On to Page 2!

I am officially finished the top half of my Frank Lloyd Wright Fountain Glass cross stitch picture, and I have started the second page!  The top half has a lot more stitching than the bottom half so as long as I can find more DMC#318 thread, I will be all set.  I have a couple of people mailing me some thread and hope that it will be here this coming week. In the meantime, I will continue working on the other colours.

After all the cross stitching is done, I will go back and do the outlining.  I bought some metallic thread for that but I am not sure where I put it...I will have to send out a search party soon.

Grand-dog, Finn, had a bath this week and was very fluffy afterwards.  He has been enjoying puppy class each week and is quick at picking up new tricks.

I took this picture looking down at one of the flowers stalks on one of the hostas in our backyard.

This is the centre of a purple coneflower.   Nice colours!

I will be linking up with Kathy and the other Slow Sunday Stitchers in the morning.  

Sewing with Christine

I have been squeezing in a bit of sewing here and there this week, including an evening of sewing with Christine last night.  Earlier in the week, I put together four more Foothills blocks --this quilt is being made with my husband's cast off shirts. The light green fabric in the block below actually came from one of my shirts. 

I am making these blocks by making parts--hour glass, HST and flying geese units and then putting the parts together into blocks.  In the original Foothills quilt, some of the blocks were not perfect and this added interest to the quilt.  We don't know if these were intentional or mistakes...  The block below was not intentional--I only noticed the flying geese all flying in the same direction after the block was assembled.  I decided to leave it that way for a couple of reasons...the yellow fabric frays easily and I thought the geese would fall apart if I tried to take it apart and I like the little surprise of finding a slightly different block or two in the final quilt.

If I was making a quilt from quilting cottons, I am not sure that I would combine these colours and fabrics together, but when working with a bin of shirts, I make it work.

I like the stripes going in different directions too.

I have 17/25 blocks done now and a few parts made for the next few blocks. I would like to have this quilt finished for the London Friendship Quilter's Guild show in October.  Only 8 more blocks to go!

Two blocks are missing from this picture...

Baby #2 received her quilt in the mail this week. The quilt is folded in half in this picture.  I'm glad that she likes it! (her grandma told me that she did!)

When Christine and I got together to sew for a few hours last night, she worked on a baby quilt and I worked on some 5" blocks for a swap that we are doing at the Elgin Piecemakers Guild.  I need to make 24 5" blocks each month and the first set is due at our September meeting.  I would like to get ahead of the game and get a few months' worth of blocks done and in zip lock bags, ready to swap.

We are using neutrals in this quilt--white, beige, brown, grey, and black.  I am digging into my stash to cut up bits and pieces of fabric that are in my scrap bins and in my bins in the colours we are to use.  I spent some time cutting out squares and strips last night and then sewing some blocks together.

I'm using this bin to keep all of my pieces together in one spot.  I have 18 blocks sewn so far.  This is a good project to work on when I just have 15 minutes to sew.

My husband and I have been working on re-doing this entrance to our backyard after the new fence was put in. A lot of the dirt from the post holes ended up on top of our rocks and flagstones so we had to dig everything out, wash the stones, re-lay to flagstones and put the stones back in place.  It looks great now!  We have to adjust our gate to make it fit the new opening which is a little bit narrower than the old opening.  We are still working on the flagstone path at the other side of the yard...  This is an all summer project.

Slow Stitching on a Rainy Day

I've done some more stitching in the car and gazebo this week. I am just about done the top half of this picture and will soon have to move on to the second and final page of the pattern. I am soon going to be out of DMC #318 again.  If anyone has an old skein of this colour, please let me know.  The new skeins at the store are a much lighter gray and do not match my older thread that I have been using.  

My husband and I went on a garden tour in Goderich yesterday and then to see a play, To Kill a Mockingbird,  in Stratford last night.  I had read the book in high school for English class, but my husband had not.  He read the book over the last couple of weeks before we saw the play. It was a powerful and interesting play which left the audience with lots of food for thought. We usually go to see at least one play each summer in Stratford.

The rain held off for the garden show so we were able to leave our umbrellas in the car as we walked around the gardens.  The bees were busy in all of the gardens...

This picture was taken in my yard--this is a hummingbird moth. It was undisturbed by my picture taking as it flitted about, gathering nectar.

I have had very little time in my sewing room this week...we have been working on our yard and gardens.  We have not had any rain for weeks, until this weekend.  The grass is already looking greener and the flowers and bushes are looking much perkier with the rain.  I won't have to spend any time today watering everything!  Here's another garden visitor:

I will be linking up with Kathy and the other Slow Sunday Stitchers today.  (If any of the slow stitchers would like to see my modern guild swap, you can see it here.) Have a good week.

LMQG Swap: What is it?

Members of the London Modern Quilt Guild are swapping small quilts with members of the Ancaster Modern Quilt Guild.  Christine and I both decided to participate in the swap. We received the name and preferences of our swap partners in February and the quilts were due at our July meeting this past Saturday.  Now that my quilt is handed in, I can show it to you on my blog!

I started by making some random sized building blocks with some brightly coloured scraps.

I was on a roll and did not take any more process pictures as I put it together in two evening sewing sessions.  I used a light grey diagonal mesh print for my background. It was fun to figure out how to piece it together from my building blocks. At this point, I showed it to my husband to see if he could tell what it is...his guess...A HAT!  He was wrong.

I quilted it with fuchsia thread...the lines are the width of a piece of green painter's tape and the second set of lines are two pieces of painter's tape wide.  Painter's tape was my friend when I was quilting this quilt!  Next, I did diagonal lines through every other intersection in both directions...I'm not sure that is a good explanation, so I will show you...

The idea for the quilting came from Jacquie Gering's book "Walk" and also from the two day walking foot quilting class that I took with Jacquie a couple of years ago.  I think the quilting makes my quilt sparkle!

Several years ago, my friend, Erin, gave me a couple of yards of this fabric. It makes an interesting backing for my swap quilt and the colours are similar to those on the front.

It is bound in fuchsia grunge fabric.  Have you guessed what I was trying to depict yet?   Yup--it is a SEWING MACHINE! I hope my swap partner likes it!  Maybe she will find a spot to hang it in her sewing room.

Frank and some flowers.

Today, I went to the monthly London Modern Quilt Guild meeting.  After the business part of the meeting and show and tell, we had a few hours of sewing time.  I did not want to drag my sewing machine and supplies with me to the meeting so I brought my counted cross stitch project with me.  As you can see, I managed to get quite a bit done again this week. The lighting was a lot better for pictures this week...last week's pictures were a bit dull.

I managed to get one more block done for the Foothills Quilt this week.  I also made a few parts for future blocks.  I hope to get a few more blocks done this week.

Our grand-dog, Finn, is getting bigger!  He's keeping my daughter so busy that she has not been doing any cross stitching!

Baby #1 received her quilt in the mail this past week.  I think she likes it!

What would a blog post be without a few flower pictures?  This hydrangea bush is in our front garden.

I took these last two pictures when my husband and I were out for a walk tonight--Queen Anne's Lace.

This was my favourite picture of the day...sea holly and Russian sage.

I will be linking up with Kathy tomorrow morning.  Take a look and see what the other slow stitchers are working on...

Cross Stitching in the Car and a Comfort Quilt Block

I made lots of progress on my Fountain Glass Window cross stitch project this week.  A few longer car rides and some evening stitching in the gazebo helped!  I am just about finished with the upper left corner of the picture. 

Today, I finished off the DMC#318 thread that was on my skein and started using the skein that was sent to me by Paige at Quilted Blooms.  It is a perfect match!  I can't tell where my thread ends and her thread starts.  Can you?

I will keep working away at this corner until all the cross stitching is done and then move around the picture clockwise.

I belong to three quilt guilds--the smallest one--the Elgin Piecemakers has under 20 members and we meet in each other's homes each month.  Our charity project is comfort quilts for adult chemo patients at our local hospital. At the beginning of the year, we are given a list of colours/themes to make a 12.5" quilt block each month (except July, August and December when we do not meet).  I like to make my blocks ahead of time so I am not scrambling at the last minute to get them done.   This week, I made my navy and lime green block for our September meeting.  I had already made the blocks for October and November so I am all caught up for this year!

I had hoped to have the colours reversed but I did not have enough of the navy to do that so it was made this way instead.

The background colour of the block matches the leaf colour of our new Redbud tree we planted in our backyard this week.

I spent some time on Friday planting flowers in the garden where this tree resides.  I am still not done but progress is being made.  Maybe by this time next week, it will be done.

I will be linking up with Kathy for Slow Sunday Stitching tomorrow.

Working on My Foothills Quilt

Quite a while ago, I started making blocks for Mary Elizabeth Kinch's Foothills Quilt-along.  I managed to make 9 complete blocks and parts for several more blocks before life got in the way of sewing time.  I made a few baby quilts to get my sewing mojo back and then worked on a swap quilt for the London Modern Quilt Guild.  With all of these projects done, I can now get back to making the rest of the Foothills blocks.

You may remember that I am using shirts that my husband was discarding.  Here is the first block I put together today:

(The block really is square--its just a funny camera angle that makes it look like it isn't!). Here is the second block I made:

I had all of the parts made except the flying geese.  I put together 4 sets of flying geese today and I have one more block laid out ready to sew together.  I like the way the stripes look in these blocks.

I have 11/25 blocks made now.  I will need to make more parts soon so I have a variety to choose from when assembling the next few blocks.   Here are my 11 completed blocks on my design wall:

I did some gardening this morning and took a few pictures of some of the flowers I have in bloom at the moment.

Astilbe

This one is an annual in one of my patio pots. I can't remember the name of the plant...

Dwarf Delphinium

Tonight was a great night for a walk on the pier in Port Stanley, for us, and the Canada geese!

Slow Sunday Stitching on Canada Day

Happy Canada Day!  I made these pillows last year to celebrate Canada's 150th birthday and they are out on display again this year.  We added a metal Maple Leaf to our shed this year.

The new fence was installed over the last few weeks and we finally got our gardens put back together this weekend. We managed to keep all of our plants alive in pots while the construction of the fence was underway and now they are back in their new spots in the gardens.

There's still more gardening to do and we will keep working away at it over the next few weeks. We are pleased with the new fence.

After putting out the call for DMC #318 a few weeks ago, three friends gave me their versions of #318.  My original skein is on the cardboard holder at the top left of the picture.  Funny how there was no consistency in the colour of #318 over the years.  The bottom left colour was too dark.  the two on the right were just not quite right and the one on the far left was a perfect match!  I hope that I have enough thread to finish off the picture now...if I don't, I will let you know. Several other friends have been looking through their embroidery threads to see if they have the correct colour as well.

Here's where I left off last time I reported in about my Frank Lloyd Wright Fountain Glass Cross Stitch project.  I managed some stitching time this week and hope to work on this today again. 

The big yellow blobby part will look better after I add the outlining. 

Yesterday, my husband and I went to the local museum to see a display about Scottish settlers in this area and this quilt was on display. I took a close look at some of the fabrics---cotton, flannel, plaids, satins, -- scraps from old clothing, most likely, sewn together to make a lovely barn-raising log cabin quilt.

I love the polka dots!

Here is the information about the maker.

I spent some time this evening quilting my swap quilt for the London Modern Quilt Guild.  The quilts are to be done by our next meeting in two weeks.  This is an in progress picture.  I don't want to reveal the finished quilt until my swap partner receives her quilt.   I have cut out the binding and hope to put it on this week--I like to have my projects done well in advance of deadlines.

Here is a recent picture of my daughter's dog, Finn.  He had a bath and was quite fluffy afterwards.  Time for a snooze.

I will be linking up with Kathy and the other slow Sunday Stitchers in the morning.