Erica's Stitches

I first did this quilt in the late 90's.  It was my first quilt with a shape besides a square. At the time "Quilt in a Day" was on PBS early on Saturday mornings.  I was amazed at how simple the complicated blocks were to piece and it gave me confidence to try a more complicated quilt.  As, I remember, the show was of star blocks.  I found that book at the quilt store but I liked the Pioneer Sampler better. My first pioneer sampler was made with 30's style fabric I purchased on sale.  I liked the fabric when I saw it and was afraid if I didn't get it I would never be able to find any again.  I'm happy to report that 15+ years later you can still get 30's fabric - so much for it being a fad.  The quilt lived on the couch and was used when watching TV on cold nights.  I don't even have a picture of it any more. I still use the techniques from the book for piecing half square triangles and flying geese.  The calendar pages in the books w

I made my first pattern based on a scanned photo with the help of software.  This hardy columbine was burned to the ground, quickly grew back and was flowering within a month. The first step was to crop the photograph and brighten the colors.  After importing into  PC Stitch , I spent hours tweaking the number of stitches and colors trying to come up with a stitchable pattern.   The software couldn't deal with the center of the flower (the yellow part) at all and I had to manually fix it.  Except for the yellow, the colors all came from the software and they are perfect.  Every shade of purple I have was used. With too few colors it was an unrecognizable blob and with too many colors the pattern was impossible.  I ended up manually reducing the colors until I thought I could handle stitching it.  I was tempted to give up, but I loved how the pattern was turning out so I kept at it. I think that there are still too many color changes, but the pattern is small so I