My New Love......

Remember the "white" 1965 Singer Featherweight I purchased earlier this year?  Loved the hum of the little machine, but I really hated the off-white sort of celery green color. Sorry Featherweight purists, but I had to do something!

So after a lot of research I sent her off to Gerald Holmes in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His price was right, he promised fast turnaround, and he had good internet recommendations. Et Voila! She has come back after a little more than a month with her lovely "Lexus Pearl White" finish (he uses automotive paints - you choose). Here she is below resplendant in her gold Singer decals...

 I finished a whole baby baby quilt top on her last weekend and loved working on her fitted into my Sew Ezi table upstairs in our son's old room with its leafy green views of the neighborhood. (He lives and works in Nashville so he will never know.....)

 I had to make her a special cover - loved this pearl gray fabric from Sew Modern here in LA  with abstract thread spools....

  - which I embroidered with her name --- "Pearl"

A Little Time Out...

For the last ten days or so I've taken a little time off from my normal fiber work to make two small crib size charity quilts for the St. Joseph Center Pre School program in Venice, California. Every once in a while I find it amazingly therapeutic to abandon the art quilt aesthetic - the color choices, the complicated techniques required to get my ideas on to fabric, the choices of materials and embellishments, the paints, dyes, fusibles, etc. - in favor of some old fashioned piecing. It clears out the cobwebs, simplifies things and makes me feel like a real "quilter".


A buying spree of some packs of 5" charm squares and layer cakes of fun bright modern cottons at a local quilt show gave me the raw materials and I was off. A quick way to sew and slice 10" squares into half square triangles given to me by a friend resulted in a fairly "Modern" chevron quilt and a package of Moda charm squares with simple sashing became a sweet pastel cuddly thing for a little girl.

 

  
I found some great modern border and backing fabrics on the sale rack at Sew Modern in West LA for 40% off. I love their bright modern prints and I'm not always able to use them in my other work. My one problem was adapting my usual very tight compact decorative quilting with fine silk thread technique into large overall quilting with strong heavy thread that would stand up to pre-K abuse. The great part is that quilting that way finished the thread work on each piece in one day! I also used a great technique from the AQS magazine American Quilter for an attractive, but durable faux piped machine binding.

 

 
They are both done and ready for delivery, leaving me cleansed and ready for some art quilt projects that have been dancing in my head.