The festival is the brainchild of Amy (whom I’m happy to call a friend) and was lots of fun last spring when she first held it. Amy asked me to design a logo and offered me a sponsor spot in return. Needing, as I do, a deadline to work off, I jumped at the chance to to the job and used her date as the ‘launch day’ for my new venture. All the sponsors are offering prizes and here are the details on mine:

To celebrate the launch of Patchwork Folio, I am offering a complete blog make over to include a custom header, 5 sidebar title buttons, custom background, coordinated fonts and colors, custom favicon and ‘email me’ button. I will work with your current platform (i.e. Blogger, Typepad, WordPress or other) and restrictions may apply depending upon your plan level and options available with your service. If you don’t have a blog but wish to enter the drawing I will get you set up on Blogger’s free platform and include all of the above. In order to enter, all you have to do is click the graphic above and enter your name at Amy’s site.

Lest we not forget the concept behind the festival—my entry for this round:

The Roundabout Quilt. I really didn’t have much choice—I love this quilt.

Now, what are you waiting for? Head over to Parkcitygirl and link up!

In October it’s not unusual that by six-thirty everyone has been fed and I’m locking the front door and heading upstairs. In contrast, at six-thirty on a July evening it’s likely that I haven’t even started preparing dinner. As the darkness comes faster I feel a need to gather everyone inside and be finished. I’m not afraid of the dark. Actually it’s often quite the contrary. There is a sure and certain magic in walking one’s dog on a cold December night-with the smell of the neighbor’s wood stove in the air and it seems as if every star in the universe might fall at your feet. But I feel a need to have my day’s work completed by nightfall—to protect everyone from an uncertain darkness—to have them all under my wings. So the days are sometimes rushed. I have to fit it all in less time.

While I traditionally struggle with energy levels and mood issues when there are fewer daylight hours I also look forward the traditions involved in preparing for the long winter. Obviously we have resources available to us that make it so we don’t have to put up enough food for the whole the winter, but I think much of the emotional hunkering down I do is leftover from days when preparing for winter was a matter of survival.

There is usually a new sweater on my needles. And the slow-cooker comes out of the garage (although this year it never actually made it back into the garage). Much of the cooler weather activities in my house center around cooking. Efforts are made to stay connected while the natural meeting of neighbors is reduced. We snuggle closer for warmth. And we’ll laugh and cry and be grumpier than usual and manage—until the days slowly begin to get longer again.

How do you prepare for winter in your home?

Thanks for the great response to my announcement last week. I’m really excited to launch the website for PatchworkFolio next week (yikes – I’d better get that finished). For those of you who expressed an interest in having me design something for you or host your WordPress site, feel free to contact me as soon as you’re ready because I’m working, even if my website isn’t.

Designing the site has kept me pretty busy and yesterday I got a full-day break. I took Denyse Schmidt‘s advanced improvisation class in her Bridgeport Studio. I signed up with a friend of mine from high school with whom I have reconnected through the miracle of Facebook and blogging. When she got out of her car in front of my house yesterday morning it was the first I’d seen (or even heard her voice – as all our plans were made via email) of her since the day I graduated high school (in 1987). As it turns out, we were the only two students in the workshop and had Denyse and Richard all to ourselves. While it’s possible that we missed out on some of the group dynamic that happens when there’s a full-house, it was a pretty intimate and productive five-hours of creating. Much of the day was spent head-cocked, chin in hand, standing back from the design wall rearranging and auditioning designs.

Mostly what I took away from this class was a reaffirmation of my process. It was reassuring to be encouraged and respected by three such talented designers. It felt comfortable to converse with them in a language we all speak and to participate in discussions of style, theory and creation and be treated as an equal. While I’m proud of my quilts, I design and create in a vacuum (also known as my bedroom) and to be told by someone who’s work I admire so much that my work was beautiful meant quite a lot to me. (Perhaps this is why so many of us blog about what we make.)

Did I also mention that the workshop was held in Denyse’s studio? Which is not in my house. And that there were no children there? And no husband. And no phone. See where I’m going with this? When was the last time you spent five hours doing something just for you? Try it. I’m sure you’ll come away refreshed and inspired.

And just in case that wasn’t enough, Niall brought the boys down to meet me after the workshop and we spent a glorious late-afternoon on the beach in Bridgeport letting the already-cooped-up-monsters out of their cages.

I highly recommend taking off your shoes and getting sandy if you’re starting to feel the constraints of cooler weather and shorter days. Come to think of it – I highly recommend taking of your shoes and getting sandy for no good reason at all.

So I became a website designer.

I worked in a freelance capacity for a while and then took time ‘off’ to have my first child. Seven years later I found myself single and in need of a job. I was insecure about freelance work and had other concerns including competing against new graduates who were hipper and cheaper than I was. So I tried something new. And then something else. (I had some success at both of those somethings, and one in particular makes a good story, but I digress.) Still, I keep coming back to website design. 

I’ve mentioned here before that the Commonplace household hasn’t been immune to the economic downturn and that we’ve made some rather large life changes in it’s wake. So work I must. But, like many women I know, I long to have flexible hours that allow me to be available to my children. I hate the thought of being carried away from them on a commuter train or sending a babysitter in my stead to the school play. (If you do either of these things, please don’t consider yourself judged. I’m only commenting on what feels right for me.)

Any work I have is word of mouth and as is often the case with the cobbler’s kids, I have no shoes website of my own (yet). Designing websites is a big field and like everything else, I have areas of strengths and weaknesses. Since I work alone I don’t have the resources that a big website production company has and I sometimes turn away work because it’s beyond the scope of what I’m good at. It occurs to me that rather than throwing darts at fish in barrels (Niall, chime in here on the metaphor mix-up please) I might be better off narrowing down my scope of work and focusing on the area of my strengths.

So, if you’re still with me (thanks and), I’d like to introduce you to my newest project:

My plan is to cover all areas of blog development from domain name registration through hosting and SEO (search engine optimization). I can work within self-hosted platforms (i.e. Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, Squarespace. etc.) or provide hosting and software (WordPress or Moveable Type) on my own servers. I can do small items like buttons and banners all the way through headers, backgrounds and total re-designs, custom WordPress Templates and e-commerce sites and multi-media sites. Of course I’ll still design ‘regular’ (non-blog) websites but I feel that narrowing down my scope allows me to really focus my time and energy.

I’m excited to share the news here first because I have found this community to be very supportive in the past and frankly, I’m hoping for more of the same. Also I kind of needed the accountability of having made a public announcement.

I’m planning to give away a full blog re-design (or design from scratch if the winner doesn’t already have a blog) in conjunction with Parkcity Girl’s Fall Blogger’s Quilt Festival (for which, by the way, I designed the logo). So spread the word and come back next week for more details.

All of your encouragement got me in gear and the momentum took hold. I finished the single missing block, sewed the rows, pieced the back and quilted the entire quilt.

I almost always use off-white thread to quilt but didn’t think it would work here. The choices were clearly brown and gray. Since I thought the brown fabrics were a little more dramatic and stark than I had expected, I went with the gray in the hopes of softening the overall look of the quilt.

I’m pleased with the results except that gray on brown can be very revealing of mistakes…

I got a lot of questions about my quilting technique after posting the Cripple Creek Quilt so I thought I’d answer them here.

Let me just say that I’m no expert and my quilting leaves much to be desired but I have come quite long way in the one year since I ventured out of the ditch. I’m sorry to tell you that the only way I really saw improvement was with practice. There isn’t any magic trick that will take you to the next level. I did watch/read as many tutorials as I could. The two that I found the most useful were Amanda’s and Elizabeth’s. The most important thing I took away from Amanda’s was seeing how often she stopped and re-situated her quilt and the most useful thing I learned from Elizabeth was that I could put my left hand *under* the quilt and grab it from there. (Hey, it’s the little stuff that matters.)

I didn’t have too much trouble getting my stitches pretty even after a few practice quilts but my ‘designs’ were awful. I found myself getting caught up in the speed and not planning out the design very well and never really knowing where to go next. I ended up with lumpy squishy blobs, not the graceful swirling lines I was looking for. The thing that helped most with this problem was sketching. I just doodled my ideas – yes, even plain old stippling – until it flowed naturally and moving the quilt was just muscle memory. Another thing I remind myself while I’m quilting is to slow down. Sometimes I’m going going and I make bad choices because the momentum has hold of me. I have to remind myself to stop, breathe, assess the area I’m in and start back up. I also hum.

As for the technical stuff: I always clean the machine before quilting a new project and I use a new needle. One time I forgot to put my feed dogs down and honestly I couldn’t tell the difference so now I don’t bother with them. Also, (I know there are opposing camps on this) I don’t wash my fabric for the most part before I use it. The exception, of course, being recycled materials (clothes and the like) and then I wash everything. While I’ve found it to be true that when using cotton batting you’ll get a nice crumbly quilted feeling even with washed cottons, I find it to be more pronounced with unwashed fabrics and therefore ‘softens’ my imperfect quilting.

I hope someone finds this helpful and if you have any tips you’d like to share I’d love to hear them.

The pathetic part of this story isn’t that I have nineteen out of twenty blocks finished or that I finished those nineteen blocks in three days but haven’t been able to get the last one done in three weeks or that my brother’s birthday is less than two weeks away—it’s that I have three other projects in the exact same state of unfinished-ness in the basket under my desk.

Somebody kick me in the ass please.

Is it okay for me to say that I love this quilt?

I don’t know what possessed me to stipple so tiny (each loop is about dime-sized instead of my usual quarter- to half-dollar sized). It was very fun, but took a long time and a huge amount of thread. I kept it in the machine and basically quilted one bobbin’s worth at a time. I set up my old sewing machine on the dining room table in the meantime for other projects, because I was afraid if I took the quilt out of the machine I’d never get back to it!

I’ve been busy with freelance work. My current job came to me as a referral from the last website I designed and the client has been a dream to work with. (If only work could always fall into my lap this way.) It’s been a juggling act of time-management and I’m feeling pretty good about it. I may even have a business-related announcement to make here in a few week’s time. All I’m saying is: if you’ve been thinking about registering a domain name for your blog or business, redesigning your blog or launching a website of any kind—keep me in mind.

This morning Quinn and I snuggled in my favorite chair and watched television. I’m not embarrassed to tell you that I loved every minute of it. Sometimes letting someone else entertain us is just the thing we need on a rainy morning.

Tilly was a young woman who looked after my mother and cleaned my grandmother’s house (kind of hard to imagine, yes?) and her mother hand pieced and quilted these.

I believe they were made in Pennsylvania in the 1950′s.

I had them on my bed as a child. They are somewhat faded and showing years of love and wear so they are displayed on a blanket stand in the guest room at my parents’ house and don’t get any use now.

It just seemed like they needed sharing.

Shortly after posting it I made an offering (stage 3—bargaining) and was given a three day reprieve.

Thankfully stage 4—depression was short-lived and I moved swiftly into the last stage of grief.

Acceptance.

Me: ‘I know. And the laundry needs folding and the dishes need washing and the money needs making and the diapers need changing and the cat’s claws need clipping and the windshield needs fixing and the school forms need returning…’ (Are you getting the picture?) ‘But I’m too busy doing nothing right now.’

While it’s not exactly true that I’m doing nothing—it certainly of feels like nothing is getting done. Frankly the reason I’ve been absent from this space is that I’m preoccupied by a cutthroat game of tug-of-war I’m currently engaged in with summer. (Apparently summer feels that it’s time to move on but I’ve got other plans.)

I realize I’m not the first person to remark that summer is fleeting but this feels like more than my usual early September observation of ‘where did the time go’. I’ve got none of the usual excitement for the leaves turning and the sweater wearing and the apple picking. I’m plain sad and even a little angry (at myself I guess) that I didn’t manage to eek out every one of summer’s usual pleasures this year. What happened to dinner outside with the smell of chlorine in our hair? And rustic tomato sauce? Not even once. And camping? And thunderstorms so severe we lost power (never thought I’d be missing that one). And impromptu backyard meetups with the neighbors. Did we do that? I can’t even remember.

As we mark off days until school starts the pressure on my shoulders mounts. With each degree the thermometer dips—my mood droops, and with each leaf that floats by—my heart sinks just a little further into my stomach. I fear the darkness and the cold that is New York State in the winter and I’m not entirely sure I can handle another grade-school related catastrophe. I just want to hang out with my kids barefoot and bra-less all day and… be.

Oh yeah, I finished a quilt.