Where in the world is Cheryl?

Every where it seems!
Thanks for all my quilt friends for the shout outs! To see some silly pictures of me click the linkies...

Pokey Bolton/ Quilting Arts

Melanie Testa

Catherine Redford

Quilts.com's Festival@Home

Commence the Showing and Telling

I know you're waiting with baited breath to see the stuff I got at the IQA Chicago Show. Wait no more! Here it all is!!
One of the things I like best about the quilt show is the ability to get stuff you can't get in one single quilt store. I especially like shopping for new thread so I can see all of the varieties and weights, and especially the colors. I stuck to 30 and above weight cottons for this trip. Also shown are the smallest yo-yo maker and a new ribbon flower maker I had not yet seen from Clover.

Next up is hand dyed stuff. I always spend a ridiculous amount of money on Cherrywood fabrics, as I find their fabrics to be top notch. I also buy from Artfabrik (Laura Wasilowski), Frieda Anderson, and Wendy Richardson. Wendy dyes in the greatest mottled greens, purples, and browns, and I love her dyed damask napkins. They are a treat to sew on.

If you know me, you know I love things from Japan, and the Maeda Imports booth has lovely fabrics from Japan. These are cotton furoshiki (wrapping) cloths. I especially love the Hina Matsuri (Doll festival or girl's day) and Kodomo no Hi (children's day) with the koi cloths. I also love, love, love the kawaii cats and fishbowls. I also got some Japanese knotting cords for some future project.

One thing you won't have at a quilt show is a lack of patterns, books, and DVDs to inspire you. Kits are popular, because they can be made up as is, and folks like to make what they see on display or in the picture. Here are a couple of pin kits (one of wool and one of shibori silk) because I love pins. I also love this Crabapple Hill pattern of embriodered haunted houses called Hocuspocusville. And I love the Quilting Arts booth, where I picked up a couple of DVDs. One is season 2 of the QA tv show, and one by Melanie Testa.

I am not a huge purchaser of novelty fabrics, but I know a couple of people who would appreciate the motifs on a quilted project from these. Some racecar fabric for a certain father, and some Cicely Mary Barker Flower Fairies for a certain mother in law. Isn't that face striking?

Ah, the odds and sods. The grey looking thing is a kimono sleeve, vintage, with sparkly threads in it. It will become a purse. The round things are strips of hand dyed wool from one of the many wool booths at the show. The sparkly stuff in the middle is Stewart Gill rainbow texturizers. The Fuzzy Nabber is a washable lint roller, which I have one of already and just adore. And the little fruits are the weird kind of thing where I could have bought the book and materials to make them myself, but I know I would never do them, so would rather buy the finished products themselves. They have loops for putting on a keychain or project.

Now for the things I made at the show. At the MIU booth (Quilting Arts/Interweave area) you can take classes on the show floor for $10. These are the 3 classes I took (besides Surviving the Runway). The first made the background fabrics, which were taught by Melanie Testa. The doll class was by Debbie Crane. The little charms were the resin class by the Little Windows company. All were great!

Last but not least is my tiara from the Art Quilt reception, and the pin award I recieved for being runner up.

Hope you enjoyed Show and Tell!

Recycled Weekly Quilts

Here are the last two week's "recycled" themed quilts. Sorry they are late being posted online, but I was having SOOO much fun at IQA, I didn't have time.
This quilt is made from Ramen noodle wrappers. I don't really think about packaging much, but when you are trying to reduce your carbon and plastic footprints, things like these mundane wrappers do contribute. I don't think to ever recycle the plastic on wrappers like these. These slippery devils are applied to a kunin felt batting. They bubbled up a bit, but I kinda like that.
This week's quilt is made from my program from IQA. I had such an amazing time, and I have lots of memories, but one more program is one less thing I need to keep around. So I made this quilt out of the things I liked from the program. I intentionally did not use any quilt imagery from the program as that artwork is copyrighted by the artists whose quilts are shown. The one non-program thing is the little hippo drawind I sketched on a piece of mail after talking with Melanie Testa. The hippo represents the friends I made at the show and whom I shared the show with while I was there.

I have an idea in mind for next week's hope it comes together as I expect.

Party like a Rock Star!

I had an amazing weekend at the IQA Chicago quilt festival. Lots of cool things happened, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I spent each day at the show until it ended, so I had little time to "live blog" the show like last year, but here are the highlights! (Pictures from the hallways leaving the show, because I hate posts without pictures.)
Thursday: I spent the day in a full day class with Maggie Wiess on Thermofax screen printing. It was great fun, and I think Thermofax screening is right up my alley. While I love my Gocco, the supplies are getting more and more expensive, and hard to find. Thermofax printing is similar enough, and there are enough services out there to provide me screens without buying the machine that I can make use of it. I can't wait to finish my project from class. After class, the show floor opened, and I walked the floor, spent money, and took a Make It University class on Little Windows resin. When Pokey Bolton called my name, she said "Oh I know her!" and even gave me a little hug. Wow!

Friday: Bright and early I got to the show and took the Embellishment Know How seminar, which was about 8-9 demos on embellishing your work. Afterwards, I had lunch with Steff and Catherine, and did some shopping with Steff. I made it through the whole vendor area, and had some time for some of the quilts. The Art Quilt reception was Friday evening, and Steff and I attended. I made a tiara last year that I didn't wear because I could not stay, but entered the "tiara parade" this time. Now, style counts, so I entered as the "queen of mean" and my skull pendant on my tiara even has a crown on it. Instead of a Miss America wave, I threw up the "heavy metal" horns and rocked down the aisle. Well, I guess this paid off, I was a runner up! Best of all, my co-runner up was none other than Melanie Testa, and we chatted for a bit and really hit it off. We also got a chance to speak with Karey Bresenhan, Bonnie McCaffrey, Laura Krasinski, Maggie Weiss, and many others! Melanie, Bonnie, Steff, Catherine and I went to dinner. Bonnie even taped us doing our "Shopping Show and Tell" for one of her video podcasts!

Saturday: Wow, how could you top yesterday? By hanging out with Melanie Testa for a portion of the day, that's how! I took her MIU class first thing, and we shopped a couple of booths and looked at some of the quilts afterwards. My friend Amanda and her friend were visiting the show from Baltimore, so I went to lunch with them, and then got to hang out with Melanie a bit more. It was really good to get her perspective on art quilting, and her story on how things in the art quilting wold are going. It gave me a lot to think about. At that point, it was time for Surviving the Runway. It's was an 80's Prom theme, and I made my Prom Queen tiara in ridiculous over to top fashion. I am sure You Tube Videos will surface. It was silly, and lots of fun. I didn't win, but had a great time with everyone. Bonnie McCaffery even gave me some sideline help. So fun!

Sunday: I got to sleep in a little bit (one extra hour). Arriving at the show at the opening, I did the last of my shopping, and got a call from Steff, who was there shopping with our friend Pika. We all took the "good girl Doll" class from Debbie Crane at MIU, did some more shopping, and took one last gander at the quilts. I spent literally my last dollar saved for the show, a grand total of almost $700 spent on the show overall. It was an amazing time. I felt like I really was part of the "it crowd", and was a bit of the MIU groupie, but had a fantastic time, and can't wait to see the shak out of the many things I discussed with everyone.

I'll post my "Show and tell" things I bought on the next post!!

More Zombie Awesome-ness

Last night I drew and inked these cute zombies, even took the time to watercolor one of them.

Can't wait to work on this quilt!

Sneak Peek: Adorable Zombies sketches

I hinted at these elsewhere, and folks seemed interested, so here are my sketches for an upcoming quilt series of adorable cute zombies. Click the picture for a better view...

Ephemera- Another Recycling Theme!

I love the concept of recycling in art projects, things that would be trash becoming something beautiful. Even moreso, I love "ephemera". Ephemera is material not intended to be retained or preserved. Vintage ephemera could be advertisments, candy wrappers, empty soda or beer cans, and so forth. More recently it's greeting cards, comic books, trading cards, and the like. Some ephemera is valuable, like comic books or other collectibles.
I'm of the "keep everything to remind me of things later" types. I keep cards and letters well past any meaning they may have held. If I have a memorable moment, I keep something from it; a ticket stub, a flier, a receipt, or shopping bag.
This month's theme is a recycling effort to use up some of the goofy ephemera I have been keeping for a project like this. I hope you like them.
This week's is scraps of Japanese newspaper that I got as packing material from one of my Japan purchases. Newspaper is not meant to be saved, per se. Especially newspaper that is used as packing material. But I love this stuff, and carefully fold the sheets I get from their crumpled up state in my boxes from Japan.
My painting, well, I'm happy and not happy with it. First of all, this is about as close to my true art style as you will see without me posting sketches. I'm not that great an artist, figure drawing or painting-wise. But these little eco-characters were in my sketchbook, and I thought I could use them effectively for this theme. My husband likes the "happy little dirt" in the lower left.

Back to back injury- time to crochet!

Ha ha....sorry for the pun, though I'm not really laughing. Yesterday proved to be a stressful morning, and my back seized up after being OK for a couple of weeks. My allergies seem to be in overdrive today, and I am very stuffed up. I'm exhausted from stress, injury, and antihistamines.

In times like these, I crochet. I think this is one of the first kind of fiber arts I did. I was taught to crochet by a nun named Laverne who lived on my block. I grew up in Calumet Park, IL. This nun brought all of us kids on Ada St into her home almost daily and let us do crafts, color, and otherwise keep us off the streets. She taught me how to crochet, just one stitch, the single crochet. Laverne passed away not too long after teaching me, and my grandmother would not let us go to her funeral. I eventually taught myself the rest of the stitches, years later. I have never made a large crochet project, but plenty of small things.

When I am laid up like this, I usually crochet because it's easy and I can do it and watch TV at the same time. The past couple of weeks before getting back into the sewing room I made lots of washcloths from cotton yarn I got on sale at Michaels. Now I'm thinking of making some socks...