It was  sewing weekend with Country School and the first thing I worked on was getting the Stars at Sea top together. I really love it but I'm thinking about removing a star in the right and replacing it with a red one but I think we all know the probability of that happening is about 10%. I made this quilt to be a sample showing off the Color Wheel Stash Pack. I used only one set of fat quarters. Now I just have the small task of quilting to do but I expect to quilt this one right after I finish Lost My Marbles because this one will be a simple all-over design.

Here's the pattern if you like this enough to make one for yourself. The original is done in bright batiks.

Before I made mine I planned out the colors. (My quilt above is hanging upside down from this image.)

Before I cut out my stars I cut 2 strips from each fat quarter to set aside for binding. I'm going to have a bright scrappy binding. Maybe this will be the right place to add more red to the quilt.

After I finished the Stars at Sea quilt top I was excited to jump in and start on Antelope Canyon. I think this is going to be a beautiful quilt and I'm excited to work on it more next month.

The move is over! Mom and I worked non-stop for 6 days and we had a 2-day yard sale, a day to finish packing, a day to move and start unpacking, a day to finish unpacking and a day to hang window treatments and art. That was all followed by yesterday which was entirely a day of rest. The only thing left is for her to finish setting up her sewing room and to build her new design wall. The apartment looks great and I think it's going to work out terrifically.

While I was at her house I knew we would have some time in the evenings so I took my Stars at Sea to work on. This quilt is made in 5 panels. This is the 3rd panel and it seems I made a cutting mistake!

Darn! I even cut one wrong in the 5th panel! If not for this I would have been able to finish this top.

Fortunately tomorrow and Friday are the CSQ sewing days for this month. I've cut new blocks and will be able to get this top together and start one of my other pre-cut kits.

My other task for the weekend is to get these 10 cases of fabric from the foyer to the basement so getting my exercise in will not be a problem!

Did you think I forgot about my applique project? Absolutely not! I'm sooooo close. I work on it a little in the evenings while watching TV and I have 3 more blossoms done.
Half of this border is done so I'm 79.5% done! 5 more blossoms on this border and then I can sew the borders to the quilt and do the corners.

In other news look what came in the mail! These are fabrics for more tunics. The Ikat on the left is one that a friend gave me a few years ago. The rest of batik rayons from Sew Batik. I got almost 4 yards of the black because the next few tops I male will be color blocked. The black will go with the Ikat, the multi/black and the red/black. The two tan/black prints will be used in the same garment. I washed and dried all of the fabrics....except the Ikat. I need to do that. I want the tops to be wash and dry with no ironing. The blue one that I've made already came out of the dryer perfect. I can't wait to get started on these. Chris is on his annual golf trip this weekend so maybe I can make a couple of these in the evenings after quilt club sewing days. 

Boy, wouldn't that be a perfect weekend!

Let's sneak in a few more marbles this week! These 6 make me 46% done with the small circles.

Today is unpacking day for Mom. Once we have her new sewing room set up I'll share some photos. But for today I thought I'd take the blog to tell you about a book I listened to recently that I felt needed some extra attention. 
My blog friend, Kristen, recommended this book to me and I almost didn't listen to it because it breaks 2 of my cardinal rules:
1 - No books less that 10 hours, this one is only 5 hours
2 - No books read by the author, this one is narrated by Elizabeth Gilbert
Another reason I almost passed it up is that I'm not an Eat, Pray, Love fan. I just couldn't get on that bandwagon.
But then one day I had a break between books and thought a quick little book would be perfect to quilt marbles by. I'm so glad I did!

The book I'm talking about is Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. This book is about the creative life and is a summation of her own life experiences. What I loved about is that it's not the pie-in-the-sky advice of "living your dream". Those types of books seem to focus more on the dream and less on the living part. Gilbert focuses on living while pursuing the dream.

This book is about doing the work and it cuts through everything else that isn't absolutely necessary to be a serious artist and that list includes school.

Her comments about college for artists being unnecessary get a lot of negative comments in reviews but if someone pays attention to what she says, she's absolutely right. College is outrageously expensive these days and it's especially expensive when you are getting an art degree. There aren't a lot of jobs that you can get out of college that would pay back $100k in college debt. Gilbert puts a much-needed voice of reason when she make the point that we can make art any time and that being serious about it is about doing the work more than taking classes on the topic.

The book is full of real life wisdom for artists and others. Gilbert, of course, is mostly referring to writing, but the book applies to any artist. Frankly, I think it would be a good gift for any graduate because it really is about "living the dream" rather than "dreaming the life".

​Thank you Kristen for recommending this book!

I scheduled this post last week but, assuming that everything went as planned, movers are picking up all of my Mom's belongings and will deposit them in her new apartment in Richmond today. We started talking about his move last summer after her miserable cataract surgery (that she is just now stabilizing from).  She had a great run for 11 years living with her sister but it's now time for a new phase and I made her a card to celebrate. Some of my dear quilt friends also sent her fabric postcards so she will have some good mail to greet her when she arrives later today. Here's the one that I made.

I started with some watery backgrounds. These were more of the fabrics that I sunprinted with stencils. I love how these turned out. This was one set where I felt that sunprinting really was the best option. I fused them to card interfacing and trimmed them to the 4" x 6" size.

Next I needed a fish. Using another stencil I found that opaque screen printing worked great for my fish image.

A school of fish!

I affixed fusible webbing to the back of the fish fabrics before I cut them out. I fused them to the cards and stitched around the edges and fins. Simple!

The hardest part was decided on what color thread to use for the edges. These were both rejects but that doesn't mean the cards are rejects. I'm just playing around with color.

I finally settled on a solid orange. It's a simple card but I love how it turned out.

My pond has 9 goldfish. These are going to make for great birthday cards too.

Patricia Caldwell is back this week with another of her beautiful art quilts. Rainbow Reflections is made with the Imperial Dragon gradient. If you follow Patricia on her Facebook page you can see the work she is currently doing on a Crystal mandala.

Patricia has done a series of these reflections quilts and I thought it would be fun to look back at a couple others that were previously shared so we can see them in a group.

Yes, I have a second post of marbles this week! I have 90 small marbles and 19 large marbles. With this 6 I have 36 of the 90 small marbles done or 40% of the small marbles.
Let's get to it.

Remember a couple of weeks ago when I cut my new Indonesian batiks into a quilt kit? Well, these were the leftover scraps and they've been on my swing table ever since just waiting for a home. I finally couldn't take it anymore.

I knew that they needed to be matched up with some other fabrics and I was determined that it would not involve dyeing or buying new fabric. No surprise, I have a drawer full of green dyed fabrics and I pulled out as many as I could find that went with greens in the batiks. Every batik has at least one green in it.
​Now I needed a plan so it was off to play in EQ.

I wanted it to be something simple and thought I might be able to do something based on 2.5" strips. Here are the 2 ideas that I eventually landed on. I expect that I will do the one on the left. So I started cutting all of the scraps into as many 2.5" strips as I could. I'm not far enough along to have any idea  how big the quilt will be. I'll make as many blocks as I can and it might be only big enough for a veterans quilt. I'm cool with that.

Then I matched up a green with each fabric and paired them. I didn't cut the green fabrics yet. I can do that whenever I get around to working on this project.

There were small scraps left over and, of course, I kept them too! They are on the bottom of the bin with the strips and greens and then the 2 quilt layouts printed off. I got that pile of scraps in this one bin and now I have FOUR travel sewing projects. That might be overkill but I'm OK with it and at least these fabrics are out of my way and I can work on the project that I want to work on here at home. More about that one later.