August Push to Finish Time

One of the good things that I like about August, is the Alaska State Fair. It urges me to finish those things I've had laying around, so that I can enter them in the fair. It's fun to display there, & most years I manage to win enough ribbons to at least pay for my gate fee. The cash prizes for quilts is a pittance, but the ribbons are fun to collect. A blue ribbon wins $6.00, 2nd place $3.00, & 3rd gets $1.00. Now if you manage to grow the biggest cabbage you win $2000.00. Can you see where the priority is in the Mat-Su Valley?

Eve here has been finished finally. I've posted her before, but now she has a finished edge & bead embellishment. She will be entered in the fiber art, needle felting wall hanging section of the Fair.
Here are some details. You can click on the pictures to see them bigger if you want.

The other thing that happens soon, is our Anchorage Log Cabin Quilt guild show, right after the Fair. We always have a small quilt silent auction for our big fund raiser every year. I decided to make a replica of our raffle quilt from last year. It is 8"x11", and took me about 20 hours to complete.

It is wholecloth, I drafted the whole design on graph paper 1st, by looking at a glossy photo of the original quilt. It placed the drawing on my light box, & laid my fabric on top, then drew the color on using an assortment of fabric pens.

I used an extremely small machine stitch to quilt. It was impossible to remove the stitches once sewn in because the stitch length was so tight I couldn't possibly get the seam ripper into it, so I had to do everything right the 1st time. I used very fine threads. The purple around each block is the Superior Threads' Bottom Line #60 wgt poly thread.
The rest was quilted with #100 wgt YLI Heirloom Cotton .
I bound the edges with a single layer (instead of my usual double fold), & it's only 1/8th inch wide.

I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Thursday at quilt guild we had several people do quick demos about different techniques.

This lady is Caroll Jones (one of 2 Carol Jones in our guild). She talked about Shasiko.
I was really impressed with her work.

She studied under a Japanese lady named Noriko ---- (sorry I forget the last name), but she said she'll be going to Houston this fall to take more classes from her, so you who get to go there may see her wandering around there in her lovely Sashiko jackets.

She offered to teach us a class for free. 8 of us signed up.

PS you should all stop by my friend Kathy's blog. She's doing some beutiful work with her natural dyed wools.