Reveal day!

A while ago (maybe two years?) a group of us started what we were to call our Shoebox exchange.

Everyone was to choose their own themes and make a block to start. We put our blocks in a shoebox (or something like it) and it was passed through the group once a month. Everyone added to your quilt and after a year (since there were twelve of us in the group) we were presented with our own shoeboxes, full of blocks everyone had contributed. 

In that year, we had not seen what was being added. At the end of the year we had a Reveal Day get-together where we finally saw our blocks. It's been a while now, but we set today as a day to try to have our blocks assembled into a quilt top!

To remind you of my Shoebox quilt, you can look back to post here. 

Here is a picture of the finished quilt, Moonlight Thru' the Trees....

I had hoped to host today's Reveal outside with a bit of a Garden Party feel. Well, Mother Nature has other plans with heat and humidity to feel like the upper 30's! I have a feeling we'll end up in the house with the lovely A/C!

I've always liked to bake, but sometimes success doesn't happen when it counts....for company!

Today I have prepared a treat from Pinterest, Berry Pie Bars. Luckily it has turned out delicious and looks just like the pictures on Pinterest!

 Of course, we had to do quality control....yum!....

I'll take pictures today during the gathering and hopefully the ladies will agree that I can share the pics later in my next blog post. 

It will be so fun to see what everyone has done with their blocks. We had so many themes....snowmen, an I Spy quilt, trees, baskets, fairy gardens, etc.!

I have to show a picture of how my border of FlowerGarden is doing. I'm loving the big beautiful flowers. The one at the top measures 8 or 9" across.

Puppy update

Today the pups are five weeks old. I can't believe how fast the days go! 

We have set the pups up in the living room in a small wading pool to keep them contained when we don't want them wandering about. Now they are getting big enough that we've had two escapees already. 

We've had a challenge starting them on kibble, but now we've found an answer and they are taking to it...

So much cuteness around here this summer!

I am linking up to Sew Fresh Quilts for Let's Bee Social to see what others are up to today.

Have a great Summer's Day!

Quilt show season!

What a nice few days we've had! The weather has certainly helped the plants and trees pop in the last week or so.

It was two weeks ago today that I was driving home from the Simcoe area and drove through a little snow flurry....now we're into the temperature feeling like the mid-30's!

It's so nice to go out in the garden each morning and see what's new. I think my favourite, at least this time of year, is my Snowball bush...although now that I see it in a photograph, it seems I'll need to try shaping it a bit after it's finished blooming.

I'm worried about the Limelight Hydrangea that I planted last Spring. No sign of life yet, even though when I scratch the bark there is a bit of green. I had high hopes for that one.

On Saturday we attended a quilt show in Dunnville. They certainly had a lot of quilts to show. Now I'm feeling like a bad blogger since I didn't even think to take pictures :(

I think it's the first time I've left a quilt show empty-handed! Must be because I was feeling a little under the weather, but it was nice to window shop.

I always think that it's nice to come away with one inspiration at a quilt show, be it colour or design or what-have-you.

I happened to be inspired by a quilt that is very much like one I've had on the go. My project is a neutral block exchange. The blocks are 5" unfinished and we are nearing the end of the exchange. We will have almost 400 of these when we are done!

Here are a few...

At the quilt show, there was a similar one but made of all Kaffe Fassett fabrics. It was glorious! Geez, I wish I had thought to take a picture!

I've made up a block to remind myself of the quilt...

I'll have to take care with the values of the fabrics I choose, as this one seems to be a bit too blendy between the centre and the first row. Value has been a problem for me in many of my quilts.

I don't have a huge stash of Fassett, but I think any bright will be ok for my version....especially my yummy TulaPink fabrics!

I have started with a 2" centre and added three rows that are cut 1" wide.

I remember when I first started the neutral exchange I made a few coloured ones out of speculation. I did like them, so I'm not surprised that this particular quilt caught my eye.

I'll have to think of a name for this quilt....any suggestions are most welcome!!!

I've been trying this week to catch up a bit with of my Quilty365/Year in My Life. I really like this one...

...and these, too.....

These are some pretty jolly hearts! The pink "heart" heart is actually from a fabric that I had but I don't think I have it anymore. I begged this scrap from a friend. The one with the white house was gifted from a friend...I wish I had a couple yards of that one!

I am linking up with SoScrappy for ScrapHappySaturday to see what others are doing with the scraps in their stash and with Kathy over at Kathy's Quilts  to catch up on what others are stitching on today. I'm also linking up with Cynthia over at Quilting is More Fun Than Housework for Oh, Scrap!

My lawn is in dire need of mowing so I think I'll get at it after breakfast before it gets too hot again. After that, I think I may take some applique outside and take it easy. Sounds like a plan!

Have a wonderful Summer-like Spring day! 

A Neutral finish

I am so happy with the finishing of my Neutral quilt! 

I decided that, instead of binding the quilt, I would apply a facing to finish it off.

Here is how the front looks...nice and crisp!...

I've only done this method once before so had to go back to the tutorial on a blog called the Silly BooDilly which you can see HERE. The instructions seem long, but they are so well done...it's really quite simple and perfect for certain projects.

All that needs doing is a sleeve for hanging. I love how this quilt turned out so it will definitely find a place to hang somewhere! I'll post a picture after the quilt is shown at my trunk show next week.

We need to fashion a bit of a "nesting" box for Minnie since she will have puppies in a few weeks. We dug out the travel crate to see if this would suit her fancy....but within a few moments another member of the family laid claim to the hidey-hole...

Well, off to get ready now for our new activity...Tai Chi! Today will be our first class and I really hope we enjoy it.

Have a great day!

Sourdough success???

I've been quilting away at my April goal this week, which is to have my neutral quilt ready for showing at my trunk show in May.

Just a bit of time in the mornings with my coffee and I've seen a lot of progress...

This is my first try at big-stitch quilting. I'm using a few different shades of perle cotton. I'm really enjoying it and it's especially easy with my Thimblelady thimble and no hoop...

I picked up my usual thimble one morning by mistake and realised that it would much more difficult to quilt this in this manner without the proper thimble.

As of this morning I would say this little quilt is two-thirds quilted, not bad!

On to my baking adventure...

Last month I tried to get a sourdough starter started and after a week actually baked a loaf of bread. It was an absolute disaster!

I'm determined to have a success at this process. I found a site online where you can order a bit of dried "starter", you can see it HERE. My order took about two weeks to get here since it was coming from the States.

Here is a beautiful sourdough bread we bought at the market the other day from The Good Bread Company...

....so chewy and yummy!

.....and after two days of "feeding" here is my starter, bubbling away...

I know it looks kind of gross, but I think that means it's working!

On Saturday, I figured it's time to actually try making a loaf. It's actually a longer process than the times I would make bread on a regular basis years ago. This actually had to sit for 12 hours.

My loaf is now rising for a bit before cooking. I have to say, so far it looks like I'll need a bit more practice :(

I had hoped to have a bit more time at my sewing machine this week, but that was not to be. 

I did manage to get the first block done for this month's Rainbow Scrap Challenge. This month's colour is orange with a bit of black. I am going along with the Column-along for this project and here is a picture so far...

The block for January is the blue one ( I obviously need to do a few more ). February is the pink and brown. March was the purple butterflies. This month's block is super easy so I expect one more sewing session will complete the needed blocks.

I have a cousin back in Canada for a bit from his island home of Mauritius. He held a gallery showing of his paintings last week and we attended. There was a good turn-out of people to admire his work and I can say I'm now the proud owner of this, titled "Humanity". 

It's beautiful and I'm hoping I can come to a decision on where it will hang soon, but for now at least it's up. I was hoping to have one of Dan's paintings as I also have the first painting ever done by my grandfather. Danny was also happy to keep one of his paintings in the family.

Well, it's another busy day in store around here so I'd better sign off for now. 

I am linking up with Kathy's Quilts for Slow Sunday Stitching and with SoScrappy for Scrap Happy Saturday.

Have a wonderful Spring day!!!

April goals...

I'd like to say that today will be spent doing some "slow" stitching....not to be. It'll have to be a work day for me, but that's ok since it's such a fun quilt that needs finishing! I'll have to ask if I can share pictures for next time.

I was able to spend my morning coffee-time putting in a few stitches, of course. I finished this month's block for the HappyDay BOM. 

I don't know that it shows well in the picture but it's really pretty in real life.

I have two goals this month. One is that before I pick up another bit of applique I want to finish quilting my Moonlight Through the Trees. Here is a reminder of this quilt....

It's not a big quilt and I have incentive to complete it...I'm doing a trunk show in May and think it would be nice to include this quilt. I am quilting it with perle cotton, which is new for me, and it should quilt up quickly....if I keep at it!

The other goal is regarding a BOM I'm doing at Quilt Junction. We meet once a month (yesterday) and get the next set of clues for a mystery quilt. The quilt is Quilter's Legacy by Border Creek Station

Somehow I've fallen quite behind. Yesterday was the sixth of eight installments....I came home and finished installment three. So I have a couple of weeks to get caught up....and I'm determined I will!

Hopefully everyone has a bit of time today to take it easy and do some peaceful stitching.

Have a visit with Kathy over at Kathy's Quilts to see what others are working on today!

Thimble love!

After finishing the piecing of my "Moonlight" quilt lately, I just knew that I had to start the quilting right away. I've been itching to do some hand-quilting for a few weeks now.

I've decided to try big-stitch quilting on this with perle cotton and some lovely needles I bought on Saturday at Quilt Junction in Waterford. Lana suggested them and I have to say they are very nice to work with. They seem quite strong...which is nice since this quilt is quite thick in some areas.

I also love the chance to use my Thimblelady thimble. 

This thimble is fairly new to me and takes a bit of getting used to but so worth it. It involves learning a whole new way to hold your hand while quilting....and you can quilt with it without using a hoop. It was a bit of an investment, but this will probably be my go-to thimble forever.

Maybe you can tell, I get fairly attached to my thimbles! However disorganized I may be, I can be sure to tell you where my four best thimbles are at any given time!

So here is a picture of the beginnings of the quilting of "Moonlight through the trees"...

I've started in the middle with some quilting along a marked line. After that, I decided to just go freehand, doing some gently waving lines of quilting. 

It's very difficult for me to do these big honking stitches after over 35 years of trying to master perfect, tiny, evenly-spaced quilting stitches! I'm having a hard time keeping them even and, being so big they just look messy to me. Hopefully I'll get a bit better at big stitches and like them a bit more! 

Actually, I think they will enhance this quilt perfectly in the end!

It's another dreary day....hard to push myself up to the longarm when all I'd like to do is some piecing and curl up with my book!

Yesterday I worked on a client's scrappy quilt....which always makes me happy. To me a quilt like this just screams "authentic".

Today I am linking up with Quilt Story's Fabric Tuesday.

Have a great day!

Is this what "creativity" feels like?

In my last post I lamented on what to do with my neutral blocks.

They are part of an exchange with friends and my theme, obviously, was neutrals.

All of the blocks were beautiful and expertly sewn.

......but.....on the design wall they just didn't seem to "go"....

Also in my last post, I said how if I left the blocks up they may soon speak to me. 

Well, on Wednesday morning they not only spoke to me.....they actually raised their voice and shouted a little!

The idea they were presenting terrified me and thrilled me at the same time! Could I do as they asked? What would my friends think of what I would do with these lovely blocks they had made for me?

 It didn't take me long to realise that I wanted to love this quilt, so I had to be ruthless and go for it!

So I took all those blocks and sliced them up into 3.5" squares!

As I did this, I stacked them into 5 piles...light, light/medium, medium, medium/dark and dark. 

I hesitated before cutting the last block, the feathered star that I had painstakingly paper-pieced.....

...but, yes, it got chopped up also!

I had an idea to start at the centre of the quilt with the lightest 3.5" blocks and work out toward the edge with the darker ones...

As soon as I had them all up on the wall I could see it was a "picture" of the moon...

Here is the finished piece. I am calling it "Moonlight through the trees".

The very centre of the quilt is an appliqued circle from what had originated as an dresden plate block...

To take time to look at all the little individual blocks is fascinating. I took the original blocks and made them into 182 beautiful little abstract blocks! Here are a few...

Even my feathered star is included...

It's so strange to me how this idea caught hold and had me slicing and sewing like a whirling dervish. I know that at the beginning of the year, my hope was to try to explore creativity. Well, I certainly felt creative this week!

I do hope when my friends see the finished quilt they will understand that their hard work is still there, just in a different configuration....and in a quilt that I love!

While trying to think of ways I may quilt this, I thought it might be a nice piece to try "big stitch" quilting. I've got a few balls of perle cotton that would be just right to try this out.

For all the creative sewing I was able to do this week, it feels like my applique is moving at the speed of molasses. Oh well, even a little a day gets the projects moving along!

I'm getting so close to finishing the bottom border of FlowerGarden. I'm so glad because I'm afraid I'm getting a little tired of working on this one. Thankfully, the side borders will go a lot quicker.

I've appliqued a couple of little birds just to give myself a little break from the neverending circles that are on this border.

...and managed to put a few stitches into last week's block of The Splendid Sampler...

I'm linking up with SoScrappy for her ScrapHappySaturday so I can show that I've started my RSC16 in purple for March. I am doing the blocks she is sharing in her Column-along, a butterfly block...

A nice easy block....only eight more to go, no problem!

I hope today is as nice as yesterday as we plan to plant some peas today. We emptied our compost into the vegetable garden in the Fall and the soil looks wonderful. I love this time of year when you can feel the nice weather just coming around the corner!

I'm linking up with Kathy over at Kathy's Quilts to see what others are working on today. 

I am also linking with Cynthia for OhScrap over at Quilting is More Fun Than Housework.

Have a wonderful Spring-forward day!

Neutrals, what was I thinking??!!

I don't know if it's being of a certain age, but one of my favourite things is going out for lunch with friends, family....whoever!

Today I'll be meeting my sister-in-law for lunch at a restaurant I've never been to, Ferrera's in Simcoe. I'm quite looking forward to it...I don't know much about it except to hear a friend say that this restaurant has the best breakfast around.

Yesterday I worked on a quilt that was designed and made by my friend, Debra Allan. It's such a sweet quilt. She named the pattern Beary Love and Butterflies....and you can see why.....

A couple of years ago I was part of a block exchange that we called the Shoebox quilt. Everyone in the group ( I think twelve of us ) picked our own theme, made the first block, then passed the blocks around for a year 'til we ended up with our own Shoebox again. During that year we couldn't see what others were contributing to our own Shoeboxes. Every month we would have a month to construct a block ( or two ) for other participant's quilts.

We have finally set a date in July to try to get our blocks made into quilt tops, if not completely done!

There were a lot of fun themes....snowmen, trees, houses, fairy garden to name a few. My theme was neutrals. I've always been intrigued with the challenge involved in the making of a neutral quilt. 

Yesterday I figured I'd better at least get the blocks on the design wall. I really had it in my head that as I put them up they would magically fall into place into a pleasing arrangement!

Bwahahahahaha!!! Not so much!

I am totally stymied on what to do with my blocks! I'm going to rely on a old, faithful technique....leave them up there for a while until they talk to me and give me the answer!

I do have a kind of radical idea, but I don't think I have quite the courage :( 

Monday evening I went to a guild meeting. So many people showed their centre medallions of the 365QuiltChallenge block-of-the-day. I will have to take a bit of time out of my day to do mine after being inspired by every else's blocks. 

The beauty of being a bit behind is hearing everyone's advice on the piecing of the medallion....thanks, guys!!!

I did piece a block this week that was quite challenging. It's part of a BOM called Happy Days by Sarah Fielke. This is going to be a stunning quilt. I especially like that it will be challenging and using techniques that I'd never come across. 

Here is this month's block...

The middle bit is almost perfect but some of the dots in the fabric really make it look way off! Oh well, it's done and I like it! I also like that the tigers in the corner fabric all came out standing up by happy accident. 

I am linking up with Quilt Story for their Fabric Tuesday to see what others are working on today!

Have a great almost-Spring day!