(For the Online Quilt festival, I linked to this posting. I had grown a lot in my art by the time I made Dahlia Festival, and I am very happy with the quilt. However, another quilt might be my real favorite because of the meaningful subject. I made a quilt honoring my father for the 2007 Journal Quilt Project. You can see it pictured on my November 2, 2007, posting.)

This is probably my favorite quilt; it's called Dahlia Festival. I printed photos I had taken at a dahlia festival in Oregon. I printed the flowers and leaves on a variety of silk fabrics--chiffon, charmmeuse, satin, crepe. The hardest part was arranging the flowers in a pleasing manner. I eventually stitched a piece of green upholstery trim on the background, following the Fibonacci pattern (think nautilus), and placed the flowers and leaves along the trim. I quilted it freehand, the background in a pattern of leaves; then I sewed French knots and beads on the flowers.

The quilt makes me happy, not only because of the cheerful colors and theme, but because it reminds me of the lovely day I had with my sister Janet, my brother-in-law Scott, and Scott's cousin Dirk. It was a beautiful day, which we topped off with a delicious slice of marionberry pie.

I am still spending a lot of time working on my website. I keep changing the colors and pictures and haven't posted it yet with the newest changes. I have also been organizing the photos on my computer (this has taken many hours, too) so that I can find the images that I want to include. This one is 8"x10". The fabrics are 95% my own hand-painted and/or dyed, and includes beads and some machine work. It is representative of a photo I took on Martha's Vineyard of a huge garden of black-eyed Susans.

I spent many hours today working on my website. I didn't like the original look and layout, and when I changed it, I lost everything I had already done. So I started from scratch. Unfortunately, I wasn't publishing or saving as I went along. You know what comes next: the computer locked up on me and I again lost all I had done. You'd think I would know better; when I taught computer classes, my mantra was, "Save, save save. Back up, back up, back up."

Please check out the site (although it will be changing more--a lot more). http://www.fiberartbyruthanne.com/

The quilt picured is my "65 Roses" quilt, the one I donated to a silent auction last summer at the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation gala. I made it in honor of my two grandchildren, and when the bidding was not

going anywhere, I bid on it myself and now own it. About half of the blocks were made by members of the former Scrap Club sub-group of the Shoreline Quilters Guild.

Click on the image to see the roses.