Rugs & Quilts

Last Tuesday I attended the monthly meeting of one of my rug groups and there was some great show & tell. Jeanette was finished with the hooking on the rug below and started finished the edge while we were all there together. Her rows are all perfectly spaced and the squares have sharp corners - I love the scrappy colors she used - the red center of each block ties everything together!

Leisa finished her Tree of Life rug and is planning to put it in a frame on a gallery wall in her home.

Sandy is working on this lovely pattern from Vintage Heart Primitives and it's so lovely! The tiny flowers really look like roses!

Shelly arrived a bit late and showed us this great rug - it's made from a kit she bought from Deanne Fitzpatrick and it's her very first project - she's a natural I think! If you look closely you can see the alpacas she added beneath the trees - she raises them so wanted to include them in this project.

Tonia traced her design onto linen at the beginning of our meeting and got this much hooked before leaving for the day. Since this picture was taken a week ago, I'm sure she has it finished by now.
(edited to add: you can see Tonia's finished pillow here)

I got one more motif hooked on this old-fashioned looking geometric I've been working on for months. Soon I'll have to make a decision on how to hook the alternate blocks - hard to choose!

A couple weeks ago I saw this cute little rug for sale in a consignment shop - wonder who hooked it?

On Friday I attended the HMQS show in SLC and was surprised to see this hooked rug in a display of teacher's projects - nice!

There was a special display of quilts at the show that had creative labels exposed and I snapped several pictures to give me inspiration for when I make labels for my own quilts. Some of them were SO clever!

The quilts below were part of a special exhibit too - they were all the same size - and each quilter had been given parameters on how much of the quilt was to be sky, how much was to be water and how much was to be beach. They were free to do anything else they wanted, and when the quilts were lined up side by side they made for a very interesting shoreline image when viewed from a distance.

Usually when I make a quilt, I will make scrappy blocks using whatever colors I think work well together, and then find something that will do for the border. However, I've started a quilt that I seem to be making backwards. I found a wonderful paisley floral print that I loved and wanted to use for the border. So I chose fabrics to coordinate with the colors in that print and made my blocks using those. In the picture below you can see the border print on top of the stack, and the block fabrics are below that. We'll see how it turns out.

My two daughters showered me with fabric gifts for Mother's Day - they know me well! On the left are some assorted FQs to add to my stash - and on the right is fabric that's a kit to make a small Kim Diehl wall hanging - I can hardly wait to start cutting! My 4-year-old grandson was very puzzled about why I would get excited about fabric - until I explained to him that those are Grandma's toys and then it made better sense to him! Too funny.....