TRQ and Some FMQ

Right before the deadline, I submitted my first ever quilt show entry to the Three Rivers Quilt Show.  I put in two quilts: Charming Stars and City of Bridges.  This week, I got a letter in the mail that they were both accepted!!

This is the first time I ever submitted anything for a show and it's a good feeling to get in.  Fellow Pittsburgh-based quilter/blogger Michelle from My Life As Michelle also has a quilt in the TRQ show!  And I'm super thankful that she can pick my quilts up for me after the show because I'm supposed to be in two OTHER places at that exact same time.  Thanks Michelle!  She's also going to be showing one of her provocative pin-up girl quilts in Boston this month.

And this morning I got the Designer Bump (it's like the Colbert Bump, only for fabric-related blog posts haha) when Kate Spain shared my Honey Honey quilt blog post on Facebook!  Thanks Kate!

My other excitement from this past week is that I'm finally getting to be decent at FMQ!  I've been slowly (very very slowly) working on my Groove quilt.  As the wonderful Leah Day suggested, I got a thread stand.  Suddenly my tension seems to be mostly in check.  I was really on a roll but then I ran out of thread in the correct colors...

You can see the orange pebble quilting, the yellow fan/paisly type quilting, the green is a swirl that I'm not crazy about and haven't mastered, and the blue is a loopy design.

See how crummy the tension was on the back before?  It's really obvious with the light yellow thread on the blue.  Yuck!

Through a combination of practice, different brand of thread, and a thread stand, my tension is SO much more balanced, as you can see in the loopy blue design above.

I'm really excited to finish this up and see how it looks after it is washed :)

Linking up with FMQ Friday - hop over and take a look at Leah Day's gorgeous quilt.  I can't even imagine how tedious it must be to do alllll that stitching!  But it's so worth the results.

-Melissa