flowers and embroidery

Sunday I spent time roaming through the Memorial Park Gardens of Appleton, WI. It was a kind of hot start to the morning even though we started the walk around 9 a.m. Interesting to see were the vegetable gardens that were fenced in for protection against critters and a Petting Zoo Garden where all the plants had animal type names. I'm sharing 2 photos of the wonderful sites so you can enjoy them too!

Jeanne and I are starting to increase the pace of our designing and stitching. We have decided that we will try to get 4 new patterns ready to introduce at the Houston International Quilt Market late in October. With the price of everything going through the roof, we aren't quite sure we can swing a visit to it this year. Airfare has jumped to $800 a ticket and the booth price has increased by $200! But we know we will have new patterns to share so we HAVE to get busy. I am starting to embroider on a 2nd version of our Care Quilt-butterflies and hearts-what is better than that??? And Jeanne is trying to move ahead with a new towel pattern that we love and have selected Rosie's Garden fabric to accent with-from Quilting Treasures. Stay tuned-photos probably by the end of this week!

July Over and Back to Work!

It seems so long since I updated this-sorry folks! With company from Spain and a series of wonderful outdoor parties going on, my focus drifted to summer and not work. BUT I'm BACK! Hope you enjoy the zinnia photo Jeanne took. She has a wonderful series of flower beds that I will be sharing with you over the next week or so. We are meeting tomorrow to regroup and decide what the next push in designs will be. While we wait for new fabric deliveries to show up we are still hard at work on new versions of the Care Quilt and our new embellished bag design. Stay tuned for more!

New Purse design

We've been up to our noses in pink and green fabrics since we started in with the Care Quilt. Since that was so much fun, we had to continue and have our new purse to show for it! This simple to put together bag is just right for those hot summer days when colors sizzle. The lining uses a fat quarter of fabric, the outside is a mish-mash of simple charm squares cut into pieces and sewn back together with as much trim added as you can find. The bag handles we chose have a simple brown wood handle.

Next up, conversations about how hard it was to find trim in our area and why I DON'T like beading! or what I learned about myself while finishing this purse pattern!

It's BACK!

Picked up the sewing machine last night. Thankfully it didn't require new parts or something complicated like that. Just a tension problem apparently.

Time to jump back into projects now that I can count on it again. My old friend is back!! I have a tote to finish today that is made from the same fat quarters of pink/green/white fabrics we used for the Care Quilt. But this will be really embellised with beading, embroidery, and other cool stuff. We wanted to add some embellishments to the Care Quilt but didn't because we wanted it to be able to be curled up with no "sharp" edges intruding on the perfect nap and comfort quilt. But on this bag-anything goes!

Julia Grace (3 weeks old now) is beautiful. We visited her last night and had the fun of seeing her very much wide awake. What a little beauty! More pics to follow.