Stitching Report

You may have noticed I was missing in action last weekend...I was visiting my daughter and Finn for the weekend!  Finn and I hung out together while my daughter participated in a curling bonspiel. He didn't mind snuggling up to me as I did some cross stitching.  We went for a walk every day too. 

I have added three more motifs to my winter cross stitch project.  You can see the cardinal and the pinecone above and this week I finished off the evergreen tree. 

There were very nice sunbeams in the afternoons while I was visiting.  Finn took full advantage of them!

You may remember that I replaced the binding on my daughter's University Quilt at Christmas time.  I finished hand stitching the new binding while I was at her place.  This is a well loved quilt!

Here is a picture of when this quilt was new in 2009. 

Finn approves of the repairs that I did. 

A friend has four grandchildren and she wants to make quilts for each of them using leftover fabrics from PJ's that she has made for them over the years. She brought the fabrics for the first one over one night last week.  I showed her how to make a disappearing nine patch block.  We figured out how many squares she will need of each fabric and she will get them all cut out and sewn into nine patches over the next couple of weeks.  Then, we will get together again to figure out the layout.  She has lots of flannel chunks that we can piece together to make the back of the quilt.  Once this quilt is done, we will figure out a design for the next one.  There are lots of fun winter themed fabrics in this quilt. 

I added the border to my crumby stars quilt top and I purchased a piece of flannel to use for the back. I have some ideas floating around in my head about how to quilt this using my walking foot.   Stay tuned. 

I have another quilt underway but can't share anything about it yet in case the recipient is lurking here.  I will be working on it this week to get it done before the deadline. 

Another picture of Finn... I hope you are not getting tired of seeing him!

My daughter's mystery cross stitch is coming along. Finn doesn't mind being a cross stitch model. 

I celebrated a birthday this past week.  Finn and my daughter sent me flowers.  There have been three restaurant meals with friends and and family--with one more extended family dinner tomorrow.  I am feeling well loved. 

Happy Valentine's Day to everyone.  Someone decorated a tree by the walking path with hearts this past week. 

 I made this at a recent retreat. It is on our mantle. 

I will link up with Kathy and the Slow Sunday Stitchers in the morning.  This is a group of bloggers from around the world who share their hand stitched projects each week.  We all encourage and support each other as we slowly make progress. The link to Kathy's blog is in my sidebar. 

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.

Purple Donations

The Elgin Piecemakers have had quite a bit of fabric donated to us for our charity quilt projects in the last year.  We have used up some of this fabric for chemo quilts but at last Thursday's meeting, some time was spent sorting out the fabrics into "possible project piles". Each member was invited to take home a pile and try to make a quilt top from the fabric. Here is the pile I brought home:

I had four fat quarters of the purple flower border print, several different sized pieces of purple solids and about a fat 1/8th of the green and purple polka dots. 

On Friday night, I decided to start cutting into the fabric.  I used only the purple and green flower border of the fat quarters and cut it into squares.  I then cut the purples and the dots into squares as well.  I used the squares to make 9 patches (sorry--I got carried away with sewing and forgot to get a picture of the nine patches.)  I cut up the nine patches to make lots of these pieces...

 

 

I sewed again on Saturday night--at one point I sewed for about 20 minutes with no bobbin thread.  This was not very productive!

Between Saturday night and tonight, I put the rest of these blocks together and then searched through my stash for some green fabric for the sashing. I did not have enough of one fabric for the sashing so I decided to use two different green pieces for the sashings.

 

 

A close up of one quadrant:

 



 

I finished piecing the entire quilt top except the borders tonight. I hope to add the two purple borders tomorrow night. 

Wow!  That was a fast quilt top!

On the way home from work the other night, the sun was setting over the snow covered fields.  I snapped a couple of pictures with my phone.

I am thankful for longer days and some warmer temperatures in the weather forecast...

Quilty Gifts

This is the quilt that I made for my daughter for Christmas. It is made from leftover flannel from the PJ's I have made for her and her cousins over the years. The back is pieced from the larger flannel leftovers. She has already used it when we watched TV during the holidays!  It will be going back to her apartment with her when she goes back for the winter term at university. It will keep her warm while she is reading her textbooks.

Here is a pic of my quilty gifts from Santa and Company. The Liberated Quilts book is even signed by the author--Gwen Marston!

I am getting together with some friends next week to work on Indian Orange Peel. We hope to get together for a weekly support group/sewing session.  I bought some more fabrics for my IOP when I was in Toronto this week...

The warm colours.

And the cool colours.

In a Bind...

I have twin neices and I have made each of them a flannel quilt made out of leftover fabric from PJ's that I have made them for their birthday each year since they were 2. I used some of the bigger chunks of fabric to piece the backs of both quilts. I got this quilt back from the quilter's last week and put the binding on the other night while watching a movie on TV. Just to make this quilt even more scrappy, I also pieced the binding.

I have the binding cut out to put on my in-law's quilt tonight. I have another movie recorded so I will stitch while I watch the movie. I will show a picture of the completed quilt when it is bound and labelled.

I did 2 more 4-patches and one arc for my IOP (indian orange peel) this afternoon. Here is a picture of what I have done so far...

Just 20 more 4 patches and 98 more arcs to go...

Sewing Report

I have made progress on several project in the last few days so this will be a long post with lots of pictures!

1.  This morning, another member of the Elgin Piecemakers and I delivered 7 comfort quilts to the chemo unit at our local hospital. If you have been reading my blog for a while, you know that this is an ongoing project of our guild. This was our third quilt delivery. Here are a few pictures of our quilts.

Jacqui and I made these two quilts from one jelly roll. Jacqui divided the jelly roll into two colourways and we chose different background fabrics and sashing/borders.

Here are all of the quilts, except for the black, red and white one--it went home with the quilter to have the binding sewn down!

2.  Here is one of my nieces' Christmas gift--it is a disappearing 9 patch quilt made with leftover fabric from pj's I have made for my daughter, and my twin nieces over the years. It is back from the quilters and I put the binding on the other night. The back, as you can see is pieced. The binding is made from this year's pj's leftover fabric.

 3.  Christine and I got together to work on our Carolina Christmas quilts (Mine is now called Creamsicles by the Sea, as suggested by Christine!) I put the 2 1/2 inch borders on my quilt and put the pieced units together when we met at Christine's house this week. She is at the same stage as well. We will be getting together at my house one day next week and think we will be able to finish our quilts off then!  This is so exciting!  We are both looking forward to starting another project when these are done.

4.  I finished sewing the blocks for my in-laws' Christmas gift --a lap quilt called Country Spin.  I purchased fabric for the borders today and hope to find some suitable flannel for the back shortly. I want to take this quilt in to the long arm quilters next week so it will be done in time for me to put the binding on for Christmas.










5. My next big project will be Indian Orange Peel--a Karen Stone pattern. I am organizing a class for a group of quilting friends at the end of November. This quilt will definately be a challenge!