Flannel Selvages

I dug out my bin of flannel selvages this week, (yes--I have sorted all my selvages by colour but the flannel ones are all together.) and top stitched them onto a strip of lightweight non fusible interfacing.  These two strips and two others will be used in the scrappy flannel baby quilt that I am making. No matter how hard I try, I never seem to run out of scraps. 

The binding is on the quilted Advent calendar for the church bazaar. I added a ribbon to the top of each of the little ornaments and now I am adding buttons to hang each ornament on as the days go by in December.  I have 15 more buttons to sew on and then it will be done. 

The leaves are all done on my pitcher plant rug hooking project and I have started working on the background at the bottom of the picture. 

We had a busy week--My MIL turned 95 on Friday so we had a birthday picnic with her that day. Dessert was butter tarts--her favourite! Earlier in the week, we planted flowers in pots outside her window...geraniums in a hanging basket (Mother's Day gift) and begonias in patio pots (Birthday Gift).  She likes to look out her window and see the flowers.  We are still working on our own yard as well and still have a few more jobs to do out there.  I noticed my clematis vine is blooming this week.  I think this is the most flowers it has ever had. 

My daughter has read a lot of books this month and has made a granny square for each one for her book blanket.  I will post pictures of the squares and the books she has read in May next week.  For now, here is a sneak peak. 

And here is Finn, out for a walk this past week.  Finn is happiest when he is outside lying in the sun.  Here's to lots of sunny days ahead, Finn!

I will link up with Kathy and Frederique, as usual. 

Sewing Retreat Report and Gardening

Last weekend, my husband and I went to the Camp Kintail Crafter's Retreat--Christine, my usual accomplice at retreats, had other plans for the weekend so my husband agreed to go with me.  He did some reading and worked on weathering some model train cars.  We also went for several walks--it was a gorgeous sunny weekend. I finished off the last three blocks for this quilt.  I have not decided what to name it yet... The blocks are not put together yet as they have to be all trimmed to the exact same size first.   They are bigger than standard 12.5" blocks.  All these fabrics came from my stash--the background is Essex linen. 

I also got caught up on my hollow nine patch blocks for this year's rainbow scrap challenge.  Green is the colour for May and red for April.  

I made a pillowcase for my MIL for Mother's Day.  We stopped to have dinner with her on our way home last Sunday.  Her dad was a beekeeper and this fabric has bees on the flowers.  She has it on her pillow now and is telling everyone I made it for her. 

This panel was donated to our church sewing group and I took it on as my project for the bazaar.  There are little ornaments (mostly made already) that will be added and hang on a button for each day of advent.  I did the quilting of the wall hanging at the retreat.  This still needs binding. 

My flannel scrap bin is overflowing again so it is time for another flannel scrap quilt.  I cut up some scraps and started sewing them in pairs.  On Monday night, I started sewing the pairs into foursies.  (Christine was here to sew that evening)

After consulting with my hooking friends, I decided to remove the stem stitches and start over.  Luckily, taking a line of loops out of a hooked rug is very easy and quick.  They both suggested I use two strands of yarn for one line of loops in the stems.  I will give this a try soon. 

I asked my daughter for a picture of her April books and granny squares for her book blanket.  She was quite busy at work in April and did not do a lot of reading.  The pace is picking up in May so there will be more squares made this month. 

We have spent lots of time working on the yard and garden this week. This is the last daffodil to bloom in my backyard--so pretty--I like the orange edge on the centre part of the flower. 

My husband picked our this unusual plant at the garden centre where we bought annual for our porch and patio pots.  It is called Kangaroo Paws and originated in Australia.  We looked up what real kangaroo paws look like and you can see an image at this link.  The plant does look remarkably like real kangaroo paws!

I planted all our patio and porch pots and so far, everything is doing well, despite the squirrels best efforts to dig in the pots...

I need to buy some smaller trays for the bottom two plants on this stand. 

My husband's dad always grew geraniums from seed for us each year so we put geraniums on our front porch every year in his memory. 

Christine and I went out for lunch in Port Stanley for her birthday this week.  We went for a walk and then stopped for ice cream before heading home.  

Our deutzia bush is starting to bloom--it will be covered in these small white flowers very soon. 

Two chipmunks entertained my husband and I as we ate supper one night this week.  They would come close to us and then run off quickly. It was hard to get a good picture!

We hiked with the hiking club one morning.  I love seeing all of the spring green emerging at this time of year. 

And, the trilliums are blooming!

Finn likes to lend a helping paw when my daughter is reading or crocheting.  

My Mother's Day gift was a new cookbook.  I have already tried one of the recipes!  yum!

I will close this off with a sunset picture from Camp Kintail. 

I will link up with three blogs this week--Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitchers, Angela's Rainbow Scrap Challenge as well as Frederique's weekly link up. 

Flannel Vortex Baby Quilt DONE!

Over the past few months, I have been using some of my many bright flannel scraps to make a flannel vortex baby quilt.  This is my third vortex quilt...I did my first one as part of a quilt-along with Amanda Jean at Crazy Mom Quilts.  The second one was made with my darker flannel scraps and was given to a friend who was going through cancer treatments.  A friend's daughter is having a baby soon so this quilt will be a gift for the new baby.

I used my walking foot and my favourite serpentine stitch to quilt this one. I wanted to make sure that there was quilting through every piece of fabric for stability when it is washed.  I make my baby quilts to be used and washed over and over again!

Some of these scraps have been hanging out in my sewing room for a long time.  Most are leftovers from PJ's I have made for my daughter and my twin nieces.  Does a scrap of flannel from 23 years ago count as vintage???

The quilt was just a bit too wide to use one width of fabric piece for the back so I pieced a strip of little birds into the middle of the dotty fabric to make the backing wide enough.  The binding used up almost all of the dotty fabric --there may be a few scraps of dotty fabric to add to my next flannel vortex quilt.

Happy Canada Day!  Happy 150th Birthday, Canada!

Flannel Vortex DONE!

I had some time yesterday to do some sewing so I laid out the backing, batting and top of the flannel vortex on the kitchen floor and did some pin basting.  I would really rather do this on a table but no table was available at the time.  My back likes me to use a table!!  LOL.  

All pin basted and ready to quilt!

I used my walking foot to do a wavy cross hatch. There are a lot of seams in this quilt and I wanted to make sure I hit most of the pieces of fabric with a line of quilting.

Here is a close up of the quilting.

I trimmed it up and made binding with some of the golden brown flannel with the animals on it.

All done and ready to give to a friend who is having a rough time at the moment.


In an effort to use up more of my flannel stash, I pieced the backing from odd hunks and chunks of fabrics that I used on the front as well as a few leftover slabs from the front. Here is a picture of the back:  

It is a very cozy quilt, just how I like my quilts to be.  FYI--the label has been added to the bottom right corner in the picture but I covered it up by turning up the corner of the quilt.

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...