Los Angeles Modern Quilt Guild

So last june or July I decided to get a new sewing machine, and actually wanted to get a good one, rather than a cheap one that I had to replace every two years. Doing some on-line research, I somehow found the LAMQG, the first modern quilt guild in America, formed in October of 2009 by two amasing women, Latifa Saafir and AlissaHaight Carlton. Going on their website, I found a community of quilters who support each other with the utmost respect and pure love of the art of quilting and creating. I not only found resources for the machine I bought (a Pfaff Quilt Expressions 4.0 bought at Tanner's in Westchester http://www.tannersewandvac.com/), but a great source of inspiration and motivation. While I had been sewing quilts for twn years, it was all on my own with no real interaction with any other quilters, kind of the same as with my sewing of clothing, No classes, no stimulus other than being a fabric whore and not being able to stop myself. I've since made a quilt, and several other quilted project for different swaps LAMQG has thrown. The first one I made was a quilted bag from one of the other members fabrics- we swapped fabrics and then could add only one fabric to create something with their fabrics but with our own vision.

The next project was a holiday one- make something for the holidays, or something for the kitchen for a member whose name you pulled out of a hat. You knew who you were giving the gift to, so you could design something for them. I drew allison, and she told me she had a fiftie's kitchen and collected aprons, so it went from there. The color in this photo is bad, but the bosy of the apron is made of sea-foam green pleather, with white polka-dot ruffles, and quilted pockets made from scraps of the quilt I was working on at the time.

The quilt I was working on was made out of upholstery fabrics, scraps from years of collecing, and men's suiting fabrics. I started making random shapes within shapes within a rectangular block, forcing me to work on my pattern combining skills. I used the circle-within-a-circle technique (see this tuturial here: www.hgtv.com/crafting/pieced-curves-so-simple/index.html), with no real plan in my mind while doing so. After assembling about half of the blocks I thought I was going to make,I realized it needed some relief from the overwhelming busyness and spaced them with some solid wools.

And within 2 minutes of placing it on the bed to take a picture of it, Benita, the 22 year old wonder cat, was happily investigating.

This was also my first exience with free-motion quilting. I followed the lines of the circles-within-circles, thrying free-motion stitch in the ditch, and then on the solid wool blocks, I mirrored the eof shapes I used for the other blocks and and learned that I'm not so good at being free and casual! It took me a while to get the hang of it and become comfortable, and to get the settings on the machine correct. Twenty of thirty broken needles later, I was a little better, but this is a skill set I have to work on.

the great cover up

The garage was converted to an office, which I now use as an art studio, sewing room, and workout room. But- the last owners did it without permits they took off the garage doors, and removed the driveway as mentioned in the last post. This gives us about 400 more sq. feet of living space, but it means we can't park a car in there- but we couldn't even get a car down the driveway because of the fence at the side make it too narrow for modern cars. Well, two months after we bought the house, and it had passed all the inspections, we got a note on the door that a city inspector had come by because even though the last owners had gotten permits for new windows, new electric wiring and circuit breakers, and a new water heater, they had never had them signed off by the city. The only problem was how do we have them inspected without having the garage seen? no garage doors, no driveway, what the hell? So, we bought pavers, laid out a fake driveway going from the edge off the concrete to where the garage doors would have been- making it all wide enough for a car to drive over the gravel pit of a side yard, Then, I covered the two sides of the garage with tarps, built a bunch of 8 foot by 6 foot canvases like the flats from a theater piece, painted a couple of them with some really bad paintings of eerie ghost like doors, and had Jamie outside painting one more of them while I took the inspector around the back and sides of the house to check out everything. Jamie was under strict orders not to say anything cause he can't lie, while I can claim to be very accomplished at this often necessary skill. The inspector didn't even blink, signed off on the improvements, and was gone in fewer than 10 minutes. WHEW!

side yard

The side yard off the deck, next to the oh so glamorous black metal fence, was a gigantic gravel pit for the old owners son to play in. They had torn out the driveway, and poured in a foot or two of gravel. Jamie spent months digging up the gravel, amending the soil which originally was the hardest clay you can imagine, and then nurtured it into life. My only assistance was carting the gravel to the other side of the house to put it in the orchid area. I don't even pretend to understand how he transformed it form nothing to this.......

back yard deck

So there is a deck off the master bedroom which is 12' by 12'. The previous owners made it look tiny, tiny, tiny by putting a cheap-ass sunshade from home depot which was smaller than the deck, and only 7' high. I built a deck cover out of wood and plastic which is the same size as the deck, is slanted to keep off the rain so we can walk outside in the winter without getting wet, and has white translucent plastic on the top so it has shade in the summer, but doesn't cut out all the light. I need to take a new pic in the day time, but here's a nice, moody night shot.

dawgs

so occasionally they create extra work

dining room light

So there was a hideous hanging lamp in the dining room- it was all gold and lots of glass, a pseudo chandelier thing, which also hung down way too low over the dining room table. I decided I wanted a wood lamp, so the first time I made a shade out of mahogany veneer, and slipped it over the whole lamp that was already there, WAY out of proportion in the room, so I found an Ikea table lamp at the thrift store, used the lampshade frame as a form, turned it upside down and hard-wired it in to the ceiling and voila!

more fences

I'm gonna jump around a lot.

While here's a picture of right after I added to the fence, before it got stained, this is what it looked like when we first planted the bamboo. The next project was to cover up the weird metal fence which ran along the driveway, A few owners ago, someone erected a solid sheet metal fence to keep the neighbor's dog away from their kid ( the dog is no longer there, and we have fabulous new neighbors). So I attached wood supports to the metal, and then attached wood fencing to it so the metal fence is now sheathed in wood.

So it now looked like this, before we stained it, which will be seen when you start seeing the transformation of the gravel pit which was our side yard into the garden which is now there. The plants in this pic are jamie's cymbidiums, which will soon reside elsewhere.

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