The Last Word on Diamonds in Parisville

Thanks to my hubby and his Canon, I have my final pictures of my Parisville quilt! Without further ado, here they are:

Dresden Plate Baby Quilt

As I have mentioned before, a friend of mine is adopting a baby girl from China. The adoption won't be finalized until later this year, when my friend will be living in Korea and we will be in Cuba. So, now's the time to give her a gift for her daughter.

I found the quilt I would use as inspiration on Pinterest, but we've already talked about that (HERE).

Using a template I found online for a 20-point Dresden Plate, I arranged my pieces and began sewing them together.

Only to find that my pieces were for a 19-point Dresden, not a 20-point.

See the extra point popping up to say hello?

So, I sewed the extra point out of the plate.

The cream background wasn't exactly the right size, so some piecing had to be done.

Once the plate & the background were done, I cut charms out of the same fabrics as the plate for the border. 

Luckily, the border was exactly 7 charms by 8 charms.

The original quilt had embroidery around the Dresden plate. I just did echo quilting.

And there you have it. A 36"x40" baby quilt.

I certainly hope that my friend will be able to wrap her little girl up soon. I wish them all the best.

REPEAT Update & Back to the Diamonds

A very heartfelt Thanks to everyone who encouraged me in the REPEAT contest. Sadly, I didn't make the cut, but they had a large pool of very talented people apply. The 10 finalists have amazing pieces in their portfolios, and they clearly deserved a spot.

I'm really looking forward to following the contest and gleaning expertise from the contestants. Who knows, maybe with a little attention and practice I can pull together a stronger portfolio for the next opportunity!

If you want to follow the contest, ThePrintedBolt.com is hosting. The first challenge is "Tiny Dwellings".  Huh? Huh? Enough to draw you in??


Okily dokily, onto my BIG NEWS!  I'm done, Done, DONE with my Parisville Diamonds quilt.

And guess what.

I love it.  It's bright and noisy and happy.

And it's done. Done. Done. Done. I don't think I can say that enough. It's done.

Too bad it's raining/snowing/hailing to damn hard outside to get some good shots, so I have some crappy pictures I took with my phone then tried to edit-up. I promise, as soon as I can catch a dry spell, I'll take a few good pictures to show off.

The yellows are more mustard than this picture indicates.

I love the mix of colors.

Robin's Egg Blue Grunge Solid by Reily Blake for the background.

I had to show off the cameos!

REPEAT

Oof.  I can't believe it's been a week since I've posted.  I've had a terrible, terrible head cold that just won't go away, two kids who also have said head cold, a birthday party to plan and prep for, and...dah, dah, DAH!, I put together a portfolio this week to submit to the REPEAT competition. (Contest site here)

The competition is a Project Runway-esque vehicle to bring an independent textile designer into the professional quilting-fabric world!  I really, really don't expect to become a contestant, but I really wanted to at least try for a spot.

It has seemed silly that I'm almost 30, been a lifelong student of art/design/typography and now textiles and I don't have a real portfolio.  I suppose I'm using this contest to force me to actually put one together. And (cough, cough) I suppose I need to start putting myself out there if I ever want to accomplish anything cool.

Unfortunately, I didn't catch wind of this contest until Wednesday, and the deadline to submit a portfolio is tomorrow. If you recall, our computer crashed in January, taking all my portfolio pictures with it. Sooooo...I had some scrambling to do.

I found some previous work that I had [luckily] snapped with my phone or sent to my mom via e-mail, so I just had to clean those images up a little bit.

"Green & Blue, Leaves of Two". 30"x40". Ink on canvas.

"Mediterranean Veranda" 40" x 60". Acrylic on canvas.

And I found a couple textile designs from last fall I uploaded to Spoonflower.com:

Play on Plaid in Butter.

Exes and Ohs in Coral.

And I threw in a photo of my Prince Charming quilt to show that I actually like textiles:

So there were 5 of the requisite 6 images.  All I needed was 1 more.  This is what I came up with:

"Pennies from Heaven". "18"x24". Acrylic on Canvas.

There you have it.  My portfolio submitted to the contest. I'm looking forward to following the competition, most likely as a spectator, but now I have a slim shot of competing, right?