A Finish!

It is always cause for rejoicing when a UFO is finished! At guild meeting several members brought finished UFO's to celebrate and I was happy to do the same, and also happy that comparatively speaking (not mentioning any names!), my UFO wasn't that "old"! As you probably know from previous posts, this was made from a kit I bought at a New York quilt store called Calico Gals, which I visited during Christmas vacation in 2006. I pieced the blocks in 2007 and finally finished the quilting this week. The fact that the whole thing is now hanging FLAT against my dining room wall is a bonus!
Don't forget to enter your name in my 200th blog entry draw - see this post.

Good news!

I have lots of good news to tell you! First of all, it sure feels good to announce that we have been seeing the sun here in Southern Ontario!! And look here - some real daffodils are starting to poke their little heads up and check to see if the snow is gone...and it mostly is! Finally! It has been a long winter here and we are more than ready for some nice warm weather and some flowers.
My second piece of good news to announce is bead related, so jump on over to my beading blog here to read more about that.
My third good news announcement is that this is my 200th blog post! Wow! How did that happen?!?! I continue to enjoy blogging and find it a good way to not only meet and be inspired by other quilters, but also to keep track of my projects and the quilting/stitching that I am doing. I am going to put together a spring gift for one of my blog readers, so leave me a comment on this post and I'll let my kids pick the lucky winner on friday, which is a PD day (no school, so everyone is getting haircuts - don't tell them!).
I had a couple of quiet hours on Sunday afternoon to do more machine quilting on my spring flower quilt. Here is a photo of my original sketch for the border quilting. It is hard to photograph that green fabric for some unknown reason, so I hope you can see it. The quilting went very well and I was happy with the end results. It was a little wavy so I went around again and added a few more leaves. I challenged myself to finish the quilt in time to show at guild meeting, and I still have to do the binding, hanging sleeve, and label. Tick, tick, tick, tock.....

More machine quilting

I am back from my work conference in Sudbury. Driving in snowy weather to the conference was a nightmare, and we ended up being storm stayed in Parry Sound. Luckily we found a hotel room for the night and resumed our trip safely the next day once the white outs had subsided. The conference itself was very intense and exhausting, but excellent learning for my intense and exhausting job. I came home with the psychosomatic symptoms of being sick (stomach pain) and tired (headache). Thankfully the drive home took half the time that the drive up took!! And it's a good thing that we only have to go every other year - I have 2 years to recover and brace myself for the next conference!
I sure am craving some quilting time and hope I have some time and energy to quilt soon. Here is a possible border design that I am playing around with. This is what I usually do - fold a scrap paper the size of the border and doodle some ideas until I get one that is continuous and enjoyable to quilt.
Then I start quilting that design and hope the quilt lays flat out to the edge...
I'll let you know how it goes.

Machine Quilting progress

I have been machine quilting my spring wallhanging in every spare moment. First I quilted in the ditches between the blocks (using my walking foot). I quilted all the horizontal and vertical seams, and then started free motion quilting the blocks.

This was my block sketch with the quilting design that I liked the most. Sometimes I use EQ to design the quilting, or at least to print out the block to sketch ideas on, but with my computer acting up, I just did it the old fashion way - drawing on scrap paper.
There are 20 flower blocks and I have about half of them finished. There are places where the quilt is thick because of all the seams on the top and on the pieced backing, so I have had trouble with thread breaking if I quilt too fast. I also couldn't get the quilting needles to work and had the best luck with a universal needle. I am using a varigated Sulky thread and just hope I have enough to finish the quilting!
And this is how the blocks corners look where they meet.

I was hoping to have the quilting finished so that I could sew the binding on while I travel to a work conference this week, but I haven't had enough quilting time to meet that goal. But I will put my time to good use and will sketch some border quilting ideas while sitting in meetings. I'll post my sketches when I get home.

Happy Quilting!

National Quilt Day!

Happy National Quilt Day! Actually it was yesterday, and it's really only an American "holiday" although I don't know if quilters are given time off work to celebrate! You can read about the celebration on this website. Since I take any opportunity to celebrate quilting, I used this as an excuse to make sure my family knew that I needed to quilt yesterday - as if I need an excuse!!!

Because of the winter weather we have had, and the fact that Easter is early this year, we will not have any flowers at Easter - no crocuses (crocusi?), or daffodils, or tulips...only snow. I was really in the mood to work on my flower/spring quilt. I cut the border stips and sewed those on. Then I finished piecing the backing. You may remember that I switched the border strips and the backing fabric since the recommended border, which I had already sewn, was too busy for my liking (you can see the "problem" here).
So here is the scrappy backing. There are the 4 pieced borders strips that run right across the backing, and then I filled in with leftover pieces of fabric from the kit. I have only a few small scraps left and am very pleased with myself for using up everything instead of running to the store and buying a new backing. I hope it will quilt okay on my little machine having all those seams on the back...we'll see.

Then I started the pin basting process, which I enjoy now that I have big tables to lay out my quilts on...no more crawling around on hands and knees for this old girl!

Digging Out again

What a huge amount of snow we had this weekend. Lots of shovelling. Thankfully there are 4 of us in the family to take turns at it. We have been shovelling our own driveway and sidewalks, helping the elderly neighbours with theirs, and helping to push out cars that were stuck in the snow. Can you see that the snowbanks are higher than our car?!?In Kathy's Quiltland, I have been thinking about an old UFO called "La Vie En Rose". I don't very often buy kits, but for some reason I liked this a few years ago. The flower blocks were fun to sew, and now I think the colours are so pale. But I will finish it and I am excited about my ideas for quilting it. But first I have to finish the border...the place where my UFO's are created!
It is supposed to have the pieced border on the right, but I thought it was "too much". So I decided to use the green fabric that I bought for the backing instead. And that means I have to piece the backing from the pieces I was going to use for the border. Do you follow? The border and the backing are switching places!
I won't have much time the next little while to do as much quilting since I have taken on another part time job...just for 3 months, working days a week doing work for the Community Health Centre with post partum depression clients. With the winter weather we have had...we have had snow every 2 days out of 3 since Dec. 1st and more than half the days have seen less than 1 hour of sunshine (according to the newspaper)...the incidents of post partum depression in our community has skyrocketed. So I'll help out until the weather improves and hopefully the referrals decrease. My daughter asked me how I was going to do three jobs - I'm not sure yet!! But I know I'll figure it out!