I am behind in continuing my ongoing series, The Library Stack, sharing my stack of borrowed books from my beloved local public library.
Two library stacks (and a mini stack) have been browsed and returned to the library since my last post (luckily I remembered to take photos) and I have a current stack I will post about after I finish my reading/browsing.
Stack 1
Here is the oldest of the stacks that have been enjoyed and returned:
The book that really stood out in this pile was Faux Appliqué (2008) by Helen Stubbings:
image credit: amazon.com
I loved the idea of the Colourqué® technique: using colored pencils to re-create the look of intricate appliqué.
Stack 2
After returning this stack to the library, I accidentally discovered a new section to browse while looking for a cookbook – the Sewing Section!
I did not realize there a separate sewing section in the library’s Non-Fiction collection. I usually browse in the quilting, needle arts (knitting, crochet), general craft, and home decorating sections. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a new treasure trove of sewing/crafting books!
Trying to be reasonable in my selections, here was the resulting library stack after my new discovery:
The book that really stood out for me in this stack was 50 Little Gifts: Easy Patchwork Projects to Give or SwapPaperback (2018), Compiled by Susanne Woods:
image credit: amazon.com
There were so many projects I wanted to make in this book that I just broke down and bought it.
Another book that intrigued me was DIY MFA: Write with Focus, Read with Purpose, Build Your Community (2016) Paperback by Gabriela Pereira:
image credit: amazon.com
8 years ago I finished my MBA (Masters in Business Administration) because it was an appropriate graduate program for the work I am employed. However my dream would have been to get my Masters in Fine Arts (MFA). If money were no option and I did not have to work for a living, I would love to get my MFA!
Then I discovered this book which teaches the concepts of the MFA condensed into one book. I started the book, reading about a 1/4th of the book but then had to return it because another library patron had it on hold. I am going to borrow the book from the library again when I have more time to read/work through it.
Stack 3 (Mini Stack)
I picked up a miniature stack (one book) when I stopped by the library to return the above stack (are you impressed with my self-control?):
The title of this book cracked me up and the cat themed crafts were over the top (there is a cat head skirt pattern that only someone truly obsessed with cats would make much less wear).
Okay so those are the stacks that I forgot to post and stay tuned for a future post on my current library stack.
My neighbor Carole, a retired nurse, recently created a room in her house just for herself. I got to tour the room on Monday afternoon when I popped over for tea and to share my homemade apple cake (yes I made apples cake with left over rescued apples, see post Apple Rescue and Pre-Fall Cooking).
She let me take photos so I could share with you images from her “nest“.
Creative Space: The “Sacred Nest”
In the April 2018 post “The Toe Saga, Library Stack Catch Up, and Your Sacred Nest“, I shared a quote from the book our Creative Work Space: The Sweet Spot Style Guide to Home Office + Studio Decor by Desha Peacock from the section “Your Sacred Nest: Everyone Needs a Creative Sweet Spot Space“:
A mother bird doesn’t complain that she doesn’t have time or space to create her nest, she just makes do with the resources available to her at the time…Her job is not finished when the nest is built. She still needs to protect it until her babies are strong enough to go out on their own…think of what would happen if the momma bird neglected to actually build the nest because she couldn’t find the perfect materials. Don’t let your creativity suffer or, worse, die because you can’t find the perfect lamp…don’t worry if it’s not perfect. Use the resources you have around you and allow them to blossom with age and use.
Carole’s Nest
Carole’s home looks like it was ripped from the pages of the magazine Country Living. She has a wonderful sense of style.
When you first arrive at her home, here is what greets you at her her front door. In addition to her front door, her front porch always has seasonal decor:
Carole has a three bedroom home and previously one bedroom was the master bedroom, one bedroom was her husband’s office (he is a consultant), and the third bedroom was the traditional guest bedroom.
Carole has adult children and adult grandchildren that live out of state and visit occasionally, however she realized that a high quality blow up mattress (that can be kept out of sight when she did not have visitors) would work for their visits. So she was able to get rid of the bed in the guest room, open up the space and create her Sacred Nest!
Decorated with antiques and country charm, here is a photo tour of her room:
The table in the middle of the room has leaves and opens up to a fairly large table that provides room for laying out a quilt or other projects needing additional space. When she has overnight visitors, she moves the table and sets up the air mattress in the middle of the room for the guests.
She has many sweet items in the room, many tied to special memories. Next to her sewing machine she has a little metal drawer cabinet her husband made in high school shop class 60 years ago!
Oh and I made this little pillow that hangs on her armoire a couple years ago for her as a Christmas present:
Here husband also loves her room and is amazed with the warm cozy and inviting feel to the room. He even invited himself over to hang out in her room and watch a movie with her!
Do you have your own nest/sacred space in your home – a room of your own?
Postscript
I’ve featured Carole’s decorating talents in a previous post from December 2016 –Seriously Cute Holiday Decorations. Here is one of her amazing holiday decorations from her endlessly creative mind:.
The tierneycreates blog is 5 years old this month! I cannot believe other humans have been reading my musings for 5 years (and have maintained their sanity).
My very first post was October 27, 2013, introducing myself.
I used to have this post as a “sticky post” on at the top of my blog posts, so I’ve edited over the years and updated the photo in 2015, but here is that first blog post in it’s current state:
Welcome to tierneycreates!
Thank you for visiting and I look forward to your comments and thoughts on my posts.
My blog focuses on the many aspects of a “Crafter’s Life” and discusses topics such as sources of creative inspiration, my artistic journey, what’s on my design wall, quality of life, quilting retreats, artistic growth, outside adventures, books that inspire me and all things related to handmade textile crafts!
So I am celebrating my fifth blogging anniversary this month in two ways:
Daily Posts for the 31 days of October: I have challenged myself to post every day for the entire month (we are at day 4 so far). I will likely mix in some reposting of my favorite old posts from the tierneycreates archives on days in which I have no new material to share – I do have 5 years of posts to pull from!
A Blog Anniversary Giveaway: Sometime around the middle of the month I will make the giveaway announcement and details on how I would like to thank my readers for joining me on my blogging journey so far! I will do the drawing around the actual blog anniversary 10/27/18 and announce the winners by the end of the month.
Right now you might be thinking: “Daily posts, yikes!”
I know you all have lives and I do not expect anyone to read my posts daily. I just have such a backlog of stuff in my mind to post about I thought this would be a great time to challenge myself to get caught up (and hopefully not to bore you all to death)!
This post is a continuation of my ongoing series “What’s on the Design Wall”, featuring my latest project up on either one of the small design walls in my studio or the large design wall my hallway.
After fun with Tula Pink fabric during a recent quilt retreat (see recent posts), I’ve returned to working on the Tango Stripe (by Jean Wells) quilt with Kaffe Fassett stripes and coordinating solids that I discussed in my 09/13/18 post What’s on the Design Wall: Tango Stripe.
As I shared in that post, here is an example of what Tango Stripe will look liked completed (except mine is set in denim):
Kristin C.’s Tango Stripe
I’ve completed all the small blocks (they were simple piecing) and now I am grouping some of them together in groups of 4 to create larger blocks per the pattern design:
Working on the larger blocks is going much slower as I am having to sew Y-seams (ick) but I’ve started to master them (if you are not a a quilter and are curious as to what Y-seams are, here is a link – Y-Seams – to read about something you will quickly discover you do not want to read about!!!).
My guess is if you are bad in life and go to the “Underworld” when you pass, you are forced to do Y-seams for eternity (either that or complex paper piecing…) for your punishment – so for goodness sake – live a good life!
A pile of larger blocks and their Y-seam party
I did finish cutting out all the large blocks and they are just lined up waiting to be Y-seamed:
At first I was doing one large block at a time and pressing it, hoping all the seams would lay flat and that I did not screw up my 1/4 inch calculations on the Y-seam. After a while I started to relax and I can do 3 – 4 before running over the the iron to see if they will press out okay!
But the piece is moving along and I’ve already cut out all the setting triangles which are made from a quilting weight recycled denim I found at a thrift shop (the liner of a high quality denim duvet).
Once I get the large blocks finished, I can start to lay the entire quilt out on my large design wall in the hallway.
Postscript
If you’ve followed my blog for a while then you know about my obsession with fabric scraps (a near pathological level of obsession).
Well cutting/piecing this quilt has lead to a nice little bag so far of Kaffe Fassett stripes scraps that will be a fun future project to play with:
I made my first four (4) recycled silk art quilts in 2012 and in 2013 I had them professional photographed. For the past 5 years I had the high quality files of these photos and have only used them for images on my blog.
A couple of months ago one of my art quilting buddies, Kristin Shields of Kristin Shields Art and @kristinshields on Instagram shared images of professional printed cards of some of her art quilts and she began selling her cards at Dudley’s Bookstore (a bookstore featured on my December 2016 post Independent Bookstores (wonderful & magical places)) and I was very inspired!
After consulting with Kristin on resources I decided to have 5″ x 7″ blank cards of my first four art quilts professionally printed!
Kristin also shared the clear plastic envelopes to individually package the cards that she buys in bulk with me so I could have a professional finish to packaging the cards and their envelopes:
On the back of each card is “The Story of This Piece” (Artist Statement) and details on the piece.
I do not have plans to sell these cards but to give them as gifts; and I’ve given out a couple sets already.
Here is how I am packaging up the sets:
You can view images of these first four art quilts, part of my Color Story collection, and their Artist Statement on my Art Quilt Stories page.
It is pretty exciting to be share these cards with special people in my life!
Postscript
Guess what? It is time for my Fifth Anniversary Blog Celebration!
This year I will be offering a set of these cards in my blogging anniversary giveaway in addition to two handmade items.
More details to come in a future post as well as what I am doing in the month of October to celebrate completing my 5th year of blogging!
So where did we leave off? Ah, yes – a couple crazy quilting friends decided to create their own quilt retreat in a rented vacation townhome to focus on making Tula Pink All Star collection sampler quilts together.
One of my quilting sisters fondling her Tula Pink All Stars collection
But before we get to the endless images of quilt blocks we made (warning: it might get mind-numbing for non-quilters reading this post), let me share some of the non-sewing adventures we had during the retreat.
Non-Sewing Adventures
We did not just lock ourselves in a rented townhome for four days of non-stop quilting, we did do non-sewing activities…though some of these activities did involve fabric.
I took Judy and Dana on a mini Central Oregon Quilt Shop Hop over two days. This was exceptionally fun because Dana had never been to Central Oregon before, much less our quilt shops. I took them to the following quilt shops:
At Sew Many Quilts we discovered a very cool antique sewing machine on display:
At QuiltWorks we had a wonderful time visiting with the owner Marilyn Forestell who I’ve known for a long time. We also congratulated her on her shop being featured in the Spring – Summer 2018 issue of Quilt Sampler:
If you’d like to watch a video interview with the owner and more about one of my favorite Central Oregon quilt shops, here is the link on allpeoplequilt.com – www.allpeoplequilt.com/magazines-more/quilt-sampler/quiltworks. This behind the scenes video has a nice walk through of the shop.
We had a blast at BJ’s Quilt Basket, the third quilt shop we visited. They have a delightful and very friendly staff. While at BJ’s, OH NO – we discovered a new Tula Pink fabric line was just released: Zuma.
Judy and Dana could not leave BJ’s without the fat quarter collection (I was good as I currently have more Tula than I can handle right now!):
As if some of us did not already have enough Tula…
The next day we headed to Sisters, Oregon to go to the Stitchin’ Post.
I never tire of wandering around the Stitchin’ Post
While at the Stitchin’ Post, my quilting sister Dana and I did a “Hand-piecing Intervention“.
I overhead a woman tell her friend that she had recently retired and wanted to take up quilting but did not want to do machine quilting. Instead she was interested in hand quilting, but did not know how to get started on learning how to piece quilts by hand.
Her conversation was none of my business but I could not help myself, I had to be helpful. I introduced myself and told her all about English Paper Piecing (see my series of posts – Adventures in Paper Piecing). I grabbed Dana who was nearby wandering about and had her join me in sharing the joy of English Paper Piecing (EPP) as an option to create a quilt by hand.
We even brought over the store sample of a EPP hexagon pieced pillow to show her an example of the cool stuff she could make:
Luring innocent victims into EPP
After our intervention, the woman gleefully left the shop with a package of EPP hexie templates in hand. She plans to begin by practicing with fabric scraps (and hopefully she was going to follow our suggestion to check out YouTube videos on EPP).
Dana and I felt pretty darn proud of ourselves (either we helped someone on their road to a fun retirement hobby, or we got her to totally waste her money, ha!)
In addition to our miniature Central Oregon quilt shop hop, we also dined at some wonderful restaurant in Sunriver, Oregon.
After shop hopping and dining adventures, it was time to buckle down and piece our samplers!
Blocks, Blocks, Blocks
We pieced a lot of blocks during our four day retreat from our Tula Pink All Stars fat quarter packs!
I’ve never fussy cut (selecting a specific section/motif in printed fabric) for a quilt block in my life, but inspired by Dana, I fussy cut the feature fabric for all my blocks.
BLOCKS BY DANA
Dana, who already pieced 10+ blocks so far since our annual Quilting Sister May Quilt Retreat (see posts Please Vote On The Color! and The Votes Are In!). She focused on piecing star blocks in honor of the name of the name of the fabric collection – All Stars (the title of the collection is based on the prints in the line are updated reproductions of some of Tula Pink’s most popular retired fabrics). Here are some samples of her blocks:
BLOCKS BY JUDY
My quilting sister Judy was very adventurous and did not follow any set type of block pattern. She had fun using an old quilt block sampler book and randomly selecting blocks to piece with her fabric. Below are some examples of her blocks:
BLOCKS BY ME
Now I did not want to do a quilt with a white background. Instead I wanted to only use the fabrics in the Tula Pink All Star collection. I decided to create a sampler called “Tula in a Box” and use two different block patterns that feature boxes or boxes inside of boxes.
Here are the first 12 blocks I completed using a “Box inside a box” block pattern:
Tentatively I am planning to set the blocks using the Tula Pink All Stars stripes fat quarters.
By the end of the retreat I completed 14 blocks including these two blocks in a different block pattern called Little Boxes:
The upper right and left hand corners have the “Little Boxes” blocks
I will feature more on my “Tula in a Box” quilt blocks in a future post after I complete additional blocks.
Again, here is the “design sofa” I mentioned in the first post, with all our blocks:
FUN WITH COMBINATIONS
A very fun part of making our blocks was deciding the color/fabric combinations:
Here is another one of Judy’s cool blocks that came out of fun with putting together fabrics:
We spent of a lot of time consulting with each other on combinations.
Okay, so dear readers, are you sick of looking at blocks and Tula Pink All Star collection fabric now? No worries, we are nearly at the end of this post series.
Special Guest
On the third day of the retreat we had a special guest stop by – my friend Marie Bostwick – New York Times bestselling author.
Marie Bostwick next to a Pile-o-Tula
Marie’s bookThe Second Sister is an upcoming Hallmark Hall of Fame Christmas Movie: Christmas Everlasting that airs on the Hallmark Channel on November 24th and stars Patti LaBelle.
Here is more information on Marie’s blog Fierce Beyond 50: The Best News Ever.
If you get the Hallmark Channel be sure to watch the movie based on the awesome book!
After the quilt retreat my friend Laurie (who owns the vacation rental) stated that Marie Bostwick was the first famous person to ever visit her vacation townhome rental. I teased that I should have had Marie autograph one of the walls – ha!
Postscript
As if we were not already having an immersive Tula Pink experience, one afternoon we watched on YouTube Episode 1 of the series Tula’s House:
This episode provided some insight into the brilliant and creative mind of Tula Pink and you get a tour inside her awesome studio and sections of her home.
My blog focuses on the many aspects of a “Crafter’s Life” and discusses topics such as sources of creative inspiration, my artistic journey, what’s on my design wall, quality of life, quilting retreats, artistic growth, outside adventures, books that inspire me and all things related to handmade textile crafts!
tierneycreates 