Busy Week with lots of Sewing!

I must say that retirement is agreeing with me!  I spent one day this week sewing with members of the Oxford Guild where I worked on the assembly of my Tula Pink 100 Modern Blocks sampler.  They had nice long tables for me to lay everything out for measuring the strips that go between the rows of blocks.  I could not do this at home.  I managed to get almost half of the quilt assembled by the end of the day and hope to finish the quilt top this coming week. 

I am still walking an hour every day, even when it is cold out. We had some snow this week... I had to bring my boots up from the basement.  I managed to get the front gardens cleaned up and the leaves raked before it snowed.  I attended not one, but two quilting workshops this past week.  Friday, I spent the day with Bill Stearman taking his Double Disappearing Nine Patch class.

Here are some sample blocks that I made in class.  He provided kits (for a fee) which included all the parts needed for each block.  The colourful fabric was hand dyed by Bill.

I have some ideas for baby quilts based on the DD9P method he taught.  They will have to wait until I finish a few other projects first.

Today, I took a Weight of Love class with Libs Elliott at the London Modern Guild.  I spent much of my time this week picking out 17 fabrics for the quilt and getting all of the pieces cut before the class.

Darks:

Mediums: (the blue and green solids on the left are lighter than the ones in the picture above...just hard to tell in this picture!)

Lights:

The prints were all purchased at a quilt show in Ailsa Craig earlier this year that featured quilts from New Zealand.  One of the vendors imported some NZ fabrics for her booth.  There was a lot of cutting for this quilt!

At the workshop, we did lots of block assembly first and then laid them out on the design walls/floor.

The blue sticky notes helped me keep track of the blocks.

We learned how to sew the blocks together with Y-seams.  I didn't do too badly with my first attempt!

I will get back to working on this quilt after the Tula Pink sampler is done.

I sat down to do some counted cross stitch tonight and noticed that I had a stain on the Aida cloth--likely dried blood from poking my finger.  I used some Oxyclean gel to remove almost all of the stain and then rinsed it out and laid it out to dry.  No stitching tonight.  Hopefully, it will be dry by the morning so I can do some stitching tomorrow.

I will be stitching along with Kathy's Slow stitchers tomorrow.