Milky Way

Here's our latest quilt, up on the design wall. Each fabric was selected with the aforementioned son and his desires in mind.

Today or tomorrow we'll add the four-patches into the "holes" or blank spaces and it will take on a lot more color.

The design wall is made of flannel stretched over foam core insulation. So the blocks just stick to it and stay put until we move them. Then we can see what the quilt will look like, and watch it for a while. Decide if it's really speaking to us, or if something is "yelling" that it's out of place and needs to be moved.

This part of the process is very interesting and is almost meditative. When something is out of place and the correction is made, I can feel everything begin to breathe again. The whole piece sighs in relief. In any case, this requires quiet thought, long silences, and often sweets with our coffee. Yesterday the sweets were donut holes with cinnamon sugar.

Sew or Dye

So, we do have one customer. We've been having a ball creating a quilt for her. She found us through our guild website. Her son is about to turn 21 and has had a quilt since he was a baby. He still sleeps with it.

Wrapped around his head.

It's in terrible shape. So she wants us to make a new skin for it, and put the old quilt inside a new quilt. We spent some wonderful time with her picking out fabric and a pattern. We're using a block pattern called "Milky Way" referring to her son's love of outer space. Here is a picture of the fabrics we're using:



The son is very tactile and wants the silky binding like you find on baby blankets. But they only make that in sappy baby colors. So we decided to get some silk and learn to dye it in a cool color that he likes (purple) that would match these to bind the new quilt with.

Today we began preparing the silk for dying and making the half square triangles for the main blocks in the quilt. We made the four patches two weeks ago. The quilt deadline is October 31. We'll make it.

We're Official!

This week we made it official! We're a company. We formed an LLC. We sent the paperwork to Richmond, and we got a tax ID number from da Feds and then we even got a bank account. So it's all real now. Not that it ever wasn't real, but it's really real. Does that make sense? We're excited. I hope you are too.

Website Development

Our website is getting closer to being finished now. This afternoon I finished the center blocks for the front page. Yesterday Jennifer and I wrote the intros for all of the first interior pages. Now the hard part begins: Writing the interior interior pages!! We might have it finished this weekend. Then we can begin to hand our business cards and I can announce this whole thing on my other blog. FUN!

UPDATE -
This afternoon I'm also going to re-upload our photos so that the slideshow on the sidebar looks better. This is done! Go me.

One step and one day at time.

Welcome ...

Welcome!  

It's our new blog home.  This is our first post.  Made so that I can see what things look like and it will soon be deleted.  whoo hoo.