Seaside Stitches: KKB Road Trip

Blogiversary Post 1 of 10

To continue the blogi-versary celebration, I'm planning to post 10 quilts in the next 10 days that I have not yet recorded here. You may have seen them on Instagram.

I'm starting with the quilt that I selected as my favorite finish of 2018:

Wildflower Trio.

This project started with a text from my quilty travel buddy, Sharon. She noticed that Karen Kay Buckley would be teaching in Clifton Park, NY in June of 2018. (The original text may have been in 2017!) It said something like, "Doesn't your sister live in Clifton Park?" Since I'm familiar with the area, we decided a road trip was in order. Contacts were made with the local guild, workshop fees paid, hotel room booked, dinner plans made with my sister, supplies packed, and we were off!

There just happened to be a quilt shop hop happening that week, so we hopped our way from Rhode Island to New York! First stop was Karen's Quilting Corner in Massachusetts.

After a sketchy but beautiful drive on backroads through the mountains, we went for a walk around and over Lock E2 on the Erie Canal!

The guild lecture was that night, but I don't have any good pics of the amazing KKB or the lovely quilters of QUILT North who welcomed us so generously.

We had the next day off (as Karen taught machine appliqué) so we did a little more shop hopping and visited the Albany Pine Bush Discovery Center. My daughter had done an internship there as an environmental educator while she was in college. Sharon was very patient with me while I played with my new camera, shooting every blooming wild lupine!

Sharon spotted the deer far off in the aspen. This is a major zoom!

Finally, it was time to start appliquéing. Karen is a fantastic teacher. If you have the opportunity to take a class with her, do it! She has all the best tools for appliqué, so you'll want all of those, too.

I stitched on and off between other projects and finished the top at the end of September.

I was a little nervous about quilting. I didn't want to ruin all the hard work I had done on the hand appliqué. It's not perfect, but I think it's OK.

I wanted a little color in the binding, so I went crazy and did a beaded binding. I've got another little quilt to blog about where I'll talk more about this technique. Basically, there's a string of plastic pearls stitched into the piping. Every bead has to be stitched around by hand!