Monday Morning Star Count, July 20, 2015

I had such and amazing time at the Sisters Outdoor Quilt Show last weekend...  It was super cool to finally be there and to see my quilts on display all over town.

Travel Quilts #2 and #3 were hanging and they looked so... intricate from across the street or down the block.  I guess I forget that I stitched them from 1.5" diamonds?  

I had 3 other quilts in the show too, maybe I'll post about them later, I want to keep the focus on EPP today.  Of course I found some time to work on Travel Quilt #6 that weekend:

and got in a bit of stitching on TQ#5 during the car ride too:

I'm back home in NY now, but omg, I am SO in love with Oregon.  The quilt shops, people!  The quilt shops alone are reason enough to buy plane tix and rearrange your schedules to get out there.  And I didn't even make it to that many (4 maybe?).  It was enough, though.  I came home with an extra suitcase (I had to carry the 5 quilts...) and probably around 20 yards of fabric.  Quilting heaven, I'm telling ya...

I have cut up a bunch of new fabric for hex-diamonds and I hope to get some stitching done throughout the rest of the summer.  I'm also working on some big machine pieced projects though, so I've got to balance my time.  Yesterday it was just plain too hot to quilt.. maybe this week I can convince the kids to hang out at the public library for a while (or anywhere else with free air conditioning?).

Now it's your turn.  Who has been making progress on their EPP this week?
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LIQS Show

This was a big quilting weekend for us on Long Island.   The Long Island Quilters Society holds a huge quilt show every two years, and because I taught a workshop for them in January, I was in the loop enough to fill out the forms and submit my quilts on time this year. 
I went yesterday morning and saw the show with Eri.  It is held at the Garden City Field House Gymnasium which is big airy space.  Everything felt fresh, bright and beautiful. Promise that spring is on the way.  I was very happy that Travel Quilt #3 took two ribbons-- Best in class for Piecework, and 1st place for commercially quilted in its size category.  (That's completely Shannon's fault!  thank you!). 

It's only recently that I became interested in entering my quilts to be judged.  Winning a ribbon is pretty cool, but I have always been a little anti-establishment when it comes to the "proper" way to make a quilt.  I still feel that I made the quilts for me, and I want to share what I've made with a larger audience.  If a judge likes or doesn't like it, that's fine.  It's my quilt, I won't be ashamed of that.  So tonight when I go to pick them up, I'm curious to read the judge's comments.  I don't know if it will change anything about how I make my next quilt, but it's interesting to get feedback nonetheless. 
Here are some of my favorites from the show.  Quilt maker info is on each pic. 

As Eri and I were walking around, I thought about why I love these quilts, scrap quilts.  When I saw the Cathedral Windows below, it hit me.. I like to look closely and see if I have any of the same fabrics.

 (Btw, this quilt was hung behind a guild booth, without any identifying information. If you know who made it, please let me know!!)

I thought about the quilts I have been making, and the ones I'm planning to start or work on soon.. I think I've been getting distracted by what others have been doing again (bad, bad Instagram!), and I want to find time to get back to some of the projects that really spoke to me.  I've also got a bit of gift sewing I want to finish this spring too.  Hope I'll find time for all of it.
Anyway, here is my finished Travel Quilt #2.  Completely me.  No ribbons, but I still love it.  Made between 2007-2014, there's a whole lot of my life in there.  (the border does go all the way around, but the hanging sleeve is placed 88" from the bottom, as per the show requirements)

My Travel Quilt Story

**ETA-- Check out my completed Travel Quilt #3 here**

I don't know about you, but I check my blogger stats a couple times a day.  It's nice to see how readers find me, who has linked to me, and where they are.  In the last week though, there's been a gap, a hole.  I usually have at least a couple hits a week from readers in Japan, this week-- none.  Of course with such tragedy, I can't expect them to take time out (and use valuable electricity) to check in on my little ol' blog here, but still, the absence makes me worry about them even more.  I was thinking about how I can go back to  posting more about quilts but still satisfy my need to talk about Japan.. 

Victoria took this great photo of me at her retreat last weekend and I've wanted to write a post about it, and then it clicked, "Oh Yeah~" let's go back to the quilt that started me off on my EPP obsession..

Here we go.  Travel Quilt #1, aka "Ayane's Star"

See, I was going to Japan to visit friends (and bring back as much fabric as I could carry) in the spring of 2007, and a couple days before the trip I was struggling to decide on what quilt projects to bring with me.  I had a great huge applique leaf thing started, but thought I needed something simpler and easier to pick up and put down quickly.  I had the Quilt Patis templates, so I combed through my scraps and cut a bunch of diamonds. I started piecing stars on the flight to Tokyo and decided that I would make a baby quilt for whoever got pregnant first, me or Makiba.  She won.

I pieced and pieced through the summer, taking it with me wherever I traveled.  I was on a lot of planes that year and so I dubbed it my "Travel Quilt."  Stitched into this quilt are memories of Atlanta (where the bright fabrics came from), Japan, Athens, Chicago, and Fall River, MA.  It got me through months of infertility, the deaths of my sister and my father-in-law, and basically one of the worst summers of my entire life.  I was grateful to have something to keep me busy that year, something beautiful to look at and to hold.  In a way I was glad that it was Makiba who got pregnant first, because I was not just stitiching it for her baby, but also as a gift for a friend who helped me get through a very trying time. 

I finished the top in October 2007 but I had a lot of diamonds left over.  What to do?  Start another of course. 

And Travel Quilt #2 was born.  I wanted to make something bigger, for myself.  And though I've been working on it since October 2007, it's still not done yet.  (In the first photo you'll see it has borders basted on the top and parts of the sides, but that's it).

Travel Quilt #1 did get finished however, right in time for Makiba's baby shower.  Of course I didn't get to take a picture of the baby with the quilt, but M sent this one to me a few months ago:

Once Travel Q #2 was mostly pieced, I cut pieces for TQ #3.. started in July 2010, I've been working away at it steadily since then. 

I set up a Quilt Along on Flickr and currently have 4 friends IRL working on similar epp star projects.  It's nice to have company.

So, that's the history of my Travel Quilt collection, started because of a trip to Japan 4 years ago.. I never thought English Paper Piecing would take over my life like this, or that these quilts would end up shaping who I am as a quilter, but man, I do love them.  Scrap quilts, every diamond tells a story.  A fabric collection and display.  I was tempted to cut into the new pile of scraps from Victoria to make more diamonds, but I think I might have enough cut already.  Maybe I'll just throw in a few...

Do you have any quilts with a Japanese connection?