2018 Recapped

January - Road to California!

Seriously, if you're a quilter and you still haven't been to Road, what are you waiting for?  As always, I had a ball, saw lots of friends, and spent too much money.

Highlight was my first class with Gudrun Erla of GE Quilt Designs.  She has a talent for designing quilts by making simple blocks, then cutting and reassembling them into very complex looking blocks. She taught two lovely quilt patterns, Nova and Amalie, with bonus instruction on using her Stripology rulers.  Another fangirl moment for me.  

I chose to work on Amalie, using some Asian inspired fabrics.  Before we started chopping and reassembling, Gudrun warned us about paying attention to the orientation of our original blocks - a wrong direction would result in a backwards block.  Of course, I carefully cut my first two blocks in the wrong direction.  So I had to make all my squares left-handed.  But I still enjoyed every minute of this class and went home with several finished blocks.  Which went straight into another project box to languish.

February 13 - Start of the Forty Fabulous Years with Eleanor! 2018 Block Party

I'm fortunate enough to be a couple of hours away from Quilt in a Day's San Marcos store.  So when they announced a serious of live webinars celebrating Eleanor's fortieth year in the quilting biz, my sister and I signed up right away.  A year-long series of fangirl moments!  Best place to see a history of this project and photos of some gorgeous quilts is on the facebook group.  As I write this in 2022, the group is still in existence on FB, although the last post was over a year ago.

 Each month we trekked down to San Marcos to sit in on the filming while enjoying a lesson on that month's block.  This was another sampler quilt, this time with diagonal rows of log cabin blocks alternating with rows of the 'sampler' blocks.  Depending on the colors chosen and how the log cabins were oriented, each quilt can look unique.  Here's the prototype quilt from Eleanor:

 

Here are my planning notes along with some of  my blocks completed throughout the year. Just before the first session, I saw this close up photo of Jupiter and really wanted to make a quilt reminiscent of it. Well, finding the exact colors was a challenge and I strayed a little with one of my darks, but I did get the effect I wanted.

I chose to use a dark gold center to represent the light in the cabin window. Or maybe the spacecraft window. I’m not yet an experienced piecer but I found the instructions pretty easy to follow when I actually read carefully. I do have a stack of dark strips cut to the wrong length because I got a bit uppity but I’m sure they won’t be wasted.

June 21-23 - Quilt Show Reno

Because the huge January Road to CA show isn't enough, my sister and I decided to go up the the Quilt Show Reno.   I didn't take any classes, although I did sit in on quite a few of the short seminars.  Most memorable - Lauretta Crites showing how she uses colored pencils instead of crayons.  As her sample, she used a block from Mystery of the Salem Quilt Guild, a pattern that's been sitting in one of my many project boxes.  I've been afraid to start it because of my art failures in kindergarten.  Some traumas just stay with you.  

Anyway, it was a small, but really fun show.   A reasonable roster of teachers, excellent seminars, and good shopping opportunities.  Of which I took full advantage. 

September 7-22 -  Tour of Iceland, Germany, France, and European Patchwork Quilt Meeting with Gudrun Erla!

I never even knew Iceland was a destination and had no interest in going.  Until my sister started talking about this tour, led by Gudrun, who is a native born Icelander.   I was still not interested in Iceland or Germany, but really wanted to do the France portion of the tour, especially the Quilt Meeting and the stay in Paris.   I visited Paris way back in 1996, as part of a 1-day chunnel trip to Paris.  Unfortunately, the train was hours late leaving London due to terrorist threats (it was the I.R.A. back then) so our Paris tour consisted primarily of riding on a bus while the driver pointed out landmarks we didn't have time to see.  And a quick jog through the Louvre to get our allotted 10-second look at the Mona Lisa.   So I really wanted to go back for a real look.

Sorry, folks, but I'm sharing some non-fiber related photos here.   It turned out that Iceland is a spectacular country.  I found the people to be remarkably friendly.  Everything is clean - even the food is grown cleanly and it's amazing how much better basic foods such as vegetables and dairy products taste without all the chemicals and processing. 

Some obligatory landscape photos of Iceland.  I can't possibly do justice to the scenery.  Just amazing.  If you have a bucket list, put Iceland on it NOW.  Even better if you are a quilter and can go on one of Gudrun's trips.  She is a delight - of course she knows Iceland like the back of her hand.  But it goes beyond that - she handled all the problems (and there will always be some on any tour) with calmness and patience.  She was genuinely friendly to everyone.  In Europe, where she didn't have as much experience, there were locals to guide us along the way.  

Travel tip - even though it is expensive and a total tourist thing, don't miss the Blue Lagoon.  As someone who hasn't appeared in a swimsuit in public for more than four decades (and rightfully so), I made myself go and am so glad I did.  Just spring for the private dressing rooms if you can - there are things I saw in the public (gender separated) dressing room that I can never unsee.

While driving through the countryside, we saw many flocks of Icelandic sheep. With isolation in the earliest part of Iceland's human habitation and the more recent laws making it illegal to import sheep to Iceland, the breed has remained 'pure' for centuries and is one of the oldest in the world.  There are over 800,000 sheep on the island, more than twice the human population.  Their fleeces are dual-coated, so when separated carefully, the guard hairs make excellent water-resistant outerwear, while the soft inner coat is wonderful for garments that touch the skin.

Although quilting is not a big thing on the island, knitting definitely is.  Hand knitting has been an important part of the economy for something like five centuries.  I hear that children are taught to knit in school, so theoretically every Icelander has at least a rudimentary knowledge of the craft.  Gudrun happens to have two aunts who are master knitters, and I was fortunate enough to by these rose-pattern mittens from one of them.  Maybe not so practical for Southern California, but who could resist?

 

 

 One of our most memorable non-scenic stops was the Icelandic Saga Centre in Hvolsvöllur.  Inside this unassuming building, they were working on a remarkable project - a 930 metre tapestry depicting Njal's Saga - one of Iceland's most voluminous medieval sagas.  Best description I could find of the project and the saga is on Guide To Iceland - Njal's Saga Tapestry.  For a small fee, visitors could embroider a portion of the tapestry using Bayeux stitch.  Could anyone who has heard about the Bayeux tapestry resist having their hand in a project that exceeds the length of that monumental work?  Rhetorical question - the answer is obviously 'not me!'

So I sat down and was given a needle and yarn, and brief instructions.  I started out great - my high-school hand-embroidery skills came back pretty quickly.  I think I was a little too excited about being even a small part of this huge project, though, because I soon lost it and couldn't put in a single good stitch.  I'm pretty sure they pick out a lot of stitching after the visitors have gone - including about the last quarter or so of the part that I worked on. 

 

After Iceland, we flew to Frankfurt, Germany, where we boarded a bus to Heidelberg.  I couldn't tell you anything about the drive because I had come down with a bad cold and slept the entire time.  Also slept the evening away while the tour group was off doing the "Student Prince" experience and slept right through my alarm the next morning - causing us to miss the departure of the tour group!  Caught up with them at Heidelberg Castle for a quick tour, funicular railway to Old Heidelberg and about 10 minutes to see the sights there, then back on the bus to Ste. Marie aux Mines for day 1 of the quilt show.  

The show was actually spread among four small villages in the Alsace region of France.  The shopping tents were in Ste. Marie, with exhibitions in all four villages and a very convenient shuttle between them.  Honestly, I was so drowsy from decongestants, I don't remember much of the exhibitions.  I do, of course, remember the shopping because we spent most of our time there.  For the most part, the people were very friendly and I met sellers from all over Europe. 

Evidenced by the photos below of all the great stuff I brought home.   Travel tip # 2 - when traveling, take your oldest clothes you don't care about, and jettison them along the way to make room for better stuff in your suitcase.  Or travel with an extra empty suitcase.   I did both.  That was after mailing home all my cold weather wear that I turned out not to need in Iceland.  Travel tip #3 - do not use DHL to ship anything you care about.  We shipped home two boxes from Frankfurt.  One arrive with a large hole and items missing, and the other never left Germany.  DHL would not take responsibility for either, even though we had insured the packages. 

After two days at the show, we boarded an ATG (high speed train) from Strasbourg to Paris.  Travel tip #3 for Americans - be quiet on the trains. Our group was so excited to be on our way to Paris that some of us were exceedingly loud.  To the point where we were getting shushed and glared at by other passengers and I was pretending not to be with 'them.'  It was a great tour group - only real problem we had was a trio of women who consistently made the group wait for them at every stop and didn't seem concerned about it.  

I won't go on about Paris because there was nothing fiber arts related, except to show this photo of my favorite place in all of France.  Remember in Gigi, when Louis Jourdan strolls at night through the city, singing the title song?  One of the spots is in front of a fountain featuring horses, and it's one of my all-time favorite movie moments.

Well the fountain is called Fontaine de l'Observatoire and it’s located at the south end of the Jardin du Luxembourg. I sat on a park bench right in front of this very fountain and took a few hundred photos and videos of it.  Of which this is just one.

 

We all went our separate ways after a few days in Paris... my sister and I boarding a train to the charming medieval commune of Bayeux.  Another bucket list item for me - to see the Bayeux Tapestry.  There is, of course, a lot more to see in that area of France.   We had an amazing personalized tour of WWII historic sites.  

So the Bayeux Tapestry is simply amazing to see in person. The museum's designers did an outstanding job making the entire tapestry accessible to visitors. Admission includes a handheld device with an audio guide that brings the story of the tapestry to life. 

For the first time in several decades, my college Latin came in handy and I was actually able to read most of the captions for myself. This is an image of just a small part of the tapestry.  Which is actually not a tapestry, but an embroidery on linen.  This is a royalty-free photo of a small part of the tapestry - visitors are not allowed to take photographs inside the museum. 

I hear they are planning a new museum - can't imagine how they can make the experience any better.   

 

 

 And the glorious view of the cathedral from our hotel window at night.

 

 

 

 

 October 31 -  Happy Halloween

My annual contribution to the Halloween festivities in my office.  Turns out it was the last time because Covid has us closed for the following two years and I'm working from home these days.  Once again I couldn't decide between two things I found on the internet, so I did both.

The deviled eggs were supposed to look like sick eyeballs.  They did look pretty good before the color I used to make the veins ran.  Pretty disappointing, but they did get consumed.

 

 This is classic spinach and artichoke dip.   Already looks pretty gross taken out of context so I didn't need to do any doctoring - just added the pre-carved fake pumpkin and a tin of crackers.  This was all gone really quickly - my best effort, I think.

December 10 - the Forty Fabulous Years Quilt Top is Assembled!

 

Just in time for the final Eleanor Burns taping in this series, I got my quilt top assembled and I am so thrilled that it came out the way I envisioned it.  Funny story about Eleanor - midway through the series, she invited attendees to send photos of one of the squares.   I very proudly sent mine.  Then she went through them on the show.   She was so eloquent about each of the photos and described what she liked about each one.  I was so excited when she got to mine, then she said '... and this one is... blue.'  And quickly moved on to the next block.   What a let-down!

But the story has a happy ending.  At the December taping, we were invited to bring our work up for a final show-and-tell.   Knowing that she had not been impressed by my block, I was hesitant, but darn it, I was proud of that quilt and wanted to show it.  Imagine my surprise and joy when she LOVED the assembled top.  Made up for the earlier disappointment and then some.

Both of those moments were 'televised' on YouTube.  If you look hard enough, you may still find them in the Eleanor Burns channel.

 

 

 

November 27-December 21 - Stella Quilt Along 

Just on the heels of our return from Europe, Gudrun offered a Quilt Along using the Stella pattern from her book, Stripology Mixology.  For those who didn't have the book, she offered a PDF pattern for sale on her website.  

Each week, we had a free demonstration and check-in.  For some reason, I felt compelled to take the name literally and chose a variety of fabrics with silver and gold stars.  Mirabile dictu - I actually finished assembling the top within a few days of the last class.  Still needs to be quilted and bound but that's no surprise, is it?