The Senior Quilt & A Crash Course

Alta Girls Basketball Booster Club has a tradition.  A good/bad tradition, depending on what kind of sewing skills and time you have or to the degree of an aesthetic OCD issue you may have. The senior moms get together and talk quilts.  Before the banquet in April, they sew a quilt for their senior child, or beg and bribe someone else to do it if they can't sew.  I've been panicking about this since Chloé's freshman year.  Did I want to learn to quilt or not?  Did I just want to get it done and not think too much about it?  Or did I want to do something really cool?  I was totally on the fence.  Either I dig in deep or not at all.

I can sew.  That's definitely not my problem.  But I have never quilted, not even a tie quilt with simple squares.  And I DO have a mild case of OCD.  I wish I was kidding.  Some moms were doing a t-shirt quilt using old t-shirts from their region and state wins.  Some were just doing a pieced quilt with the red and black color scheme.  Most have their state titles and awards embroidered on the quilt pieces.  I wasn't excited about anything really.  I hate red and black together for some reason and Chloé didn't want the black and red either because she wanted it to be something that she used her whole life.  Chloé has actually worn all of her t-shirts to death, so I didn't really have the t-shirt quilt option either.

Chloé told me to do whatever I wanted, she had complete trust in my ideas.  Thank you Chloé.  One less thing to worry about or try to work around.  Chloé is modern.  She loves feathers.  So I combined a couple quilt concepts and got the perfect quilt pattern for her after 3 months of stewing over it and $65 in quilting books from Amazon.  I knew nothing about quilting.  Absolutely nothing.  So I read every blog, talked to my experienced sister-in-law, picked brains at 3 quilt stores, and purchased an online class at Craftsy.  You can find it HERE.  An advanced crash quilting course is what I did for 4 days.  And then I just had to start.  The banquet was in 4 days.

So, I decided to DIG IN DEEP.

The above book had the pattern for my quilt top and you can find it HERE.

I loved this book.  I want to make more quilts after this.

I got the free pattern for the pieced feathers I used HERE.

The quilt strips alone took me several hours to cut and keep them all in a specific order.

Then you sew the strips together to make 3 long pieced strips.

I took the three finished pieces and sewed those together

Then I pieced the borders to the 3 finished strips

Took a break from the quilt top to create the back, these strips made up the feathers.

Four hawk feathers: One for each year she participated in basketball at Alta High.

The finished quilt back

I named each year with a title 

Ready for the actual quilting machine stitches after writing in a removable ink all ofo her favorite quotes, special phrases and awards she has received at Alta.  I kept having sudden worries that I was writing in a permanent marker.  Each time to check and make sure it dissolves in the ironing.  Each strip represented one of 3 main areas of her life:  Spiritual, Academic & Physical.  There are personal messages just for Chloé that only she will really understand throughout the quilt in an ivory thread and prominent quotes, awards and accomplishements are stitched in a grey thread.

 This is a sampling of the free hand quilting I did.  A quote that I used all the way around the perimeter of the quilt was by Marianne Williamson that we have used as our family mantra since the older girls were in junior high after seeing the movie Akeelah and the Bee.  Every child should see this movie.  We loved it and we loved the complete text after finding out where it originated.  See here for the full document.

I had 95% of it complete by the banquet.  And two months later, I still have 95% of it complete.  I need to finish this by graduation on Tuesday.  It's the project hanging over my head.  So I promised myself for graduation it would be done.  Procrastinator me.  My Monday post will be sharing the finished quilt.  It may be a 11:59 pm publish time, but I will post it.

Girl. Scouts. Honor.

Queen {of LDS Temple Art} Elsa : She Brings Back Summer

Elsa Ferre * 17 years old

Have I ever mentioned my daughter Elsa paints?  She loves to do ink & watercolor architecture and landscapes.  She plans to serve a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in a few years, and so last summer she decided she would paint LDS temples to sell along with my hand lettered prints at Swiss Days of Midway, Utah.  After her big debut last August, she then came home and set up her Etsy shop at elsa1design all by herself, keep in mind, she was 16 at the time.  By the first week of October she had 13 of her temple prints listed in the shop.  Her excitement was so infectious, I finally finished setting up my shop as well.  I'm proud of her and her constant self-driven actions to accomplish her goals.  Go check her out, and if you like something you see, treat yourself from something in her shop, or she can also paint a custom picture of your own home if you want!  Check out her online store HERE!

LDS Hawaii Temple

LDS Oquirrh Mountain Utah Temple

LDS Newport Temple 

LDS Bountiful Utah Temple

LDS Washington D.C. Temple

LDS Manti Utah Temple

LDS Draper Utah Temple

LDS Jordan River Temple

LDS Provo Utah Temple

LDS Mesa Arizona Temple

LDS Salt Lake City Utah Temple 

LDS Brigham City Utah Temple

LDS Portland Oregon Temple

Mount Timpanogos Temple

LDS St. George Utah Temple

If you watched the Disney movie Frozen, Elsa brings back summer in the end. 

You can see beautiful flowers and foilage all around the castle.  

Everytime I look at Elsa's paintings with all the beautiful color, 

I think to myself, 

"Yea, Elsa brought back summer!"

Fifteen Years and Still Counting: Part II

h a p p y   a n n i v e r s a y  nate & di

t h e   a n n o u n c e m e n t

The names are all blurred to protect the innocent family who didn't ask for a web footprint from me.  But I loved this Indian handmade paper.  It has aster petals imbedded along with natural and metallic fibers.  We used a basil green cardstock as the base with a vellum overlay for the text so the natural fibers from the handmade paper could easily be seen.  We used an ivory with gold edged organdy ribbon and the floral bouqet wedding logo was printed in a gold metallic ink.

t h e   i n v i t a t i o n 

This little machine stitched booklet had the reception and open house information in it with maps behind the text printed on vellum.

Fifteen Years and Still Counting

 Hard to believe it's been 15 years today.

My sister-in-law is a sweetheart.  Greatest thing to happen to my brother was when he married her.  I remember this bridal shower like it was yesterday.  I had 101 things on my mind for the wedding the next day, like floral arrangements and bouquets and tables decorations... but I somehow managed to forget all the to-do's and have a little gathering at my little tiny Sugarhouse home in Salt Lake City for just the girls in the family.  

 The invitation was just my handwritten lettering on a vellum overlay with 

Italian paper as the main border, garnished with a plum luminescent french ribbon.  

 This was a new thing back then, gel pens.  

Oooooh.  

Baby blue ink with an eggplant speckled envelope.  

Not so trendy now, but it once was.

Chalk the Walk

The Great Wave off Kanagawa
Katsushika Hokusai
c. 1829-32
My girls participated in an art event at the high school this past week. I had to run get a sneak a peek before the drawings were gone.  They sectioned of sidewalk squares for the art students to recreate in chalk a famous art masterpiece.  My girls are wanna be surfers, so the natural masterpiece to chalk was of course Hokusai's.

These last few chalkings were pretty impressive as well.

This Little Guy

And it's this little guy's day.  Just thinking about his party a few years ago...See here, here, here but mainly here.

2011

Making a wish for the 2011-2012 year!

A custom cupcake topper just for Danny.

2014
This year he's keepin with the trend and having pie for his birthday.