Special Quilt Exhibit: Infinite Variety

As a general rule, I take all the photos for my blog, but today I am making a special exception.

My friend, Janneken Smucker, emailed me the above photo of the quilt installation she visited.

The quilts are red, but I am green with envy that I didn't see them in person.

This amazing exhibit, Infinite Variety: Three Centuries of Red and White Quilts, runs through today 3/30/2011, and is located at the American Quilt Museum in New York City (Park Avenue Armory).

If you don't happen to live around the corner from there, I noticed there is a flickr set of over 500 photos that visitors have posted here. Probably not as good as actually being there, but worth a look all the same.

If you do live in NYC, I would think that you are already putting on your coat to head on over to this.

Thank you Janneken for tipping us off to this awesome show and for sharing your photo. For those of you who don't know Janneken yet, she is an amazing young woman who is perhaps one of the worlds leading experts on Amish Quilt history. Check out her book here on Amish Crib Quilts.

Liberty of London - in Japanese!

I could not resist this book when I was at Kinokuniya the other day.

ISBN978-4-7966-7826-1: It came with a little plastic bag with handles. I think it would be good for small projects. It was a bit on the plastic stinky side though, so I am going to air it out first!

Photos include swatches of current fabrics, photos of models wearing garments made of their fabrics, and stories about the fabric designers.

Brian Wildsmith designed a fabric for Liberty that includes old airplanes. Oh, I need to figure out how to get some of that. If you have seen it around, let me know.

My love of Liberty of London Fabrics has lead me to collect them over the years. I have lots of little bits and pieces now and I am almost to take a deep breath and introduce them to my scissors.

Have you ever made a quilt out of their fabric, or sewn up something? I would love to see your photos!

Corned Beef & Green Mac-n-Cheese

On St. Paddy's day we usually try to do something festive.

This year, I was frankly....just tired.

My husband ended up cooking the entire very traditional corned beef and cabbage meal complete with un-traditional mac-n-cheese dyed green.

Kids loved it.

I also learned that corned beef is usually pink due to the preservatives in the meat. Who knew. I also learned that 'corned' is actually from the English reference to kernels of salt used to brine the beef.

Who Knew!

Hope the wind was at your back today - here's a big Slainte! (Cheers!) from me to you.

Butterflies in my head

I have been fitting in some spinning and quilting here and there, and managed to cast on a new knit scarf as well (and promptly frogged it both times). Eeek.

I was surfing around and saw a few blog posts entries that started with "My favorite thing to do at home is..." and that got me thinking about what my favorite thing would be. There are so many it would be hard to narrow it down to one. I might be tempted to answer ..."assemble Lego sets" but maybe I should think on it a bit more.

In other news, some people get butterflies in their stomach but I seem to have them on my brain.

Have you seen this awesome butterfly quilt tutorial by Mrs. Schmenkman? Sooo cool.


I am not sure if I am allowed to blog about the person who I am thinking of making some sort of a butterfly quilt for....but she is due to arrive this summer. She isn't mine of course, well...not directly at least.

More on that later. I must flutter off and help with homework.

Japanese taupe fabrics & wishes for Japan

Showing a photo of some fabrics that I recently got from Verb.

They are all imports from Japan.

Reading many headlines about their recent earthquake and the loss left behind.

When you live in California, like I do, you understand the impact they can have. Cannot help feel for families touched by this horrible natural disaster.

Thinking thoughts of recovery and comfort for those in need.

I went to our local yarn shop this afternoon with my friend Sharon of Knits are for Kids. She picked out yarn to start a new sweater.

She will have it knit up in no time, while I still lack the courage to start an adult sized sweater. Maybe it's because I have so much quilting to do!

Japanese Quilting Blogs - in search of

My mom's antique 1890's indigo and white mini-quilt is getting quilted little by little.

I spent some time with my monthly weekend quilting friends last weekend and progress was certainly made.

Recently I have been trying to look for Japanese quilting blogs out there.

I know there have to be tons (zillions?) of Japanese quilters who work in taupe fabrics, love Yoko Saito, love Chuck Nohara, love Suziko Koseki.

Where oh where do I find links to these sorts of blogs?

I even resorted to translating "Taupe Quilts" into Japanese, copying that into search engines...I must be doing something wrong here. Oh, bother.

Anyhow, my knitting/quilting club is about to come over tonight so off to feverishly scoop some toys up off the floor.

Husband Scarf & Antique Quilts

I am knitting away on a scarf for my husband.

I will come clean here and state that I LOVE to knit for kids because they are so tiny, and I kinda don't love to knit for adults. Those projects take forever.

When I met my husband, I thought - wow, what a tall and handsome man.

While I knit this scarf, I am wondering if it would not be just a little faster to finish this if he were not so tall! ;)

I am making all sorts of mistakes in this project, but I press on without taking stitches out. If you want to see the 'real' version of this scarf, I recommend you stop over at my friend Sharon's blog - Knits are for Kids. Her project really looks great. It almost inspires me to rip out my mistakes. Only almost though.

She found this cool scarf pattern and I started it because I wanted to be just like her.

The quilt in the background is a recent antique that I picked up from Etsy. The seller has a couple other cute quilts for sale right now - check them out.