Meet a Member: Lisa Ruble

Hi all,
I'm kicking off our "Meet a Member" series, intended to help all of us Great Lakes Modern Quilt Guild members (and anyone else who happens across our blog) get to know each other.

I volunteered to go first because I'm giving the presentation at next week's meeting, and this way I can skip the intro! :)

A little about me: 
I've lived in Kalamazoo almost 2 years, and before that St. Louis, New Jersey, Chicago. I grew up in Milwaukee. I'm married and I have two boys (4.5 and 2), and during the day I do social media marketing freelance work. Prior to that I was a quilting magazine editor for seven years I've been sewing since I was a kid and quilting for the last 13 years. My biggest challenge, quilting-wise, is finding time to sew!

About my quilting:
I like to dabble in a bit of everything. I started out making traditional quilts and have played around with crazy quilting, landscape quilting, made fabric, and of course modern quilting. At the moment I am focused on improving my machine quilting skills, so I've been doing some smaller projects that are easier to handle on my machine, though I did get to try out a friend's long arm this spring, and boy was that fun!

Time for a little show and tell!

One of my favorites first:
Last year I participated in an online Color Challenge over at 15 Minutes Play (great resource, if you're not familiar with it! And get ready to be sucked into the world of "made" fabric). Each week Victoria listed a color and we had to make fabric and then make a block with that color and whatever we thought went with it.

I'm in an online quarterly art challenge with three other people. Our first theme was "growth." I ventured into the world of applique (somewhere I don't hang out much!) and recreated silhouettes of leaves I found in our yard. Had a lot of fun with the machine quilting on this one too!

My first Dresden plate attempt, from this past winter. Gearing up for round 2, which will be a Christmas tree skirt!

My entry into the Tula Pink challenge last fall. You could use a pattern of hers, fabric of hers, or both. I used scraps and her "LOVE" pattern, but pieced the backgrounds because what made her quilt so cool was the quilting in each panel and I just don't have those skills! Oh, and I won the Challenge. Which was REALLY exciting!

My first "modern" quilt--a wonky log cabin made when I began my blog. Also my first straight line quilting attempt.

I'm a fan of log cabins. This one is all dotted fabric, and I quilted it in a huge spiral.

My Shades of Gray charm square swap quilt, using three different solid greens to make a Cathedral window-style corner on each square.

Getting ready to bind this one as we speak--stitched for my newest nephew, using Marcia Derse fabrics (love her designs!).

Pantone Emerald Challenge. This quilt was a huge struggle for me. Couldn't decide what to do/didn't love emerald/had trouble choosing colors to go with the greens.

I made this last fall for a blog hop promoting Emily Herrick's book, Geared for Guys. (The idea was to remake the patterns in non-guy fabrics, lest you think this looks a bit flowery for a man.) Definitely the largest quilt I machine quilted on my home machine, primarily with straight lines. And let me tell you, my biggest frustration is how the needle jumps when I stop and then start again!

I had to jump on the chevron bandwagon this spring! This uses an ombre dot and thoughtful cutting and layout.

You can see more of my work on my blog, though it is recently a bit neglected. Hoping to change that!

Hope to see you all Saturday, July 27th at the Plainwell Library for our meeting!
I'll be giving a presentation about what it's like to be a quilt magazine editor (more on that to come in another blog post!)