I have just returned home from my trip to Houston and the International Quilt Festival. I took a wonderful applique class with Elly Sienkiewicz. This was a two day class called Peahen in a Crescent Wreath. The focus of the class was to learn some advanced techniques for off block construction of applique elements. We worked on the peahen and one of the flowers on a gridded interfacing type material that Elly called gossamer.
We worked on embellishing our rather plain peahen (you know the female bird is always the duller less colorful of a pair of birds). Elly had lots of her beautiful album blocks in plastic sleeves
that she would pass around the class room for us to get embroidery and embellishing ideas. The rose was a padded technique where we would layer quilt batting under each section of the rose using just one fabric and quilting the different petals of the rose to give it dimension. When the peahen and rose are completed I will then trim the gossamer to 1/8 inch around the applique and because it is so thin, it will easily be tucked under the applique as I sew it onto the background. We also worked on adding inking to our blocks. Elly has beautiful lettering skills and she wrote on each of our blocks.
This little bandoleer on my block is only about one and a half inches long and she wrote my name in the banner of the design and then dated it and wrote her name and the words "scripts it" which means she did the lettering. She also wrote beautiful comments in our books if we had brought any of her books for signatures.
She is the most gracious person, it was just a joy to listen and learn from her. She has so much knowledge about Baltimore album quilts and the women of 1850s Baltimore, Maryland. I could have just listened to her for days.
The rest of the quilt show was also wonderful, always so much inspiration and new ideas and products. This post is getting rather long so I will share just this picture of this quilt featuring wind turbines.
I picked up a great new book by Jeanne Sullivan called Simply Successful Applique. This is a technique book more than a pattern book, but there is a DVD and patterns included.
The rest of our trip to Texas was spent with family. A few days at a beach house in Galveston with the cutest grand child in the world.
I am appliqueing with new passion and am anxious to start a Baltimore Album quilt. I will have to figure out a way to include the peahen block with it's very special signature.
Happy Stitching All,
Cheri
The next quilt was by Liz Jones from Herefordshire, United Kingdom (it really is an INTERNATIONAL quilt festival) 
and her applique method was the satin stitch,
beautiful work.
I thought it was interesting the quilter divided the block in quarters and did simple parallel quiting lines in different directions on opposing quarters. 
The feather quilting with the flower motif corner stones was a good hiding effect over the block seam lines. The applique background was a dual line cross hatch
I really like traditional applique quilts and was happy to see this red and green four block applique quilt. The quilting does not show well
but there were feather motifs surrounded by echo quilting.
I did not get the picture of the entire quilt on 
this next one, but I was so glad to see that just a simple stipple is still used as the background.
In conclusion, as I work on two applique album quilts and wonder how I am going to quilt them, I have decided you can not go wrong with the classics: cross hatch, echo, or stipple, but a few feathers or other quilting motifs thrown in for interest is always fun. 
Happy Stitching All
My husband came home from work today to the above scene and the first thing he said was "two rooms in the house are not enough for the quilting?" We are empty nesters so quilting has taken over a bit. One of our bedrooms is my sewing room with cutting table, fabric storage, and sewing machine. Then a year or so ago I started a long arm business and took over the lower level 12 X 28 foot family room for that. Today however I was going thru all my bright fabrics and pulling out pieces for Roseville Album, most of whose applique pieces are fussy cut and I got hooked on this old movie we had recorded. The television with the DVR recorder is in the living room so...I just moved the whole project out there. 
I did work this week on Lorrie's cute little spring quilt. She wanted some custom quilting done like I had done on the Civil War Bride Quilt, stippling with a few little dragonflies and other creatures mixed in:
and a bit of stencil work in the borders:
It was a fun little quilt to work on and has looked very cute in my spare bedroom waiting to be picked us this weekend. 
Yea, International Quilt Festival class catalog! I have been pouring over all the classes and finally decided to take long arm quilt classes. We always time a fall trip to visit my son and his family in Houston during the quilt festival. 
quilts that were in the show. The echo quilting was just outstanding, I think it is one of the hardest types of quilting.
I also tend to migrate to the more traditional quilts
and I spotted this one way across the convention floor and liked the colors. On closer inspection I was astounded to see all these little pieced log
cabin squares, probably about 1/4 inch logs. 
called True Cut by the Grace quilting frames company. There was an electric model and a model that just required running your rotary cutter against the sharpening stones that were set in a wood block.
The Roxanne's glue people also had a new container for their glue that I use all the time in applique, it is a sort of accordion bottle and a new cap for the needle that keeps it air tight and is not suppose to need cleaning of the needle dispenser.
best of show quilt by Sharon Shamber showing her amazing quilting and applique.
This is her third best of show at the International Quilt Festival in Houston. What a talented quilter she is.