happy thanksgiving

hello, how are you. my husband's family have arrived early for thanksgiving. before they picked me up from work, my husband drove them around dc to see a few sites. the kids were screaming and hollering when he showed them the white house. tomorrow they are going sightseeing and planing to take pictures in front of the white house. me i am going to be running around getting a few things that was forgottten on our food list.

right now i am working on a obama quilt, that i am trying to complete. someone on the internet is trying to get some quilters to display obama quilts at the capital, so i am trying to complete mind as soom as possible. wish me luck. i know it's thanksgiving and i know you are asking when the heck is she going to have time to quilt. i don't know but i am going to try. so take a look at my piece and have a

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Stitches

yetunde

cleaning house

thanksgiving is next week and i have about 35 people coming for dinner, and i have to clean the house. about ten of my family member are actually staying with us for the whole week. so i have to clean up the house. my bedroom and sewing room are the main two rooms that need cleaning. for some odd reason i just can not seem to clean these two room, when i am cleaning other parts of the house, i will start, but never seem to finish in these two rooms. my bedroom is slowly turning into another sewing room. when i am doing my hand sewing i am always sitting on my bed sewing. i have been working on a couple of quilts that i am trying to finish before the end of the year. the more that i sew the more mess, i make in my bedroom and sewing room.

their is stuff piled up on my work table, books that need to be put back on the bookshelf, fabric to be put away. and i am not going to talk about what is in the corner or on the floor. i even have to put my favorite pincushion away. i have a cousin who keep telling me that she is going to walk away with my pincushion. all my sharp objects have to be put away up high so that the children can not reach it. the children like to go to my computer room to play on the computer, and to get to the computer room you have to walk through my sewing room. so that means that everything has to be safe in my sewing room. now as far as cleaning my bedroom, i will do my regular cleaning of my room, but i do have to put fabric and a sewing machine and put down my layout wall away. and then again i just might leave the sewing machine and layout wall alone. the layout wall helps me to think of ways to lay out my pieces for a quilt. i have a piece up now that is giving me problems as to how i want to lay out the pieces. who knows i might get a little sewing done while everyone is sleep. i am addicted to sewing so you know i can not going without sewing for a week. because if i don't sew there are going to be some people who are going to see how a crazy quilter act. and they will not like me very much. so let me get started on cleaning up and i hope that once i clean up i will know where the heck i put stuff.

wish me luck

stitches

Yetunde

UFO'S

Yes i am still doing UFO's. my UFO pile in the corner is getting smaller. i have done six so far. this one that i am showing is for my mother. i was thinking about keeping it for myself, but i better give it to my mother, since i told someone that it was for my mom. i hope she use this one. the first one that i made for her she kept on her sofa to show to her friends. so maybe she will use this one when she falls a sleep watching TV. i have been busy working on a couple of other quilts, that i can not show right now because i was ask not to show them until after may. i was ask to make a story quilt and it is killing me to make it the way that i want it to look. every two or three week i call the person who asked for this and i tell her that i hate her. doing this project is so hard for me. she keeps telling me that she know that i can do this and that she is going to love it. i am not the kind of person who you can say, i want you to make a quilt about this. i can not do it. i have to feel the creation that i working on. i have to see it in my mind. if i can't see it, i can't do. so for the project that i was asked to do, pieces have been thrown into my UFO corner. if i keep throwing pieces in the corner maybe i can grab a couple of them and come up with something before may 2009. i know that if i keep throwing pieces into that corner it's going to pile up again. i hope not.

this is the quilt that my mother show to her friends. the quilt was one of my first photo fabric quilts. it is a old quilt and she loves it. the two quilts that i showed in the last post, i did find the brown to match the quilt to finish my daughters quilt and i did find a nice piece of fabric for the backing for the other quilt. my daughter's quilt i am going to send out to have someone to quilt and the other one i will get to it in a couple of weeks because i am going to work on one for my aunt. like i said, my UFO's are going to be gifts that are being given out for the holiday. why buy gifts when i can try to finish as many quilts as i can. these are not my art quilts, so i don't mind giving these up. i take that back there are a few i would like to keep for myself.

stitches for now.

yetunde

how is everyone doing. both of my computers were having problems, due to getting a new cable system. hubby got all the sports channel and i got no internet. that was not going to fly with me. they told me that i had to reboot everything and everything would be lost on both computers. i was not having it. it wasn't broke before i had cable, so i very upset. so it was back and forth with who should fix my laptop and computer. in the end the cable company fixed everything. while i had no internet, i did complete a few UFO's. i completed three and i am also working on three more. this first one that i am showing is for my daughter and her husband. it should have been finished two years ago, but i didn't have enough brown fabric. the second picture is a quilt top that is finish, but i didn't have enough fabric for the backing, i was 3 inches short of fabric. tomorrow i am going to a quilt show, so i hope to get fabric to complete these two pieces. so wish me luck.

stitches

it could be Obama

what you think, is it him.

i don't think so. but i did try. i said, i was going to do a demonstration of how i made the piece of my grandson. this piece that you are looking at is done all by hand. the piece that i made of my grandson is machine stitch, using straight stitch and zigzag stitch for his hair. while i was trying to do Obama by machine, i was working on his eyes and i forget to lift up the needle to move to another section of his face and i rip the fabric. so you know that piece went into the UFO pile. i was mad as hell. so i guess i will tell you how to do machine piece, and the hand piece, what i did first was find a picture that i like, trace it onto paper or clear plastic. for this one i use clear plastic with a black marker. then from that picture you trace it onto fabric. a quicker way is to run a piece of fabric that is 8 " x 11" that is iron onto freezer paper, threw your printer and copy the picture that you traced. if you are going to machine stitch your piece, put your fabric in a hoop with stabilizer under it. all you have to do is, straight stitch on the lines that you traced, go very slow. other people use the free motion foot and also have the feed dogs down. i keep the feed dogs down, but i use a regular foot. i have better control. practice first and see what is comfortable with you. if you are going to fill in the hair, you can zigzag stitch or you can just keep straight stitching the hair until it is fill in. if you are going to do your picture by hand you can use the running stitch or the back stitch. they look almost the same. use two strands of embroidery floss and just stitch on the trace lines. if you make a mistake with the hand piece you can take it out and correct it, but with machine the mistake is their.
hand stitching on the line. the finish block.
the only thing i can say is that i tried.

stitches

yetunde

check it out

in the guild that i am in http://www.uhuruquiltersguild.org/ there are a lot of talented people in this group. there is sandy hassan, http://sondrahassan.com/ margreta silverstone,http://www.margreta.com/index.htm lawana holland-moore, jhttp://hahawater.blogspot.com/ jocelyn herbert, and winifred wallace, just to names a few. lawana, winifred and jocelyn are published in "textural rhythms: quilting the jazz traditon," quilt book by carolyn mazloomi. margreta and myself are in the "creative quilting the journal quilt project," book by karey bresenhan'. sandy and margreta are also in private shows, check it out. i just love the bright colors that sandy works with. margreta and winifred are more into fiber art, i love their work. jocelyn, what can i say about jocelyn, i just love her stuff. i guess i love her work because i feel that her work is similar to what i do. i truly feel her work, when i look at her work, i know what she is trying to say. now let me tell you about lawana, i have been following lawana's work from the time i met her at the guild. she is someone who is not afraid to try new things and that is what i like about her. her energy moves me. we also have carol williams who is a long arm quilter http://quiltsandsewon.net/index.html and our coordinator and founder of uhuru. without her there would be no uhuru guild. and their is also my friend nadine mills who owns a fabric shop. http://www.thefabricpeddler.com/ when you visit her shop their is so much love there. they make you feel as if they have known you for years and that is your first time there. so check it out. there are many talented quilters in this quild so if you are every in the maryland area check us out. Cedar Heights Community Ctr1200 Glen Willow Drive Capitol Heights, MD. we meet on the third saturday of each month.

stitches

yetunde

UFO'S

Well, since my soul will not let me be creative, right now, i have decided to try to complete some UFO's that i have laying around here. i know that i am not the only person who have some thrown somewhere in a corner. if i complete a few before the holiday they will be gifts for some lucky family member. i have pieces that have been waiting to be quilted for several years. nice pieces that once i complete the top, i am on to the next. then there are pieces that i look at and say, what the heck was on my mind to do that. i have a UFO that is still in a corner somewhere in my closet that is called, Too Ugly For You. i am still trying to decide what to do with it. there are flowers, african prints, african figures and some more stuff in it. it is just too busy and i don't know what to keep and what to add. i am going to throw that one back in the corner until my creative side tells me what to do. when i look at some of these pieces that i have done several years ago, i see how much i have grown. how i have improved in some things and how some thing's still stay as they are. there is a style that people know i made it. but sometime when i step out the box and do something else they are like, that is not you, but it looks good. here are some pictures of what i am working a UFO, that will be someones gift and a couple of threadplay pieces that i have completed using freezer paper with no hoop. not knowing that i was suppose to use a hoop. the threadplay was kind of fun this time doing it, so after i finish a couple more UFO's i am going to try doing some more threadplay. so check out the picutures, and i will see you later.

stitches,

yetunde