Elgin Piecemakers Pot Luck

This year, the Elgin Piecemakers decided to close out the year with a potluck dinner at Diane's house. It was just a perfect evening for sitting in her backyard and chatting to catch up with everyone's news. There was wonderful variety in the salads and desserts that everyone brought and Diane cooked some pork tenderloin served with home-made mango salsa. 

After supper, we brought out the show and tell---we each had a red and gray block for this month's charity quilt--of course, I forgot mine at home and will have to deliver it later!

My block will fit nicely in that spot in the upper right corner...

A couple of quilt tops were completed.

Black, red and white

And, brown and green.

We are hoping to get together sometime this summer for a sewing day.  This will be a good chance to work on my UFO's.  I am off to deliver my red and gray block now....

Slow Sunday Embroidery

In September 2013, I went to an applique workshop with Becky Goldsmith and made this little wonky house block. Here is my blogpost about the workshop.  Actually, I have participated in four wonderful workshops this past year and now have a pile of UFO's waiting to be completed. I have decided to tackle them one at a time over the next few months.  Christine and I got together to sew this past week and I added the orange border and the triangle border to my block. The goal is to eventually make this into a little wall hanging.

I looked at my block and it told me it wanted some embroidery and button embellishments. I went down to my fabric, button and thread hoard  collection and found some cute buttons in the perfect colours for my block.

This afternoon, I am doing some embroidery, freehand--no lines on the fabric.  We will see where this goes...  Some of those buttons may end up being flowers in the garden at my wonky house.

Back from Vacation

My husband and I spent two glorious weeks in Iceland earlier this month. This was an early celebration of our 25th wedding anniversary in September. We decided 5 years ago that we should take a special trip to mark this occasion and several ideas were discussed about where to go. My husband came up with Iceland and after doing a bit of research, we both decided that Iceland would be our destination.  What a beautiful country!  Many of our friends and family members were quite surprised that we were going to Iceland, and many scoffed, but once they see our pictures and hear the stories, I think many of them will be convinced to consider going to Iceland themselves someday!

There were several different types of wild flowers.

Lupins grew everywhere.

I loved seeing the basalt columns.

More basalt columns --the perpendicular columns form from the bottom up as lava cools. There were other columns that were "curly" and they had cooled from the top down.

We went whale watching--this is a humpback whale.

 



Interesting clouds.

A volcanic crater--we hiked all the way around the top of this crater.

A rocky beach.

Dried up seaweed on the rocks.

I have not done much sewing in the past 6 weeks. I had a sick family member in the hospital and recovering at my house for the month of May and then we went on our trip. This past week was spent trying to get caught up on everything at work and at home. Christine and I will be getting together this week again to sew--we have not been able to do this in almost two months and are both looking forward to getting our quilting mojo back!

I sat in our gazebo and finished the binding on this quilt this afternoon. I used Bonnie Hunter's pattern, Majestic Mountain Majesties. This is a lap quilt, perfect for using while watching tv or reading a good book.

There are lots of fun fabrics in this quilt--all from my stash, except for the outer border and backing.

Check out the chicken feet!

Green beans and lettuce.

Corn on the cop and barnboard.  Sunflowers, too.

The quilting is oak leaves--the same pantograph used for the shirt quilts that I made everyone for Christmas from my FIL's shirts. Cathy over at Eagles Wings Quilts did the quilting on her long arm machine.

I am linking up to Kathy's Slow Sunday Stiching.