…is back! 🙂

Again have to apologize for being MIA. Life just runs over me sometimes… 🙂 April wasn’t the best of months around here…(see my blog for the story), but after all April showers DO bring May flowers, spring is in full force around here and it is time to “wake-up”, renew, enjoy the sunshine in your face and grow, grow, grow….Mother nature is so good about all that, we just need to follow! 🙂

Don’t you just LOVE all these first blooms, riots of spring color? I can easily go out for about 10 minutes and come back in with over 100 photos on my digital camera! All of which are quilt inspirations of course… Every spring, this is the color that fascinates me:

This incredibly vibrant, “in-your-face” green that is in all the new growth! Specially when it is either against the gray of the tree bark

…or against the bright blue sky

Yet – I never made a quilt in these colors!! How crazy is that?? Well, that is about to change! And I found just the fabric for it too (yeah, as if I needed MORE fabric…) – stay tuned for that!

And if you have colors/photos of your own that are nagging at you to pick colors and make that quilt, check out this IMPROVED site to do just that! Play Crafts made a new version of their free software, that lets you CHOOSE the set of colors from the photo that you want to focus on – way cool! The LINK I am giving you is indirect, because Julie writes and explains a bit what is the change – just love it!

Have another quilty thing to tell you about. This past weekend I truly enjoyed a spectacular lecture/trunk show by Jackie Gering. Jackie is a modern quilter, one of the founders of the Modern Quilt Guild and all around wonderful person! This was not your regular lecture/trunk show (as wonderful as they all are) – it was 3h long, it was personal, funny, interactive, passionate and truly inspiring, regardless of what your style of quilting might be.

What I love about Jackie’s work is that it IS rooted in traditional patterns and quilts and then she takes it out to play…Here is a play with Dresden plate…

Or a Log Cabin…Block is very much simplified in terms of pieces or specific color placement, but then it can “play” in layouts, shape, number of pieces….Not to mention great texture that quilting gives it.

How about that “stitch-and-flip” kinda block? Here is play with that one…

Remember how they say that modern quilts mostly don’t have borders (or that is one of the many characteristics, in general) – well here is Jackie’s take on that one – let’s PLAY with borders!

I could go on and on…it was 3 hours after all! 🙂 If I sound excited, that is because I really am. I have Jackie’s book (Quilting Modern) and I have to admit that I went through it looking at photos, glancing on techniques…liked it, of course.

But only after meeting Jackie I went home and READ the book… Now I just LOVE it. Much more in there than just techniques or patterns! I will do more with it and about it – stay tuned here and on my blog too…ideas are brewing! 🙂

Do you have this book? Did you do any of the quilts? Let me know what you think! Both here or on my blog

And if you are curious to know more about Jackie and her work, here is her blog.

Promise to pop in here more often and wishing you a beautiful Mayday and glorious, full of color, blooms and inspirations month of May!

Marija