Learning EQ7!

Hi Everyone!

A few weeks ago I decided to purchase EQ7 (Electric Quilt version 7).  It was just one of those things I’ve had on the mind for a while, especially after following Laura over at LC’s Cottage and seeing all of her designs she’s been doing, I finally went ahead and purchased it!

I will say though, there is a serious learning curve!  I know the videos make it look easy, and I’m sure it is once you know what you are doing, but friends, it has taken me several sessions to get the hang of it!

For my first effort, I wanted to make the Little Wheels quilt and publish it here on the blog.  This will look familiar…

But it is not EXACTLY like the quilt I made, close, but not exactly.  What was so different were the borders.  I couldn’t figure out how to replicate what I did manually with the border feature in EQ7.  No matter, I actually like having it completely figured out for me (which EQ7 did)!

Now the fun part, which I finally got to experience, was being able to change the fabrics and color combinations!  What would this quilt look like in pastels?

Oh this is sooooo cool!!!

Or what about my collection of pink and yellow fabrics???

Wow.  So cool!  I am soooo glad I bought this software.  I can see the doors to creativity opening up!

Now all I need to do is figure out how to print out the cutting directions!

Talk soon, I’m going to go play some more!

~Cathy

45 Years Later I Learn How To Change A Battery!

Hi Friends,

This past week has been a whirlwind of activity!  The paintings were due, my parents came to visit, my niece and nephew had a big event to celebrate, our new windows arrived, our gas line was repaired, my husband went on his sales trip and just when you think you’ve managed to recover from that, guess what happened today?

My car battery died.

Yup,

Caput!

Oh why do these things always happen when I’m alone????  Character builders I guess.  Fortunately I had my jumper cables in my car and was able to get a jump at work to make it home.

Lots of things go through the mind in times like this.  Like:

“Do I drive the car to a shop and have someone do it for me?” or..
“Do I stop off at Walmart, Pep Boys, Batteries Plus, etc….and just buy a battery?”…
“Do I do it myself?”
“I mean, just how hard is it to change a car battery?”…
“Will I screw it up?”

…see…lots of things to ask yourself.  I mean, husbands, brothers and boy friends usually deal with this stuff right?

Well, I decided to put my BIG GIRL PANTIES on and fix my little battery problem.  I read everything there was about the battery in the owners manual, sounds I was supposed to listen to, troubleshooting and all.
Then I got online and watched this little video at carcarekiosk (the internet is an amazing place sometimes!) and got in my husbands truck to go to the store to buy a battery.

So off I went to the store to purchase the battery and came home.  I spent some time looking for tools that would work, gloves, glasses and old clothes and proceeded to follow the instructions…

In went the new battery…

Took me about 10 minutes…

Was it going to work?

Success!!!  Greasy thumb and all!!

I’ll let you all know in a later post if I happen to have missed something and my car doesn’t start tomorrow!  But for now?  BIG GIRL PANTIES Rock!!!

~Cathy

More Painting – #11 and #12

Last Wednesday I spent another session at the municipal center.  I haven’t quite figured out water yet but still trying!

Sorry, the photo of the painting is blurry but it is still in progress…

and today I spent a few hours at another location, this time the Nature Center.  There was a lot of ground to cover and I spent a good hour walking around only to return to the entrance and paint this bird house.

A closer look of the painting.

I have shadows yet to add and some ledges but I was getting tired and thought it best to stop.  I can fill those in later.  The rules say you have to paint at least 85% of the painting on-site and touch ups can be done at home.  I’ll let this sit for the night and look at it in the morning.

Which one to complete for the turn in?  Choices choices!!!

~Cathy

 

Scenes From The Dashboard — Robbery In Progress?

Hey All!

It’s never a dull commute for me.  Okay, maybe sometimes, but more often then not lately there’s always something crazy going on.

So yesterday, I’m driving along minding my own business when cop cars come flying out of nowhere and pull into this Shell station!  Ooh!  Ooh!  What’s going on?  A robbery?

The traffic has come to a standstill because the police sirens trigger the lights.  We sit for what seems like 10 minutes.  I look over my shoulder and take this photo…

There are three police officers and two men being frisked…

Let’s see if we can read some body language.

“Son, we need to search your vehicle”

“But Officer, I didn’t do anything!”

move along, nothing to see here!

“See, there’s nothing, we weren’t doing anything!”

Both men were allowed to tell their side of the story and the car came clean.

I’m still at the stop light…waiting.

Geez, look at the price of gas!

…and through all this excitement Jamba is sound asleep! The light eventually did turn and it was time to go.  Never saw anything in the papers about it so I suppose it was a false alarm.  You just never know and I don’t think we can be too careful these days but I feel kinda bad for these two guys.  I’m guessing it was the hoodie!

What do you think?

~Cathy

More Bird Sightings!

Two more birds have come to the feeders.  This Goldfinch came yesterday…

and then when I arrived home this afternoon I put my purse and lunch bag down on the kitchen counter and saw this!…

Quick, get my camera!

Oh C’mon…focus darn it!O

Oh please turn towards me!  C’mon, C’mon!

Nope…flew away…

But I got’em!  The Red-bellied Woodpecker!  A real beauty.

~Cathy

Related articles

• More Signs of Spring…More Birds! (sewingforlife.wordpress.com)

Plein Air Painting Competition 2013 – Painting Out The Kinks for Career Painting #10

Hi Friends!

I signed up for the 2013 Plein Air Painting competition…see this link…and the painting portion has begun!  Can we just say I am sooooo rusty!  Friends, I haven’t broken out the paints since this time last year.  I am soooo bad!

It is not for the lack of WANTING to paint, I have wanted to do it, but ever since my excursions last year and not having the right equipment (my makeshift easel fell over on one trip, can we say disaster?) I haven’t made any attempt yet.

I spent some time researching and shopping at area stores looking for a field easel.  I ended up choosing one and spent the better part of this morning on the maiden voyage to work out the kinks and see what I could come up with.

I spent the morning on the grounds of the Prairie Center For The Arts.  I spotted this view when I drove in and walked around the park until I found just the right spot.  The sky was overcast and there was some precipitation.  Not the best for painting but I knew I needed to do this.

Here’s my new set-up!  It’s just a field easel with my stay wet palette attached with binder clips.  It worked pretty good.

The lake is occupied by these Swans.  They are domesticated and taken care of by the Park District but non-the-less, when a swan comes near me I back away…far!

The photos probably do not do these birds justice but these birds are HUGE!  I mean, their webbed feet are about the size of a softball!  The whole bird is about the size of a Golden Retriever!  Big.

I did not complete the painting during my time out at the park, plus there were NO shadows whatsoever because of the overcast skies.  These pictures actually look pretty good (typical for a photo to come out better due to the filtered light) but live, it was hard to find any contrast in the colors!  My painting was turning into one big gray mess!!!

So, not wanting to spend too much time on a gray piece of mess, I mostly just blocked in a layout.  I’ll need to find another opportunity later in the week to go out again to finish it.  We have until May 10th to finish the painting!

Stay tuned!

Hope you all are having a nice Spring weekend!

~Cathy

Related articles

• Plein Air enables artists to capture the bright colors of spring (courierpress.com)
• Mt. Lebanon, PA. Plein Air Paint Out, Oct. 2-6, 2012 (stephangiannini.com)
• Artists wanted for annual street painting festival in Old Town Temecula (swrnn.com)
• Plein Air Painting in the Botanical Gardens, Good Friday (davidtripp.wordpress.com)
• Why Artists Should Try Painting En Plein Air At Least Once (longdensarronart.wordpress.com)

String Quilt Project – Feather Practice Finished!

The free motion quilting of the feathers is finally finished!

Now I have to come up with a plan for the outer border.

I just found Patsy Thompson’s video here!

 

I’m off to figure out how to do this!  Okay, and don’t you just love Patsy’s videos?  I have to watch more of them!

More Signs of Spring…More Birds!

Alfred Hitchcock would be proud of me.  All these birds and all, though I don’t think any of them will be causing panic, death and destruction like in that movie of his.

So yesterday I’m at the kitchen sink and a bird flies in I’ve never seen before.  I grab my camera but the photos are shaky…

What is THAT??? It took me about half an hour on the internet trying to figure it out!  Turns out to be a Red Breasted Grossbeak!

Rose-breasted grosbeak (Photo credit: stephee)

That was cool.  This whole bird watching thing might turn out to be something I can get into!  It’s kind of fun having something you’ve never seen before fly in.

We have several Cardinal pairs in the area and here is finally a picture of one of the females.  Ain’t she purty?

And a woodpecker sighting!  This is the Downy Woodpecker, it is much smaller than the Red Bellied Woodpecker I saw a few days ago so I’m still on the hunt for that one.  There are several of these Downy Woodpeckers around…they are cute.

…another House Finch…waiting his turn at the feeder…

 

…a straggler Junco…not yet on his way to Canada…

…and I’m not quite sure what this one is.  A mystery bird!   But we have seen a couple of them around…

Wasn’t that fun?  There’s still more that haven’t shown up at the feeders yet so I’m keeping my out for the Gold Finch and the Blue Jay.  I did see a Gold Finch in the park so I know it is only a matter of time.  Hmmm, I wonder what else is out there!

Inspiration everywhere, even in the backyard!

Happy Spring!

~Cathy

Related articles

• Signs of Spring: Birds! (sewingforlife.wordpress.com)

In Search of the Cormorant

I’ve seen pretty much all of the major species of Illinois water birds in the park near our home.  This lake you see above is a man-made lake designed to control flooding.  It does a great job of that, thank goodness having just been through one of the worst floods around here, but it also provides a breeding ground and sanctuary for all sorts of wildlife.

One bird that has hung around is the Cormorant (four are in flight in the photo above).  I actually thought these were loons until I looked them up.  They are hard to get a picture of because as soon as you see them they dive under the water.  Someday I’ll probably just sit out near the lake and try and get a good picture but for now, the morning dog walks will have to do for my snap shot time.

You can see three in the photo above…elusive, those cormorants!

Pelagic and Brandt’s Cormorants at Montaña de Oro brandts-cormorant-MdO_9 (Photo credit: mikebaird)

And to update you all on the woodpecker hunt, a red bellied woodpecker showed up briefly yesterday.  I was too slow on the camera but I’m excited to know one was in the vicinity…

A male Red-bellied Woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus). Photo taken with a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50 in Johnston County, North Carolina, USA. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Stay tuned…more birds yet to come!

~Cathy

 

The String Quilt Project – Free Motion Feather Practice!

While our paint dries between applications I’ve set up my Little Sport to continue working on the quilting of the String Quilt.

This machine is a challenge to do Free Motion Quilting, of course any machine is a challenge to do free motion, you know they all have their little quirks, but silly me decided I was going to learn how to do feathers and what better way to learn than to make them in the sashing of the string quilt?

I guess I didn’t figure I’d have to learn how to make a feather in 4 different directions!  Up, Down, Backwards and Sideways like you see me doing in the photo above.

You see, in free motion quilting on a home sewing machine, you can only work on 1/4 of the quilt at a time and then you have to turn the quilt to work on the next section.  You do this so you don’t have to squish the ENTIRE quilt into the machine head section (the harp section), you just quilt from the middle out in quarter sections.

However…

Since I made my first row of horizontal feathers going in one direction and my vertical row of feathers going in another direction, both being stitched in the same manner, once I turned the quilt…Oh No! I now had to stitch the feather either upside down, in reverse, or sideways!  (They don’t tell you this in the books!).

So far I’m about 2/3rds the way through and think I’ve figured out how to do it but I will tell you, it is not the easiest thing, fun, but a little bit of a challenge.

In the string sections I’m stitching an all over meander pattern, I need a little practice on that pattern too,

and my spirals are a little rusty as well…

If you saw my set-up — card table, Styrofoam and my severely small throated Bernina Little Sport you’d most likely shriek at the impossibility!  But, you know, your scraps are a great resource to  practice.  I’m glad I spent the time to do this quilt, using up scraps, lone spools of thread and getting the free motion practice I needed.  I think all the botched stitches and wonkiness makes it feel real.

More to come!

Happy Stitching!

~Cathy