell you more about it as the release date nears.
We made some really terrific quilts for the new book. A LOT of quilts--there are 18 projects!
We had a wonderful time making the quilts for the book, but, in order to get them all done by deadline, we didn't work on much else for quite awhile.
Now that the deadline has come and gone, I am all about finishing, finishing, finishing some of those UFO's cluttering my shelves. So, imagine my smile when local quilter Lori Kukuk, recently empty-nested on account of the Boston Red Sox organization's drafting her son for its pitching squad, expressed a need for something to keep her occupied... She took a top I put together in 1996 (Clinton was President, and we'd never heard of Homeland Security) and quilted it with a simple, overall design.
Here's a photo of the quilt, not yet bound:
It's a strippy using blocks my grandmother made long before I knew her and fabric from the stashes of gone-but-far-from-forgotten friends. There weren't enough of any one type of my grandmother's blocks to make a quilt, and, because they were all constructed from the same family of inexpensive feedsack and dress cottons, I used them together and arranged them in strips. I put my grandmother's smaller blocks on point and framed them with a friend's green-on-green that is very close to the green from my grandmother's era:
And here is one of her postage-stamp blocks:
The back I pieced way back when has a hand on it and this inscription:
Made in 1996 by Carol Gilham Jones using Grandmother Themer's blocks and fabric from Louise Townsend and Marion Mengel.
The Douglas County AIDS Project's annual fundraising art auction is coming up. Last year a small group of us made and donated Vuvuzela:
This year we've gone in quite a different direction. A member of our quilt guild inspired us when she showed an antique silk quilt that has been in her family and on which she'd been doing some conservation work. We slightly modified the pattern of the antique quilt and stitched blocks using primarily remnants from a tie maker. We unified the composition by using a dark red, changeable silk in two corners of each block. The quilting is machine herringbone stitch on major seam lines. Here's the happy result:
We hope it makes a fortune for a very worthy non-profit organization.
