Comfort Quilt Blocks

My husband was out at a meeting tonight so, after supper, I ventured down to my sewing room to play with fabric.  The Elgin Piecemakers' June meeting is next week and I wanted to make my teal and silver grey block ahead of time so that I am not in a rush at the last minute.  I decided to make my block with 16 HST's and here is the design I came up with on paper first and then with fabric.

The teal fabric has been in my stash for a long time and the grey is Essex linen. I like how there are flying geese going in two directions depending on which way you look at the block.

My husband was still not home, so I decided to make a second block for October.  The assigned colours are yellow, grey and white.  For this block, I pulled out a new book that was just recently added to my quilting library:  Modern Plus Sign Quilts by Cheryl Brickey and Paige Alexander.

 I have been following Paige's blog for a while now and she and I often comment on each other's projects.  While admiring the quilts in the book, I came across "Message in a Bottle", which was designed to be a baby quilt.

I decided to get out some graph paper and draft this quilt into a 12.5" block using the colours for October's Comfort quilt.  Here is my block. My plus sign is not quite as chunky as the one in the baby quilt. It seems appropriate that I did some math to make my plus sign block...

Paige and Cheryl are hosting a Modern Plus Sign Quilt along.  One of the quilt designs has already been revealed on Paige's blog here.  They will be announcing sponsors and prizes later this week and the fabric requirements and additional layouts will be revealed on July 7th.  The sewing fun begins on August 2nd.  My friend, Christine, and I will be joining in on the fun and hope that you will too.  It will be interesting to see all of the different fabric and colour choices coming to life as we quilt along with Paige and Cheryl.

A Finish and a Prize...

Two weeks ago, I went to the Sarnia Quilt guild's show with my SIL and MIL.  They had a fundraiser--a raffle of mini quilts made by their members.  I bought some tickets and put them into the bags for the mini quilts I liked.  I was pleased to receive a phone call a few days after the show to let me know that I had won one of the quilts!

I would like to introduce you to our newest family member....this is Finn.  My daughter adopted him this past week and we are all in love with him already.  We went with her when she picked him out in May.

I worked on my Frank Lloyd Wright Fountain Glass picture a bit this week...I want to thank everyone for looking in their embroidery thread stashes last week --I have a few skeins of colour number 318 being mailed or given to me and I am hoping that one or two of them match the colour of the tread that I have already been using.  I knew that I could count on my sewing friends to help me out!

One of the three baby girl quilts that I have been making  has been mailed to Baby #1.  I worked on my charm pack quilt yesterday and today to finish off the pin basting, quilting and binding.  I added an extra set of four patches to the outside of the quilt and then discovered that I had a piece of backing that fit perfectly with the quilt this size so I did not add any more borders.  The last few hand stitches on the binding happened on Saturday afternoon.

I took a few pictures of the quilt outside in my back yard today.  You will notice that our fence that blew down at the beginning of May is now being replaced with a new fence.   When the fence is done, we will put our gardens back together and hopefully be able to enjoy the yard once again.

 I will be linking up with the other slow Sunday stitchers at Kathy's blog.  I have Baby quilt #3 quilted and hope to add the binding tomorrow.

My gardens are in a bit of a mess right now with the fence building still in progress but here is a picture of one of the geraniums I have in a pot on my patio. 

Happy Father's Day to all of the Dads.  I am remembering my Dad today.

Houston, We Have a Problem...

This past week, as I stitched, I noticed that I was running short on one of the threads for my Frank Lloyd Wright Fountain Glass cross stitch picture.  I made a mental note to pick up more thread #318 the next time I was near the craft store.  Friday night, I ran into the store to pick up the thread and noticed that DMC thread #318 in the store was a much lighter shade of grey than the thread that I had been using for my picture.  I went back out to the car to grab my project box---I had been doing some slow stitching in the car---I searched through all of the DMC threads on display and much to my dismay, there was no thread to match available.  YIKES!  I already have a lot of this colour in my picture and don't really want to take it out.  You may remember that I had to do some unsewing on this picture once already...

This is where I beg and plead for all of you to check your thread stashes to see if you have a darker shade of thread #318 that might match my thread which was likely purchased over 20 years ago.  It seems that the colour of #318 has been changed to a lighter shade of grey!  I am really hoping that I won't have to take out all of the grey stitches that I have done so far...  Here is how the picture looked last week:

And this is how it looks now (sorry about the bad lighting!):

On another note, I started a new quilt this week--this is a gift for a new baby in the family.  I started out with a charm pack and some solid fabrics.  The charm pack has been in my stash for a while...

First, I made a pink star and added a green border:

Then, I took the remaining 5" charm squares and cut them into 2.5" squares.

I sewed the squares to long strips of white fabric...

And pressed them...

I used all of the two patches to make 66 scrappy 4 patches,

Which I added to the star:

Come back next week to see what I have decided to do next.

My husband's grandmother's peonies are blooming this week.  I always look forward to seeing these large white flowers with just a hint of pink in the centres.

I will be linking up with Kathy and the other slow Sunday stitchers in the morning.  If anyone can help me out with the thread, I would be happy to pay for the thread and the postage...

Thanks very much!

Going Squirrelly!

At the beginning of May, I took a one day Scrappy Applique class with Shannon Brinkley in Sarnia, Ontario, Canada.  What a fun class!  No two projects were alike! I decided to use some hot colours for my squirrel with some blues for accent.  Shannon showed us several different ideas for shapes that we could cut out to use---mine are mostly triangles.  The triangles were fused to some lightweight fusible interfacing and then cut out into the shape of the squirrel.

Then, I fused the squirrel to my background fabric.  I thought leaves were an appropriate background for a squirrel!

I used orange thread for quilting.  I managed to get a bit of the quilting done in class--enough to get the squirrel firmly attached to the background fabric. I quilted wavy lines along the stems of the leaves and then added two more wavy lines in between each stem.  This dense quilting took a lot of thread--three spools for this small wall hanging.

I finished the quilting this week and love the texture of the orange wavy lines on the squirrel and the background fabric.

I used dark grey with dots on it for the backing and some nice bright orange for the binding.  The label is on but I will need to add a hanging sleeve before I can display this quilt on the wall.

I did the last of the hand sewing on the binding tonight and took my quilt outside for a picture, or two.

Since this is my Slow Sunday Stitching post, I should show you this week's progress on my Frank Lloyd Wright counted cross stitch project.

My daughter has been busy working on her next cityscape...New York City!

I will sign off with a picture of a visitor in my yard and some flowers...

Bachelor Button:

Coral Bells and Clematis:

And another clematis...

This visitor was peaking in my window, eyeing up my new quilt...

Slow Stitching in the Car

One of my favourite spots for stitching is in the passenger seat of the car as my husband drives us to our destination.  In my last post, I talked about how we visited my daughter last weekend.  It is a bit of a drive to get to where she lives, so I got lots of stitching done in the car last weekend.  Here is my picture from last week's post for comparison purposes...

Frank Lloyd Wright's Fountain Glass window is beginning to look a little more like a stained glass window with each stitch.

My husband and I were out for a drive in the country when the sun was setting on Friday night and we stopped so I could take some pictures.

The place where we stopped had some flowers in bloom... Lily of the Valley...

Lilacs...

and Chestnut tree blossoms.

My daughter sent me this picture earlier this week...she has finished the London, England cityscape!  I love the double decker bus,  the London Taxi as well as all those interesting buildings!

She will be working on her third cityscape soon---New York City.  

I will be joining the other Slow Stitchers at Kathy's blog today.  Take a look at what everyone is making!

Last Minute Block

Last night, I hosted the May meeting of the Elgin Piecemakers.  Our comfort quilt blocks this month were to be made with polka dot fabrics. At 10:30 pm on Wednesday night, I realized that I had not made my block yet...Yikes!  Luckily, all my polka dot fabrics are kept in one drawer in my fabric storage area so I picked out three fabrics and then went through a few magazines to look for some block inspiration.  I was looking for something easy so it would not take too long to cut out the pieces or sew the block.  I ended up with what you see above.  Whew!  I was done by 11pm.

Here are all the blocks that were brought to the meeting last night. 

There were a few people missing last night so we are short a few blocks so the members making this quilt will wait until they receive them to put it together.

We had a few comfort quilts finished or nearly finished on display last night as well.

These quilts will be donated to the adult chemo unit at our local hospital.  It is always fun to see how the blocks we make each month are transformed with some sashing and cornerstones into beautiful quilts!

My husband and I visited our daughter last weekend. She moved to a new apartment earlier this year and this was my first time seeing it.  I brought my sewing machine along as her drapes were all too long and pooling on the floor.  I had to move the furniture away from each window and then pin the drapes to the right length in place followed by ironing the hem, trimming and pinning before setting my sewing machine up on a small table or the ironing board and sewing the hem.

This is not my usual sewing set up, but I managed to get 8 drapes shortened, all to the same length, and they look much better!

The quilt in the foreground is the one I made for my daughter when she started university.

The quilt on her bed was her graduation gift when she finished university.  She picked the pattern and fabrics for both quilts.

I am hoping to have some time for some quilting this weekend...we shall see.