RAIN GARDEN sold at International Quilt Festival

I received a notice yesterday that my quilt RAIN GARDEN had been purchased at the International Quilt Festival in Houston. I feel honored that someone loved it enough to take it home! The idea for the piece came from my husband's plans to create a rain garden in our backyard. Since this quilt was finished our rain garden has made great progress. It is full of native plants that like lots of water and promises to be a thing of beauty next summer.

CALAMITY JANE

I've just completed another pet portrait. Calamity Jane is the beloved pet of a friend's daughter and she commissioned this portrait as a gift for her. This was a challenging piece since the dog is primarily one color but some highlights and shadows in the original picture helped.

My quilt label includes the original picture of the dog. She had been swimming and was wet and happy.

I've received a couple of excellent books recently that are of great assistance as I work to improve my skills using Photoshop Elements. The first is "Next Steps in Altered Photo Artistry" by Beth Wheeler. The book is well-written and well-organized and is a real asset if you like to manipulate photos. The other is "Artistic Photo Quilts" by Charlotte Ziebarth. This book gets into some more technical operations to alter photos and is very useful. Both books are focused on printing photos on fabric which is not my aim. But they are wonderful in helping to develop a picture into an inspiration for a quilt.