Three Sisters Blog

My cousin is getting married on May 30th so we have been working to finish a special quilt for him. The piecework is all done, and it is now in the frame being quilted. The center of the quilt came from “Meadowsweet Home” by Need’l Love.

It has an applique center with tiny nine-patches surrounding it that are set on point and alternated with blank square blocks. (I haven’t done any applique work in a while and really, really enjoyed doing it again. It reminded me of my fondness for handwork!) The quilt has a nice, scalloped border surrounding it to allow for pretty quilting. I spent more than a day working on digitizing the patterns for the quilt.

It was such a pleasure to finally load it in the quilting frame and see it start getting stitched out! The nice thing about this quilt is that we made TWO of them…. One is for Adam and Gail, and the other is for Jacquie and Michael. I’m glad the cousins will have identical quilts. I think it’s kind of special – especially since they both started their married lives so close in time to each other.

Check back for the pictures of the quilt. I plan to post them when it’s finished.

I wonder what you thought when you logged into this blog yesterday? Was it a wreck? Missing posts? It probably was!

I had a very bad day with internet, website, and blog troubles! It was such an odd and overwhelming thing that all of them went down on the very same day. The internet connection went down first…. Then I noticed that our website was down. And finally, in an effort to help me, my web host restored a backup that included not only the website, but also this blog – thus the loss of the posts and also some file corruption that had to be corrected. It was quite the day! Thankfully, it is over now and all is restored to good working condition. Orders are coming through again and the blog is legible!

Here are the pictures of Carol Honderich’s quilts. They are wall hanging size and were a pleasure to work on.

Our little niece is far away in Central America. We miss her sunshiny little personality! Of course, we miss Jacquie and Michael too, but somehow that little baby has managed, as small as she is, to take up a humongous place in our hearts and lives.

Michael had a cousin get married in Costa Rica so they decided to go down for the wedding and also stop in Nicaragua to visit some old friends and meet some new ones. We are very glad they had the opportunity to go, although our life here is a bit dry with them gone. We live close to each other so it is normally (and thankfully!) easy to go back and forth with each other working together as “Three Sisters” like to do.

Jacquie has been faithful to email when possible. It’s been nice to get the updates on how everyone is doing. We’ll be picking them up at the Chicago airport on Sunday afternoon. It will be wonderful to see them again and catch up on all their experiences. Email is great, but nothing beats talking face to face!

I’ve sadly neglected this blog as is so typical of “me”. Those of you who know me, know I’ve never claimed to be a writer. It is so much easier for me to chat with you than try to figure out how to get my thoughts down via letters and punctuation. But, I will try again. Hopefully May will contain more posts than April did. If I keep working at it I may yet become a faithful writer.

April was a very busy month for us. It seemed there was always plenty of work to be done! Between quilting, we also did do a lot of gardening, cleaning, sewing, and gobs of other miscellaneous spring-time work.

A highlight for us was the CAM sewing we had with the girls at church. Since we have a quilt shop and also do a lot of sewing, it seems we have a way of a accumulating a large amount of fabric due to our own remnants or donations of our customers.  We usually have to put our time into making quilts out of our current fabric, so that leaves us with totes of fabric that we have no time or need to make quilts out of. It is perfectly new fabric that is able to be turned into dresses or quilts for people more needy than we. Thus was the birth of a sewing day for Christian Aid Ministries. The other church families donated their extra fabric and we ended up with more fabric than we expected. We spent two full days sewing and made 52 dresses of all sizes.

It also happened that CAM had a slide show presentation the evening of our last sewing day. It was a perfect way to end our sewing days -with a very strong reminder of why we did what we did. It made us more keenly aware of the needs of people in other parts of the world. And more thankful for an opportunity to serve.

Introducing – Butterfly Garden by Kansas Troubles Quilters for Moda! We just loved the warm colors of this collection. We went ahead and bought the WHOLE COLLECTION. Every single print in the collection is ours to enjoy until it sells out. We think Kansas Troubles fabrics make some of the warmest, coziest quilts. The colors are so easy to work with.

These are the pre-cuts we ordered. We really like working with Jelly Rolls and Charm Packs. They make a quilt come together so fast and the colors all blend and we hardly have to think when we work with them! Of course that is great. Quick and easy! Isn’t that a great way to get a quilt done?!

Enjoy the new fabrics! I think you’ll like them too!

Smiles,
Allison

Good morning! I sent this picture over to Accomplish Quilting this week because they are updating their sales rep information. It’s not the greatest picture because we don’t seem to have photography talent in the lighting department! But that’s OK, I guess. I figured you may still want to see a picture of me at my machine.

I really do enjoy longarm quilting! I took a quilt from a wonderful customer yesterday. I always feel honored when someone trusts me with their quilt. It is a scary thing to hand your top over to someone who has the potential, with a high-speed commercial machine, to RUIN your quilt in minutes! This dear lady, Carol Honderich, is a special part of the history of Three Sisters Fabric. She is a very talented designer of quilts. She and her friends found us while they were vacationing in Onekama, MI before our Michigan quilt shop was open to the public. They begged to come in anyway, and were so encouraging when we felt so small and unworthy. Eventually, our business grew and we enjoyed their annual visits to our store. As change sometimes happens, we needed to sell our store in Michigan and moved – of all places – to the very area these ladies are from! We were so thrilled to know we’d be moving near quilting friends.

Now, here we are in New Paris, Indiana and we are enjoying the privilege of building new relationships and also continuing to develop old ones from the past. Can you see why this quilt is so special to me? Why I feel like it is such an honor to work on?

Check back soon for pictures of the finished quilt…. Smiles, Allison

Great news! We’ve expanded!!! After our move we decided to make a temporary decision to only carry fabric designed by 3 Sisters for Moda. It was a tough decision because we love fabric and we love variety, but it was necessary because of the recent upheaval.

Thankfully, we are finally starting to expand our offerings! We’ve already started adding gifts, notions, and patterns. But now we have the joy of adding more fabric!

I introduce to you – Whimsy by Fig Tree Quilts for Moda!!! It is a delightful collection reminiscent of childhood days and good old antiquity. The colors are the typical softened shades characteristic of Fig Tree Quilts, but yet have a clarity to them. I hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

Watch for the new patterns and kits to be added soon that use this wonderful collection of cotton quilting fabric!

We are wiped out, but it feels sooo good! Thanks to a lot of help from our good friend, Ruth, we’re done with the first stage of the demolition project.

First we had to clean out all the stuff that was in the building from our move. That wasn’t too hard. We loaded the back of our Malibu Maxx (It’s a hatchback.) full of stuff and then drove it over to our garage where we picked a nice, empty corner and stacked it all there neatly. Of course, it took a few trips, but it got done rather fast.

Tammy – AKA Drillcilla

Then we dove into the unknown. Could we do it? It looked almost like fun, but would we girls be able to tear into all these shelves and oddly constructed cabinets and tear them down and burn them? Well, we did! We renamed ourselves Drillcilla, Pryanna, and Sludge after our tools of preference. It was rather funny to see how each of us were more comfortable with certain tools and were less adept with others.

Tammy and Ruth – with their less preferred tools

It took us two full days, but we are done. And it feels so good! Now, the walls have to be torn out and we are going to let the guys from church do that for us…. We’re worn out! When they’re done we are going to wire and insulate. We’ve insulated before and think it’s rather fun. Michael (my brother-in-law) said he’d teach us how to wire. I imagine that will be rather fun too. I’m looking forward to learning it.

We are very anxious to move in…. I suppose I need to remember that nothing gets done over night and prepare myself for a new lesson in patience! But really – I’m very, very happy to be making progress on our new longarm quilting studio!

Smiles,
Allison

Good news! We’ve begun the remodel process and will (hopefully) be in a new studio soon. Of course, we’re just in the very early stages. We’ve done a walk through with our contractor (who happens to be my brother-in-law) and now Tammy and I will start the clean up in preparation for him to begin the “tear apart”.  Yes… Most of the inside needs to be torn down and put back properly.

Here are some pictures of the building as it is now.  It was used by the former owner as a woodworking shop.  That has been cleared out and we’ve been using it for storage lately.  We are looking forward to the finished project, landscaping included!