Progress on Several Fronts

I managed to do some knitting or sewing or cross stitching every day this week!  My Gross Morne scarf is now 1 foot (31 cm) long.  I have decided to include the measurement each time I show it as it is hard to tell from the photo alone if I have made any progress.  I still have a ways to go on this project!  

I made my husband and my daughter pillowcases for Christmas but ran out of time to make one for myself so I did that this week.  The two main fabrics were purchased in the East Coast Quilting Company store in St. John's, Newfoundland.  The berries in the border are called Bake Apples or Cloud Berries.  They grow wild in Newfoundland and are used in jam, sauces and ice cream.  There is only one berry per plant so picking them is labour intensive. They are delicious! The colourful houses represent the jelly bean houses in St. John's.  

I started a new rainbow scrap challenge project...These are cut without a template so each one is a bit different.  I will make four each month using my I spy fabrics and the appropriate background colour from my solid stash. They are 6" squares.  I will make an I Spy baby quilt with the finished blocks. I would like to do another RSC project this year but have not decided on anything yet.  

I made and finished off the facing on my David Owen Hastings class project.  I will be hanging this up in my sewing room.  I would like to try making more of these little quilts inspired by architecture sometime.  This one was inspired by a picture I took at the chapel ruin at Dunnottar Castle in Scotland in 2019. 

I put in a lot of stitches on my Christmas cross stitch this week.  The reindeer in the upper right corner is just about done--the antlers and legs are yet to be done (plus a bit of the lower body). 

While digging around in a bin of UFO's this week, I found this 4.5" basket block that was just begging to be made into a pin cushion.  I used some cute pin fabric on the back.  I made the basket block at least 12 years ago.  There is an extra layer of white fabric under the basket block to keep the crushed walnut shells from making the white fabric look dingy. 

I finally finished piecing the back for my modern sampler quilt--I used only stash fabrics for this one.  I will cut the batting to the right size and take it to the long armer this week. 

Finn keeps my daughter in sight at all times and often has to be touching her.    Here they are, toe to toe!

A wintery blast arrived this week so it is time for boots and a coat.  Finn is not thrilled. 

I will link up with the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, Frederique and Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching.  

Pincushions, NYC, Frank and Some Binding

Christine and I have been making some pincushions recently.  I had to buy more stuffing for mine so even though I made them a couple of weeks ago, they did not get stuffed and the openings sewn up until this week. The top 5 are mine and the two in the bottom of the picture are Christine's.  I would like to make a few more and, goodness knows, I have lots of scraps to use to make them!

My daughter recently finished her New York City counted cross stitch picture.  The background is white, like the other ones that she has made.  She went to the store today to buy more floss for her next projects, although she is not sure which city scape will be stitched next.

I did a lot of hand stitching this week...I spent three evenings hand sewing the binding on my Foothills quilt.  The binding is navy blue to match the sashing and borders.  You can see in this picture that the backing fabrics are also shirts.  I will do a blog post about the finished quilt later this week after I get some pictures in better light.

I am very close to finishing off my FLW counted cross stitch project...I worked on it a few days this past week and finished off the second last section from the bottom and started on the bottom section.  I am almost out of thread on the first spool of silver metallic thread but I bought two so there is no need to panic!  I don't want to get into a running out of thread situation again like I did with the grey thread earlier in this project!

It is harder to get a good picture of this these days since I do my stitching in the evenings and it is dark so early this time of year.

Today was Quilt 'til You Wilt with the London Friendship Guild ---I was there by 9am and wilted about 8pm.  I will do a blogpost about my accomplishments later this week.  I will link up with Kathy and her gang of Slow Stitchers in the morning.

Half Way There

I managed to find a few minutes each day this week to add some more stitches to the outlining of my Frank Lloyd Wright Fountain Glass picture and I am pleased to announce that the top half of the picture is done!  The bottom half does not have as much detail so it should not take as long to complete the outlining there.  I have been doing most of my stitching in the mornings with a cup of tea before breakfast.  It's cozy to sit by the fireplace and add a few more stitches as I think about the day ahead.

I have a bit more outlining to add to the left of the brown and yellow chevrons...that will be done today.

I have had a very Quilty week...Monday night, Christine and I got together to sew for a couple of hours.  I made some blocks for comfort quilts for the London Friendship Guild...

and some pincushions (one one is complete because I ran out of the beads I use to stuff them):

I dug into my bins of solid scraps for these.

Wednesday night, my friend Pat and I attended the Oxford Quilt Guild's meeting in Ingersol.  The speaker for the evening was Sandra --her blog is "Quilting at the Cro's Nest" .  (The house quilt in the background is the raffle quilt for the Oxford quilt guild at their Spring quilt show.)

I met Sandra online through her blog when we both linked up to Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching Group each Sunday.   We met in person back in May when my husband and I attended her Guild quilt show in Simcoe.  Sandra is a long arm quilter and also makes amazing, colourful appliqué quilts which she often quilts by hand. It was inspiring to see her quilts up close at the trunk show.

Thursday night was the monthly London Friendship Quilter's guild meeting where Cathy and Charlene did a trunk show about their amazing English Paper Piecing quilts.  Cathy blogs at Eagle's Wings Quilts and also has a business by the same name selling EPP supplies.  Here is a picture from her blog of her most recent finish--Friendship Chain which she showed at the meeting :

Yesterday, I spent the day with members of the Elgin Piecemaker's Guild for a sewing day.  The original plan was to work on some UFO's, but no, I started two new projects instead...Yikes!  I will do another blogpost about the sewing day later this week. 

I will be linking up with Kathy and the Slow Sunday Stitchers at her blog this morning.  Take a look at all of the beautiful hand stitching everyone is working on and leave an encouraging comment or two. Have a wonderful day!

Basket Pincushion and a New Quilt Started.

I needed a quick small gift for someone and decided to make a pincushion.  I found several little 4" basket blocks in a drawer in my sewing room and picked out this one to quilt.  The backing is a solid blue to match the flowers on the basket.  I like making pincushions!

I met Mary Elizabeth Kinch at the Gwen Marston Beaver Island Quilt Retreat several years ago.  I have one of her books and love admiring her large quilts made with many small pieces.  Every Christmas, she does a series of blogposts about 12 different antique quilts.  This past Christmas, one of her favourites was one called "Foothills".  She recently decided to do a quilt along http://www.maryelizabethkinch.com/qal-registration/ to make this quilt and I signed up!  I have a collection of men's shirts that have aged appropriately and are ready to cut up to make a quilt so I will be using them for this project.

I don't have a lot of time for sewing these days so this is what I accomplished one night this week. There are a lot of shirts in my collection so it takes a while to pick out the 7 fabrics needed for each block.  I finally made the flying geese and hourglass block for this block tonight.

I like the splash of brighter colours in the middle of the block!

I made a few parts for my next 4 blocks...

I am going to continue to make lots of parts and then will figure out how to combine them to make the blocks.  I have not made much of a dent in the pile of shirts yet...

Christmas Bow block

I have been making blocks for Lorna's "Have a Jolly Little Christmas" quilt along.  Every two weeks, another pattern comes out.  By Christmas, I hope to have a completed sampler quilt ready to snuggle up under on the couch in my living room.

Tonight, I made the bow block.  It had far more pieces than the first two blocks!  

Here is the completed block.  It took quite a while to make this block! 

I will be putting sashing between the blocks in the finished quilt.  Here are the three blocks I have made so far. 

I have another pincushion to add to my collection...this one was a birthday gift from my friend, Pat.

Isn't it cute???  I have a shelf in my sewing room where my pincushions are displayed and this one has joined the others on that shelf.  Someday, I will do a post about my collection! 

Bye for now.

My Pincushion is DONE and a Couple of WIP's

I finished off my paper pieced pin cushion in time for show and tell at the London Friendship Quilter's guild meeting tonight. I had to make a mad dash to Len's Mills store today between appointments to buy more plastic beads to fill it up. I had 5 minutes after supper tonight to hand stitch the last seam before I put it into my bag to take to the meeting.  It has 72 pieces in the top...and took hours to make but the results are so worth the effort!

I had to hand stitch each of the corners but the rest was sewn by machine. I will add this pincushion to my growing collection!

I am in the process of quilting a quilt for a refugee child from Syria and made some progress this week.  I am a little over half way done.

I also added the final chicken wire fabric border to my chicken coop quilt. I need to purchase some backing for this quilt and then it will be off to the long armer's house for quilting.

I hope to get the child's quilt done this weekend.  The family will be arriving from Syria soon.

London Modern Quilt Guild Meeting--paper pieced pincushion.

This morning was the first meeting of 2016 for the London Modern Quilt Guild.  After a very brief business meeting, Kristin led us in a paper piecing workshop to make these pincushions. This dark gray one is the sample that Kristin made to show us.  She had made up kits for each of us to use, trying to fool herself into thinking that she was reducing her stash...

I sorted out my pieces of fabric from light to dark in colour families.

 

 I started with yellow and worked my way through the colour wheel.

This is the first of 4 sections.

I managed to finish 2 sections before the end of the meeting.

Tonight, I made the last 2 sections and sewed them together. It finishes at 4.5" square.  This looks so cool!!!  (There are 18 pieces in each section of this project!)

This weekend's handwork project is removing all of those little pieces of paper!

A couple of years ago, I received these tweezers with a magnifying glass attached.  They are for removing small pieces of paper when paper piecing.  They are perfect for this job!

I hope to finish this pincushion sometime this week.

We had warm weather today... and some rain.  There is no snow.  Very weird weather for this time of year.

I am linking up to Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching.  Once I get all that paper removed, maybe I will have time to do some hand quilting on my wool applique squirrel project...

The Last Gifts of Christmas

My friend, Cathy, is heavily into English Paper Piecing...you should see what she has been working on all year!  I call it the "Monster".  She has been enhancing her stash a lot this year with fun fabrics that she can fussy cut for her project. 

 

 

For Christmas, she made me this EPP pincushion.  Isn't it cute???





 

 

I love the little heart buttons!  You can't smell it from where you are, but I can tell you that it has some lavender in it and smells heavenly!

 

 

 

Thanks Cathy!!!!  I love it!

 

 

Speaking of pincushions, here is one I made for Roxene at the Elgin Piecemakers Guild.  Each year, we pick names and exchange small gifts.  Roxene loves Churn Dashes and makes them almost every month for our charity quilt projects.  I decided she needed a church dash pincushion. 

 

 

 

This is a chunky churn dash! The fabric was in my scrap bins...

 



I found some green fabric for the back and some green buttons for the middle on the top and bottom.  I filled this pincushion with plastic beads--no lavender for this pincushion.

 

 

I also made Roxene a friendship bag with a churn dash on the front.  (I actually made two of these bags and the other one was given to Karen.)

 

 

Organic quilting with green thread:

 

 

Two friendship bags...

 

 

...with green dotty fabric for the lining!

 

 

 You have seen all of the quilty gifts I made for friends and family now.  Next up...I need to finish off the two quilts for the Syrian Refugee families.