DNA quilt

This is a quilt I made last year as a wedding gift for my collaborative teacher in Biology. The blue/green things with orange dots are supposed to be cells and the other motifs are supposed to be the double helix with sugar, phosphates and nitrogen bases. I guess you have to be a science teacher to appreciate it. I've been having trouble logging in to my blog to post lately. I hope I got it resolved today.

I saw this one block wonder quilt today on Google Images and it made me want to make another. We did this a few years ago on National Day of Quilting with my guild The Common Threads Quilters. I really like the swirl in the center. It reminds me of a yin yang which is one of my favorite graphic symbols. The picture below is the top of my one block wonder. It is currently on a bed at the beach house. Thank goodness all my quilts were upstairs in the hurricane or they would have gone out to the curb with all the other first floor stuff that had to be trashed.

Athena's Puzzle layout complete

This is the final layout I settled on. I tried to keep the blocks with bright colors and high contrast in the center and the more neutral blocks to the edges to serve as a sort of background. I even made blocks with almost no contrast specially for the setting triangles. Assembling this is even more challenging than doing the blocks. They are simple to sew but orientation is everything! I have become very efficient at ripping out and resewing wonky blocks!

Athena's Puzzle Blocks

This is the latest project I'm working on. My quilt guild gave me a pack of batik strips and I found this block on Google images. It looks pretty impressive but it's really just a log cabin type block which is the first quilt block I ever made. Getting this preselected set of strips forced me to use colors I normally wouldn't choose and put them altogether. It's hard but good for you to go out of your comfort zone!

Kelly's annual WEF adventure

My daughter Kelly traveled to Palm Beach again this year to show at the Winter Equestrian Festival. She leased this horse named Elliot for the weekend. I always love the pictures with the palm trees in the background but this one with the tiki hut jump standards is definitely a winner!

Hot Color Kaleidoscopes

I finally finished another kaleidoscope quilt. I thought I had these out of my system, but every time I see a fabric with a big print and colors I like, I start wondering what the blocks from that fabric would look like. I love paisley prints and they are the best for making cool kaleidoscope blocks. This is the first post I am doing from my cool, new techie toy, an IPad. Everyday I discover some other way to use it with my students. It is definitely the academic tool of the future especially for students with learning disabilities. The k-scope quilt along with the mystery quilt and the DNA quilt will be in my guild's show next weekend.

Blogging From My IPad

It has been a long time! I finally got squared away with accessing my blog from my IPad so finally I can post again. So much happened since my last post, mainly Hurricane Sandy. All the sewing and decorating I was planning for the Point Pleasant house is in limbo. The first floor has been gutted and most of the furniture tossed due to a foot and a half of water in the house. I keep reminding myself that many people are still homeless and have lost everything. I took everything I could up to the second floor of the house the day before the storm hit. It won't happen right away but right now I think the ultimate fate of the house will be to get torn down by someone who will build a huge house on the lot since it is on the water. I guess we will focus on making it livable until my family decides it isn't worth hanging onto. This is my most recently completed quilt. It was made for my nephew Gary and his wife Sarah's new baby girl named Payton.