Proud

I gotta say, I'm extremely proud to be a woman today. I watched Hillary Clinton's speech at the Democratic convention last night and was totally inspired. (Don't let my political leanings turn you away from my quilting. I promise I'll be brief). I wish she had won the nomination, but she did such a wonderful job at endorsing Barak Obama. And she inspired such hope for the future of women. I visited my library today, where they're having an exhibit on Lincoln. Reading the entire history of slavery and abolition and his presidency was interesting. It's amazing how far we've come, and how far we have yet to go to be truly "equal" in this county.

So, how does this tie into quilting...hmmm. Well, our quilt circle (The Cranberry Township Quilt Circle) made a quilt that we donated to the Friends of the Cranberry Library so they could raffle it off to benefit the library. We were inspired by Eleanor Burns' Stars Across America book where each star represents a great woman in American history, so it ties in with the Lincoln exhibit. The raffle will continue until the Election. I went over there today, and it looks great. By the way, tickets are only $2.00 each and 3 for $5.00. I guess I'm pretty proud of this quilt too. It's the first large quilt I've machine quilted.

I did get a half reply from Quiltmaker about my query yesterday. They said the fabric is called Chambray and couldn't find it on the Benartex site. So I did some more searching on their site with the word Chambray and found the checked fabric in a line called Pipsqueaks on the website. Their Creative director is supposed to contact me to tell me how they made that block with 3 different colors. We'll see.

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Quilting queries

Have you ever read directions over and over again and they just don't make sense to you? That's what happened to me when I first started to learn quilting. I would read the Georgia Bonesteel book called Lap Quilting over and over and try to decipher what the heck she was talking about. It never started to make any sense until I took my first class in "learning how to quilt," which is also why I love to teach it. I love that feeling of having the light bulb go on in some one's head, when they finally figure out that they can make something lovely if they keep working at it each day.

Anyway, I'm in a quandary right now, and maybe someone who reads this can help out. In the Spring 2008 issue of Quiltmaker's All time favorites, page 28, there's a picture of a cathedral window with baby colors. Gorgeous of course. But for the life of me, I can't figure out how they made that square with different colors of baby fabric. I've made these cathedral windows before and that's not my problem. For now, I've sent an email to Quiltmaker to ask, but have not received a reply. I'd like to find that Benartex baby fabric also, and as computer savvy as I think I am, I'm not really "search savvy," and can't find it anywhere.

So if you're out there and can enlighten me as to either of these two questions, I'd love to hear from you.

Happy Quilting!

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