Lots of Hand Stitching and Another Block

A few years ago, I stitched "Let it Bee".  I was cleaning up the top of my cutting table and found it in a pile, waiting to be framed.  I went to Stitch It Central this past week to buy some backing for the secret gift quilt that I have been working on and purchased a 5" hoop for my bee while I was there.  It was well overdue for being framed!  

I went to the weekly guild sewing day earlier this week and spent my time hand quilting the four HST blocks in my Arizona quilt.  The centre part of the quilt is done now and I just have the outer row of squares to do. I bought myself a q-snap frame to use to quilt the outer edge of this quilt.  It can also be used for cross stitch.  

My daughter made four more squares for her book blanket over the last couple of weeks.  She's quite busy at her job right now and doesn't have as much time to read. 

I pulled out my lupins cross stitch picture this week--it just needs some outlining done and then it will be ready to frame.  I got quite a bit done this week and hope to finish this off next week. It feels good to get these almost finished projects to the finish line!

The stems were added on the light purple lupins. 

I'm in the middle of outlining the centre lupin. 

I cut out the background fabric pieces for the remaining blocks of my current piecing project this week and put the purple block together. It takes a little longer to sew all those curved seams so each block takes a while to make.  Five more blocks to make. 

Finn's absolute favourite toy is a squeaky carrot.  His old one needed to be replaced and this new one arrived this week at our house.  He was very excited to take it out of the package and run around the house squeaking it, tail wagging the entire time!

Today is quite chilly with snowflakes in the air, but earlier in the week, when it was 20 degrees Celsius, Finn and I enjoyed some time outside on the front porch in the sunshine. 

I was at a local retirement home this past week doing some volunteering and noticed that the residents had been doing some yarn bombing!  

My friend, Pat, has some snowdrops blooming in her backyard!  So pretty!  

That's it for today.  I will link up with Kathy and Frederique as usual. 

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.

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.

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!

What does the Fox say????

Christine and I get together for an evening of sewing most weeks.  A while ago, we decided to each make a small Fancy Forest quilt (pattern by Elizabeth Hartman).  We each had to purchase background fabric and we are using stash fabrics for the animals.  Goodness knows we both have an abundance of stash fabric!  This week, we each made four foxes. I am using bright colours for my animals and light gray Architextures fabric for the background.

 

 

Christine found some fat quarters in her stash that she will be using for her animals.  She bought some gray-beige fabric for her background. 

 

 

Next time we get together, we are going to make the thistle blocks...there are two in this quilt.  I have mine cut out all ready to sew together.  We are starting out with the easy blocks and building up to the more complicated ones.

 

This will be a fun project to work on together!

 

 

 

I bought a new plant for my perennial garden last week.  This is a pink threadleaf coreopsis.  





Flannel Scraps

In an effort to clean up my fabric storage area, I went through all of my flannel fabrics and sorted them into scraps, yardage and larger pieces bigger than a fat quarter but smaller than a yard.  The larger pieces and yardage were folded neatly and stored in two bins--neatly labelled and easily accessible.  That left me with two plastic containers of scraps.  I decided to sort the scraps in to two piles--brighter colours and duller colours.  The picture above is one of the bins..."duller" scraps.  Last year, I made a scrap vortex quilt with some of my scraps--I used up lots of scraps but did not make much of a dent in the scrap pile. This year, I am making a flannel scrap vortex quilt...

I keep the bin of scraps by my sewing machine and in between sewing other stuff together, I grab two pieces of flannel and use them as a leader/ender.  Today, I had 30 minutes to spare, so I went downstairs and sewed a bunch of twosies...

This is the pile behind the sewing machine when I stopped sewing.  It looked better once I had them cut apart and in a pile on the cutting board for pressing.

Better still once they were pressed...

There are always lots of memories in a scrap quilt... the animal print is leftover from a pair of PJ's I made for my niece one year for her birthday.

Here are some of the bits I sewed together earlier this week. 

They are all pressed and ready to sew to each other...

I am hoping to use up all of the dull flannel scraps in my collection in this quilt.  I am hoping for a good sized lap quilt by the time all is said and done.

I even had a few leftover flying geese that made it into this project.  Some of these pieces need to be trimmed before they can be sewn together.  I can do this in short snippets of time over the next week or two.  This should be a very warm and cozy quilt.  I am not sure what I am going to do with it yet, but at least some of the flannel scraps will be tamed!

More blooms in my garden this week...