Another Baby Quilt in Waiting

As you know, I like to make a few baby quilts to have on hand in case the need for a baby gift arises. I put this quilt top together over a year ago and had the top, batting and backing in a plastic storage container in my sewing room.  At one time, I had 5 quilts in a pile, waiting to be quilted.  Of the original 5, I have only one left to do. I have added another one to the pile in the meantime so there are two waiting to be quilted at the moment.

My husband was away last weekend, so after completing all my errands and jobs around the house, I pin basted this quilt and another wall hanging.  I did not have the right colour of thread for my wall hanging so this one moved to the front of the line for quilting.  I used some dark orange thread  and my walking foot to quilt this baby quilt.  The pattern is inspired by a class I took last summer with Jacquie Gering--Machine quilting with your walking foot.  

I used some nice soft flannel on the back--you can see the quilting in this picture. 

I finished off the binding last night after supper, but it was too dark for pictures.  I sent a text to my favourite quilt holder before coming home from work today to let him know that I wanted to do a photo shoot when I got home. 

The fabric in this quilt was in a jelly roll that was purchased ages ago. I added some solids from my solids collection to make the blocks and found a nice light green solid for the binding.  Everything came from my stash!

There won't be any quilting time this weekend as our schedule is jam packed but I may find some time to do some counted cross stitch in the car.  I am linking up with Kathy and the other slow Sunday stitchers. 

Have a great weekend. 

Design Workshop with Jacquie Gering

I spent three days in workshops with Jacquie Gering last week.  You can read about the first workshop here.  The second workshop was two days of learning to design the Jacquie Gering way!  We were told we would not need our sewing machines until Day 2!  We spend much of the first day using paper and scissors to experiment with achieving "exchange" (balance, harmony...) in our paper designs.  My first attempt is shown above and I got a gold star from Jacquie for this one!  My second attempt was not even worthy of a picture before it landed in the trash can!  I made two more--

By lunch time, we had lots of ideas up on the design wall on one side of the room.

Next, we looked at some of Jacquie's quilts and discussed the designs, some of which she loved and others that she did not love.  We talked about ways that some of them could have been designed differently to create different looks.

Our design challenge for the rest of the afternoon was to play with some paper blocks that Jacquie gave to us to create more quilt designs.  I could not believe the number of possibilities that the participants came up with in this exercise!  Here are a few of my designs.

On the second day, we discussed moving from paper or craft-foam designs to fabric.  I decided to skip the mock up of my design idea on using craft foam and moved straight to fabric.  I make 18 liberated drunkard's path units and started playing with placement on the design wall.

I have done a lot of garment sewing in my life so a few curved seams did not faze me.

At first, my blocks were too big so I ended up cutting them down to a smaller size and playing some more.

Jacquie and I played with this 16 patch design for quite a while, moving pieces here and there and trying to find a pleasing design.  After a while, she left to work with someone else.  I stared at what I had on the design wall and all I could see was the curved arrow on the upper right corner.   I then came up with this idea...

Others in the room, including Jacquie, concurred and after a bit of tweaking, this became my final design.   I sewed the blocks together and had my top together before the end of the day.

This was a fun and challenging workshop with ideas that will continue to influence the quilts that I make for a long time!  I already have my quilt basted and ready to quilt.  The quilting pattern is already chosen. I just need to find the right colour of thread...

Thanks again, Jacquie, for an amazing three days!

Weekend Sewing

I had a busy day yesterday--I went to the local Farmer's Market, did the laundry, dishes, cleaned up a corner of the garage, had a picnic lunch with my dad and went for a walk in the park with him, followed by errands, reading in the gazebo, dead-heading some flowers in the garden and watering my plants.  Whew!  By the time the evening arrived, I was ready for some ME time in the sewing room!  My regular readers will know that I attended a couple of classes with Jacquie Gering this past week.  You can see my post about the first class here.  I had a few more houses to complete when I got home so I made a couple on Thursday night when Christine was here to sew and completed the third one last night.   Here they are:

I call this one "Penthouse".

Would you like to live in this apartment building?

I needed one more house with a green background and had very little green fabric left so I had to piece it to build this house, "Corner Window".

I will work on a layout for my houses sometime soon.

I also made one more liberated sampler block--this one is a pinwheel.  I have 9 blocks made for this quilt now--there will be 64 blocks.  They are 6" blocks.  You can see the rest of my blocks here.

Cathy and I often FaceTime to sew together.  She is doing a giant EPP project and I work on my counted cross stitch snowmen.  It's fun to chat while we sew. I worked on the snow and a little bird.  I love how technology lets me sew with a friend without the travel time!

I hope for some gazebo sewing time later today to add some more stitches to this project.

I am linking up with Kathy and the other Slow Sunday Stitchers.   Have a great day!

Building Houses with Jacquie Gering

I have taken classes with Jacquie Gering, past president of the Modern Quilt Guild, several times.  The first class was stitch and flip which I took with other members of the London Friendship Quilters Guild.  You can see my stitch and flip garden here.   My next class with Jacquie was at Black Creek Pioneer Village "Quilts at the Creek" and was all about improvisational piecing.   Last year, Jacquie was in St. Mary's and taught a two day "Quilting with Your Walking Foot" class.    Jacquie was a teacher before she quit her job to quilt full time.  She is energetic and enthusiastic and takes great delight in passing on what she has learned as she explores modern quilt making.  Jacquie is a life-long learner and encourages her students to keep trying new things.  Jacquie teaches concepts and then sets her students free to make their own individual projects using what they have learned.

This past Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, I took two classes with Jacquie.  On Monday, Christine, Carol and I participated in her "Mid-century Modern Houses" workshop in St. Mary's, sponsored by Hyggeligt, a fabric store specializing in Kaffe Fasset fabrics in St. Mary's.  We were asked to bring a focus fabric (a print) and lots of solid scraps as well as some larger solids and a background fabric.

First, we cut up our fabrics into squares and rectangles of various random sizes.

You can see my focus fabric has cameras on it!  Jacqui encouraged us to use fabrics with colours from our focus fabrics as well as fabrics that just "go" with those colours, including some bolder colours.

We chain pieced pairs and then put the pairs together to make building blocks for our houses.

Here is my first house:

We started with simple and then explored other shapes and sizes of houses.

This house has a carport!  One of the other quilters thought a smart car would fit perfectly in my carport!

Next, I added a house with an attic.

Every house quilt needs an outhouse!

Here is my neighbourhood by the end of the day.  I have more ideas for future neighbourhood development... The turquoise grunge fabric will be my background.

Thanks, Jacquie for a fun day!   I will blog about the second class later.

Snow in August

I have managed to get quite a bit of snow done on my counted cross stitch snowmen picture over the past couple of weeks.  There was lots of time for stitching in the car as my husband and I went away for the weekend last week.  Today, I did some more stitching in the car on our way home from visiting my MIL.  The blue and grey blob in the sky will be a blue jay once it has some outlining done. There are two birds on the ground between these two snowmen too. Maybe they will appear sometime over the next week or so.

For comparison purposes, here is where I was two weeks ago...

Once I get all of the cross stitching done, I will start the outlining. These pictures always look much better once the outlining is done.

I bought myself some self threading needles this week.  I have not had a chance to try them out yet.  The eyes of my needles seem to be getting smaller these days (LOL) and someone mentioned that these needles are easier to thread.  Has anyone tried them before?  I thought they were worth a try for $2.39!  I bought them at the drug store, of all places! This particular drug store specializes in mobility aids and special equipment for seniors and others with special needs (including those who can't see the hole in the needle when sewing!)

I was out for a walk this morning and met this fellow.  He's a looker!

I managed to catch the right angle at the fountain on the waterfront this morning for this picture:

I will be linking up with the other slow stitchers at Kathy's blog in the morning.

Merry Kissmoose!

Would you like to kiss my moose?  He is under the mistletoe, ready to pucker up!  This block took most of two evenings to make...there were lots of pieces to cut out.

And lots of pieces to keep straight and sew together properly.

I have made 14 blocks of 15 for this quilt along with Lorna at Sew Fresh Quilts.  The last block will be out this Saturday.  I plan on making two more blocks of my own design to make this a 16 block quilt.  I will be putting the partridge in a pear tree block on the back of the quilt. I will have to figure out a layout next and add the sashing.  I am hoping to have this quilt ready for use in my living room this December. 

Liberated Sampler Blocks 1-8

I made my 8th liberated sampler block tonight.  Christine was here to sew with me--she was away at the cottage for the past couple of weeks so we spent lots of time catching up and chatting as we sewed. This is a variation of one of the blocks from 42Quilts.com.  The block that is suggested has 51 pieces in a 6" block.  I opted to do the easy version...

As promised, here is a picture of all of my blocks so far.  Eight down, only 56 to go!

I had hoped to make one a week but I don't always have time.  This quilt will be my long term project.