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The idea of fabric postcards has been around for quite a while. Recently this topic has been brought to my attention from 2 different directions, so I had to do a post!

I taught a virtual Compass Capers workshop for the Hot Springs Village Quilters in March. It was a 3 hour Zoom class in which everyone drafted a compass and then I demonstrated how to paper piece them. It was a great learning experience for me and I think it went quite well. Grace sent me a photo of the compass she made the day after the class! Wow!

Don’t you just love the colors? And look at all those wonderful points!

Then, a little over a week later I received this fabric postcard in the mail from Patty!

It’s spectacular! The Compass is 3″ in diameter – and surrounded with cherry fabric (since I mentioned in my lecture that Kirsch is German for cherries). What a thoughtful and very much appreciated gift!!! I don’t have Patty’s email, so I’d like to send a huge thank-you to her now!

This is the back of her card:

The postcard arrived in a plastic sleeve.

I’m so glad it made it through the mail and I will treasure it.

During this time the ThreadBenders fiber art group I belong to decided to have a postcard challenge. We were to make a card and send it to the member who originated the idea, by a prespecified date. We each took photos front and back before they were mailed. Here’s mine:

I decided to make a small, simple, raw-edged landscape. Once the top was done I glue sticked it to a piece of cardstock and satin stitched around the outer edge. Bad plan. All the stitching holes allowed the card to immediately tear out along the perforations and I had to fuse it back into place. Then I added one line of stitching to be sure it wouldn’t come apart. We were all to photograph our postcards before we sent them in case they didn’t make it.

I went to our local post office and was told it needed to be weighed and hand stamped. A postage label was printed and trimmed to fit. And my postcard was on it’s way.

Eight of us participated and Cindy brought them to the following meeting. It was fun to see all the cards and hear their stories.

We really enjoyed seeing all the cards and Cindy did a great job of presenting them at the last meeting. There were many different techniques used in making the cards – and many different mailing methods. The ones that just stuck on a stamp made it as well as those who made the trip to the post office for the “recommended” way. If you look at the postage you may notice that my trust in my local PO cost me more than any of the others – and didn’t look as nice 🤣.

I enjoyed participating in this fun challenge, and I’m pretty sure Cindy enjoyed recieving all the cards.

The best part for me was finding Patty’s fabric postcard in my mailbox. Receiving them is even more fun than making them! Thanks again Patty! I’m encouraged to send out my own cards in the future and bring a smile to my friends! I think sending one to Patty is at the top of my list!

Last year the small fiber art group I belong to, the Fiberistas, held a challenge based on a game. It was a lot of fun and I recently realized I never blogged about it. So here we go:

You probably have played the board game Clue™. Kay came up with the idea to challenge each of us to make a quilt based on clues from the game: a room, person, and weapon. Without peaking she chose three clues for each of us, put them into an envelope, and asked us to make a small quilt that would include the clues without giving the answer away too easily.

This is the quilt I made from the clues I recieved:

And here’s a detail image of the quilting:

As I’ve mentioned before, I love puzzles and mysteries, so I had a delightful time thinking about how to execute my 18″ square quilt. The stacked dishes were cut out of a fabric I purchased in Sweden on our Sew We Go to the Baltic Sea cruise in 2014. I fussy cut them out and machine appliquéd them onto a piece of hand-dyed fabric. Then I added clues in the quilting. I enjoyed every step of the process. Can you guess who did it, with what, and where???

Don’t peak until you think you have the answer.

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The answer is in my envelope:

Yes – it was Mr. Green in the Kitchen with the Candlestick!

To see all of the wonderful pieces made for this challenge please visit our Fiberista’s site by clicking here!

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And one more thing:

As many of you know, one of our favorite local “quilt shops” is going out of business. Ben Franklin Crafts in Oconomowoc has had a great fabric department as long as I’ve lived in this area.

The store and the people there have been a wonderful part of my quilting life. Well, they will be closing their doors forever on October 3rd. This was caused by a combination of things, but in the end the pandemic was the last straw. So many losses over the past months! The store announced recently that the mark down is now 50%.

When I first learned of the closing I was very disappointed. I couldn’t bring myself to even go in the doors for weeks. When I learned that they were selling all the fixtures, and Mike and I had been discussing that we needed another book shelf, we decided it was time. We actually bought two shelving units and I am thrilled to now have a little bit of one of my favorite places in my living room to remember them by.

I must admit I have a lot more of their fabric in my stash now too.

Thanks to Terrie, Mary, their staff and customers, for many, many sweet memories!

The most recent “large” challenge for our ThreadBenders group was entitled “Colored by Emotion”, and these were the rules:

“Everyone randomly draws one color from a bag, which contains the 12 colors listed on the color wheel:  Yellow, yellow-orange, orange, orange-red, red, red-violet, violet, blue-violet, blue, blue-green, green, yellow-green.  (There will be two copies of each color in the bag since we have more than 12 members).  Then everyone draws three emotion slips out of another bag and chooses one emotion of those three.  Everyone makes a quilt based on these two pieces of information.  You may use black, white, and the color you draw as well as all the tints, tones, and shades of your color.  No gray. At least 50 percent of the quilt should be your color. Due at the February 2020 meeting.”

At the original meeting I drew the color violet, and the emotion I chose from the bag was puzzled. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I love all kinds of puzzles, so this was an easy choice. As I pondered what to do, a design didn’t come springing to my mind. So I surfed the internet and was intrigued by a number of pieces of clip art with swoops of jigsaw puzzle pieces… but, still, nothing was coming together in my head.

As I often mention, my faith is a huge part of my quilting inspiration, so I decided at this point to pray that this quilt would glorify God (I don’t know why I don’t do this first 😊). Shortly thereafter I realized that the swoop of pieces needed to be swooping towards something – and that something needed to be the cross.  

I backed a variety of violet fabrics with fusible web, and began cutting out jigsaw puzzle pieces and placing them on a background of white fabric, grading from larger and darker in the lower left, to smaller and lighter as they tumbled upward.

At this point I pinned a paper cross in place, and added purple and black tulle strips to emphasize the “swoop”.

More tulle strips were added, and I planned to leave plenty of white background for intense quilting to give the quilt a modern look. Fortunately at this point I read the rules and realized “at least 50% of the quilt had to be my color”! The solution? Cover the entire quilt with a layer of the purple tulle.

This would make my quilt “legal”, and yet still give it a modern look. Plus, wherever the tulle had multiple layers, it intensified the shading. I left the paper cross under the tulle, and layered the entire piece with backing and batting. It was now time to mark my quilting designs, but how does one mark on tulle???

I decided to free-motion quilt around the puzzle pieces and the cross while I thought about it, and as I did an idea began to form. Now that the major motifs were quilted through to the back – I could make my marks on the back and quilt from behind. I didn’t want to get the quilt wet to erase the marks, so I used a Frixion™ “heat erase” marker.

I’ve avoided this tool because of removal problems in the past, but I made an exception this time because I was using it on the back (to read my previous post on this topic click here). I designed feathered rays that would radiate from the cross; and the marker showed up well.

You’ll notice I had to move the basting pins from the front to the back to avoid broken needles while quilting.

I quilted from the back of the quilt with a very light violet colored thread in the bobbin, filling in with echoing around the feathers.

There was a large area of background that needed more than just echoing, so I quilted some jigsaw puzzle lines from the back too.

When the quilting was done I trimmed the tulle away from the cross, removed the paper pattern, and bound it all with more violet fabrics.

Thus the only pure white area was in the cross. I decided to call my quilt “Puzzled No More”. The label reads: “My life was a purposeless puzzle until I met Christ at the foot of His cross, and now I’m Puzzled No More”.

It was a fun adventure, I learned a lot, and whenever I look at it – I smile!

The ThreadBenders entered 8 of our quilts in the AQS Ultimate Guild Challenge contest this year, but the Grand Rapids show has been canceled 😔. So I’d like to invite you to do a virtual tour of this exciting group of quilts by going to our site. Please click here to view all the quilts!

The Madison Quilt Expo has a challenge every year and I entered it a few years back when the theme was Autumn in Wisconsin. This was the quilt I made for that challenge. I call it “Which Way Does the Wind Blow?” because of the mariner’s compass leaves.

This year’s theme is log cabin. Participants are to make an innovative quilt with this very traditional block, 30″ x 40″. So ~ what can you do with the log cabin pattern that hasn’t already been done?

Well, since I’ve been absorbed in my latest quilt-venture: “Modular Memory Quilts”, it became obvious to me that I should make a background quilt and attach “individual log cabin block quilts” to it through the magic of Velcro™. It was great fun to make all the blocks ~ and quite a challenge to figure out how to get it all to work (the black stripes on the background quilt are the Velcro™, the back of the blocks have Velcro™ strips also):

When piecing the blocks, I decided to change the width of my logs to create a curved effect, and I alternated the placement of the green background and the scraps to add even more interest.

Now I have the parts made and I’m trying to decide on my favorite set. Since log cabin blocks can be put together in a myriad of ways, I’d love your input.

Which is your favorite?

Please let me know your choice in a comment to this post.

And now for my true confession. I got so into this project, and was having so much fun, that I never even thought about reading the fine print in the challenge rules. Once it was done I discovered this in rule #7: “Quilts in multiple pieces or in frames are not accepted”. UGH!!!

I’m grateful the challenge got me to make this quilt and annoyed with myself for not reading the rules. But even if I had, I would have made this quilt for the sheer fun of it! Since it can’t get into the challenge at the Madison Expo, I think entering it in the actual quilt show there is a great option. I’ll let you know if it gets in :-).

And a quick follow up to last week’s post…

Mary Margaret responded to last week’s post with a few photographs of her quilts.

She said: “I like to take my quilts out to photograph them in fun places. I took some of the photos up at the clearing in Door County, but most were from old Falls Village in Menomonee Falls. I put quilts on doorstops, hanging over barn doors etc.” 

What a great idea. When my friend Di designed my original website she photographed a number of my quilts out in our woods. Click here if you’d like to go to my Gallery page, then scroll through the quilts. You’ll be able to tell which photos were taken by Di :-).

I think I need to photograph my quilts in unique ways like this. Thanks for the inspiration Mary.