Kari's Creations and Musings

  One of the very best things about quilting are the friends you make along this creative journey. Just as there are always new techniques and skills to learn, and new quilts to make, so, too are there new friends and new adventures to enrich your quilting experience. With more free time in retirement, I’ve gotten to spend more time with quilting friends both far and wide – and I’ve picked up several quilting projects along the way!   During a guild retreat in January, friends Sonya O. and Debbie L. were working on a fabulous quilt called Morningside designed by Chris Schulte of Green Light Quilts in Nashville. The bird houses and flowers, and the colors are so amazing and fun! Well I bought the pattern (but haven’t started it yet!). But, I took it one step further by reaching out to Chris about speaking at a meeting of Heritage Quilters of Huntsville (I’m the Program VP). So, now I have a pattern to start working on very soon and a contract for Chris to speak at our Octob...

  Now, it’s time to finally share with you my new sewing space. I am very fortunate to be able to go from a sewing room to a sewing studio that includes two rooms and more space for creating and sewing and quilting. Making this big move was one of the main goals of my first year of retirement.   For the past 10 years, my daughter’s old bedroom has been my sewing room (prior to that it was our tiny bedroom under the eaves). Needless to say, I had a very “cozy” sewing room with lots of stuff everywhere. For the a few years now, I’ve been wanting to expand my sewing room, taking over a small TV room over the garage and expanding the room with an addition to the house. But that’s an expensive idea!  One of my friends – Joanie – visited one day and I showed her the upstairs TV room and told her what I wanted to do. She looked at that tiny bedroom under the eaves that is adjacent to the TV room (and that was my first sewing room) and said “Why don’t you add this room to y...

You may be wondering about now when I’m going to get around to my quilting! Let me invite you into my quilting studio and share with you what I’ve just finished and a few projects I'm working right now. I just finished machine quilting a monster quilt known as Lick It, Stick It, Send It. The quilt is made up of 1-inch postage stamp squares sewn into two different blocks. In 2020, members of my stitch group -- Stitchers Etc. -- did a block swap for this quilt. Its great for block swap because its charm is in the variety of fabrics in the quilt. Swapping with other quilters is a great way to increase variety. The quilt was first made by three of our members – Suzie, Cheryl and Maria – who collaborated on their versions of Lick It as part of a Collaboration Challenge that we did through HQH when I was guild president in 2018-19. Members of Stitchers loved it so much that we soon collaborated on making blocks for each other. There are two different blocks in the quilt that are used to ...