marymarcotte.com

Tag: customer quilts

  • Quilts of 2020: The Surprise!

    I’ve been looking back at 2020, in the hopes that looking back will help me move forward in a direction that brings my family calm and happiness. Looking back at how we spent our time was fairly easy since 2020 didn’t allow for many big events. Still, Richard and I know how to enjoy ourselves even when there’s little to do or see or have. We are very aware of how blessed we are. Our children and grandchildren and great-grands bring us such joy and love. We appreciate our home and our community. And we are enjoying retirement: he has his woodworking; I have my sewing and quilting.

    Ruby Snippets was my first finish of 2020. It was well on it’s way to becoming a finish when the new year rolled in.

    I accomplished much more this year than I had hoped. I suppose being home has something to do with it. (I don’t sew as much when we’re off traipsing around state and national parks.) Here are photos of some of the pieces and quilts I brought to some form of conclusion. This does not mean bound and labelled, as you’ll see. Like so many other sewists I made facemasks. When I’ve heard of people who have made hundreds of masks, I am awed. I finished about 100 and that was becoming a struggle.

    One of three customer quilts for Anna Dean. I wrote about the other two, finished in August, here.

    My Sherry Lynn Wood top, finished in March
    and the finished quilt completed April.

    I changed directions and worked on a few art pieces:
    Magnolia I (top) and Magnolia II (bottom).
    In June I started two new projects: the Bernina Sugaridoo QAL and a small sewing camp for children in our area.

    Sewing Camp was a great success, despite having only three students. I was at first disappointed but soon realized that including a younger girl meant having to give her extra support. In the end, it was lots of fun and I hope to have another one.

    I also attended the first of two retreats. Members of the Baton Rouge Modern Quilt Guild set up the retreats and they know what they are doing. Yvonne is a pro! She recruits people, collects money, and organizes meals. At the July retreat I worked on a Sugaridoo strip and sewed two tops. I have yet to quilt those tops but they are in the que, waiting their turn.

    Sometime near the end of July Richard and I contracted CoVid and it took us much longer to recover than we’d hoped. As a result I didn’t complete any quilts in July and few in August. Two hurricanes hit Louisiana pretty hard. Though we had only a little damage, the worst for us was probably going without electricity. Louisiana is a miserable place to be in July and August when temps are in the high 90s and the humidity is just as high. Some days we had heat indices of 115. The poor guys who work on power lines. They can’t possibly know how much we appreciate them.

    By September I was back on my game and completed two quilts that had been waiting for a while. All About the Boxes and The Retreat were easy, fast finishes. Perfect! About this time, with Richard’s help I opened a booth at Griffin’s Antiques and Main Street Market. In November I launched this website to have a place to sell my book and some of these quilts. Then in December I attended my second retreat which I haven’t even written about yet and we’re in a whole new year. I wonder what happened.

    In the middle of all that, somewhere, I managed to fiinish writing my novel, This World So Fierce (here’s an excerpt), and self-published it through BookBaby. Since then I’ve mostly been trying to sell copies. Speaking of, have you gotten your copy? If not, you are in the right spot! Click on the title in the top bar or here. You’ll be purchasing directly from me, so you’ll receive a signed copy, if that matters at all. If not or if you’d prefer a digital copy, go to Amazon or Books a Million or your favorite book retailer. Thank you!

    Whew! I was busy all year, wasn’t I? What about you? Did you keep busy with quilting or another craft? Leave a note linking your year-in-review and I’ll come by for a visit. Thanks for getting through this long post!

  • Customer Quilt ~~ finish

    I’ve been so involved with trying to get my website up and running–correctly, thank goodness–that I really haven’t been blogging anywhere. Here or on Blogger. In fact, I’ve pretty much abandoned Blogger for good. If you go there, you’ll find my last post is really just the instructions and links to get here. Thank you for coming! Hang out while, won’t you?

    In the meantime, I had a customer quilt to work on. It was actually a duvet that she purchased and wanted me to turn into a quilt. My original idea was that I’d stuff the batting in, smooth it out, then load it and quilt away. Nope. That duvet had other ideas. Richard watched me (lets say he tried to help) struggle until I was mad, winded and sweaty. You know how I hate to be sweaty, right? It was getting pretty rough inside that duvet. Yes, at one point I actually climbed in.

    He had a suggestion. I tried it. He helped, for real, this time. That duvet was having none of it. We struggled and fought and I decided that the end was happening. But first I’d rip it apart. Yes, that’s exactly what I did. Rip it apart. Load it up like a real quilt using the top and bottom pieces and adding the batting like a regular quilt. Then came the cranky part.

    Can you see the shredded piece of thread? It would eventually break, but sometimes I caught it early
    enough to cut it and save time rethreading the machine beginning at the tension all the way to through the needle.
    A pile of wasted thread from the shredding and breakage. Frustrating when it happens a time or two. This many times? Wow. Just wow.

    That duvet simply wanted to be a duvet. But, hey, I’m a persistent chick. The thread problems were unreal. The screen-print had some sort of ink that simply hates needles and thread. Can you believe this? I regularly had to cut the thread, pull the shredded part through the machine, and rethread the needle. And the ink just ate at the needles. They would get dull and then chop through the knit-like fabric. It took days. And patience. Yes, lots of patience. Then I had to add a binding because the edges were raw, but the binding was the easiest part of all. How about that for those of you who hate binding?

    In the end, we parted company, except it left in a whole new form. And Crystal was happy with her quilt, which was to be a birthday gift for her little boy. Plus, I learned a valuable lesson: stick to my cottons!

    I hope you’re having a fabulous week! Our niece is getting married on Saturday and we’re excited to be able to attend her wedding. That will be a fun little getaway that I’m especially looking forward to.