Needle Felting, FLW and Dear Jane

The Elgin Piecemakers met this past week for the first time since June.  There was lots of catching up to do!  Pat P has been doing a lot of needle felting over the summer and decided to teach all of us how to do this too.  We were each given a small piece of felt, a block of foam and the barbed needle tool as well as our choice of colours of the wool roving used in this craft. You can see my small creation above before it was trimmed.

The back is quite fuzzy!  Here is my square after trimming:

And here are all of the little needle felted squares that we made:

I can see why Pat has found a new addiction!  She has been busy making pincushions and little landscape pictures over the summer.

My husband and I were away on vacation for 10 days and one of the stops was at the Bennington Museum in Vermont where I got to see this in person:

Yes...it is the original "Dear Jane" quilt made by Jane Sickle in 1863!  It is only on display for one month of the year and we happened to be in the neighbourhood at the right time!  5,602 pieces!  169 blocks plus all those triangles in the border! I stared and studied it for quite a while!

I took a picture of the information card for your reading pleasure. 

I thought all of the slow Sunday stitchers would be interested in seeing this quilt on my blog today.

Here is a close up of one of the blocks:

This quilt is a testament to Jane Sickle's perseverance in a difficult time period in history.  The fabrics, the piecing/applique and quilting had me in awe!

There was lots of time on the trip to cross stitch as we travelled.  I managed to finish all of the cross stitching on FLW on the trip.

I am now working on the silver metallic thread outlining.  This will take a while.

So, this is my hand stitching project for the next while...getting all of that outlining done.  I will be linking up with the other Slow Sunday Stitchers at Kathy's blog tomorrow morning.   Happy Stitching!

Foothills Blocks DONE and more FLW

A few stitches here and a few stitches there, and progress is made towards the finish line. I just have a few more borders to do at the bottom of my Frank Lloyd Wright cross stitch picture and then on to the outlining. With any luck, the cross stitching will be done in the next week or two.  When I get this close to the end, all I want to do is finish it! When this picture is done, I will have three completed pictures to take to the framing store to have them stretched and framed.  It would be great to have all three on the wall by Christmas time. Maybe that is a good attainable goal...

On the quilting front, I am nearing the end of a quilt I started in February...the Foothills quilt along organized by Mary Elizabeth Kinch.  I used my husband's discarded shirts as my fabric source for this quilt and have been working away for months now on the 25 blocks.  This past week, I finished the last of the blocks and purchased the sashing/border fabric.    Here are my last 5 blocks:

The brighter green rectangles were actually from one of my shirts--the rest of the shirts were my husband's.

The above block involved some ripping and in the end, I still ended up with all the geese going one way...I am fine with that...it will make the quilt more interesting to look at.  I intentionally made some of the blocks with the HST's oriented differently in regards to where I put the light and dark fabrics.

This quilt allowed me to play with different value and colour combinations that I have not tried before.

Most of the fabrics were thread dyed checks or plaids but there were also a few solid colours as well.

You might think that with all these colours and different shirts in one quilt, it would not be cohesive, but somehow, it is.   Here are all my blocks.

The flying geese took the longest of all of the parts of the blocks.  There are 150 flying geese in these blocks.

I grew rosemary, thyme, oregano and parsley in pots on my patio and I have decided to try drying them in brown paper bags.  Here is what the rosemary looked like when I picked it.  I will see how it looks in a week or two.  I have not done this before.  (I know, I should have grown sage instead of oregano and channelled Simon and Garfunkel, but I digress...)

With this picture, I am a day late and a dollar short--Kathy asked the slow Sunday Stitchers to show their favourite stitching spot and here is mine--in the gazebo in my backyard.  This picture was supposed to be shown last week or the week before... Oh well...now you know where I like to sew!

I will be linking up with Kathy on Sunday morning.

Modern Quilt Guild Swap

Several months ago, I signed up to participate in a swap at the London Modern Quilt Guild.  Our swap partners were from the Ancaster Modern Quilt Guild and we were given some information about our swap partners and their preferences.  The quilts were to be no bigger than 24" X 24". We handed our quilts in at the July meeting and they were to be distributed at the August meeting when the Ancaster Guild members would be visiting.

You may remember the quilt that I made--my husband thought it was a hat...

I was not able to be at the August meeting as I was away on vacation so Christine brought my quilt to me a couple of weeks after I got back.

My swap partner's name is Nicole and she wrote me this lovely note that came with my quilt:

I had mentioned that I liked liberated quilts, such as those made by Gwen Marston.  I love my liberated log cabin quilt, Nicole!  The colours are wonderful and the quilting is divine!  Thanks so much for swapping with me.   Christine told me that Nicole knew that the quilt I made for her was not a hat!

(I'm not sure what Kristin and Nicole were looking at while this picture was taken!)

If I get another chance to participate in a swap, I think I will jump in with both feet!

Slow Stitching This Week

It has been a couple of weeks since I last posted a picture of my Frank Lloyd Wright counted cross stitch project.  Here is a picture of where I left off last time.  

Since then, there have been a few car trips with stitching as well as an evening with a friend --she was knitting mittens and I cross stitched.  Today, I was at the September meeting of the London Modern Quilt Guild and there was time to sit and sew after the business meeting and program.  Instead of bringing my sewing machine and a bag of fabric, I chose to just bring my (lightweight!) bag with my cross stitch project in it and add some more stitches.

There is one more rectangular box at the bottom of the picture that I need to complete along with the grey borders like the rest of the piece. There are not a lot of colourful stitches left to add--just a few here and there---mostly grey.    After the cross stitching is done, I will be working on the silver outlining. I need to find my thread heaven again as the metallic thread tends to tangle easily.

Grand-puppy, Finn, has been teething and lost a molar this week.  I wonder if the Tooth Fairy visits puppies???

It has gotten decidedly cooler in my neck of the woods this weekend but I still have lots of blooms in my garden...

Sedum

A miniature rose

Phlox

One of my favourite things to do on Sundays is to check out what the other Slow Stitchers are up to over at Kathy's blog.  I hope you will take a peek and perhaps leave some encouraging comments on some of the blogs.