Integration quilt finished

Uta visiting me has been a stimulus to get some work done!  She's on the road right now in North Carolina visiting other friends, but she's going to be back here for two days before catching her plane back to Munich.  So I have had two weeks in which to make the "integration" quilt that I've been putting off for months, in time for Uta to take it back to Europe with her.

I was going through old boxes of stuff and found a bag of fabric that I had bought years ago during a workshop at the Crow Barn.  I liked the four batik patterns in green and brown, especially the one with stripes, because I was just starting to work extensively with stripes.  (Since then I've made at least a dozen quilts from stripes and bought four drawers worth of striped fabrics!)

I did a day's worth of piecing at the Barn before I decided that I didn't really like what was happening, and packed everything up.  Years passed.

When I came upon the bag last week I decided it wasn't so bad after all, and if I were to sew up the parts I had already begun it would fit the IT theme of "integration," because the green and brown fabrics started separate at top and bottom of the quilt and together in the center.

I feel good about this quilt.  It isn't beautiful, but that has never been a problem with me.  I like the graphic quality of the color contrast, and the pale green reminds me of the very first leaves of springtime.  That made me feel cool and refreshed in the midst of a hot and humid August week.

Kathleen Loomis, Spring Growth

Hand stitching quilt finished

I finished the hand-stitching quilt some time ago but never got around to putting a sleeve on the back or posting a photo to the blog.

It started as an exercise in hand stitching from the wrong side of the fabric -- I find that when you can't tell exactly what you're doing, it gives a great air of spontaneity and surprise.  When I realized that I could use this piece as the center of my International Threads quilt, I decided this would be an experiment to see how I liked putting machine stitching (the quilting) on top of hand stitching, which I had never done before.

I added black fabric around the edges of the stitched piece to make it the right size for IT, quilted it, and then added a lot more hand stitching over the top.  Some of the additional stitching was to partially cover the machine quilting, so those lines didn't stand out quite so strongly.  Some was just because I find it hard to stop stitching once I get started!

Now that Uta is here in the U.S. I quickly finished the sleeve so she can take the quilt back to Europe with  her next week.

Kathleen Loomis, Night Garden (detail below)

International Threads get-together!

Uta has been visiting the United States this month, and spent a week with us in Louisville before heading off for several other stops, including watching the eclipse.  We had a great reunion and she got to meet several members of my family that she hadn't met before, including Vivian, who will be four months old next week.

Here's Vivian hypnotized by Uta's knitting!