Red Cedar

So here is the finished quilt – pattern is Flower Chain, fabric is Flea Market Fancy – both designed by Denyse Schmidt. I appliqued the petals on rough (zig zag stitch) otherwise I would have gone crazy – but in my experience this technique holds up okay in the wash.

I am no fancy quilter – with just a regular sewing machine I can’t imagine trying to move everything around under the needle. I think I will send my next large quilt out to someone with a longarm which isn’t nearly as expensive as it used to be.

I had leftover fabric, so I made a couple of pillow shams to go with, as well as a stamp-block pillow. I need to do a little brag here and say that the cases are french-seamed because I don’t have an overlocker and wanted to make sure they held up to washing and use.

Thanks to Elizabeth Hartman – I am in love with this technique which took me no time at all today and results in perfectly lined up rows of tiny fabric pieces. Also, I now have a quilter’s grid drawn on canvas for future projects.

  And this is all the bedding ready to be slept under! This marks the first full sized quilt that I have made for us since moving into this house nearly five years ago (I have made quilts for other people and smaller quilts for us – but the only queen-sized quilt I have ever made for myself is the first one I made 10 years ago). I am counting this as three separate patchwork projects in my attempt to do 52 projects in 52 weeks this year.

As I just posted on Facebook – I don’t normally get in on the selfie action but I really did want to share my new rain jacket – bought by my Mom in honour of my birthday – and worn today with my favourite red-roses dress in keeping with Valentine’s day. Both the jacket and the dress are locally made – the outerwear by Faye Tality Couture and the dress by me for last Valentine’s.

I haven’t been making any clothes lately – but this weekend I will be finishing off some pillow-cases to go with my just-finished quilt and there will be photos to share finally. I’m also considering making a 15 x 15 throw pillow with the remainder of the scraps using Elizabeth Hartman’s Stamp Collection block tutorial. There is something so ridiculous about a square made up of a hundred tiny squares…… but this method using interfacing seems so do-able and attempting it on a pillow (rather than planning a whole quilt) seems like the best place to start.

Also in the hopper is a plan for me to finish the ugliest quilt ever started – which I tried to dig out of the closet this morning but decided against since extracting it involves moving a bunch of things around and I didn’t have time to get into that mess. This is another project for the weekend and I will take pictures once I get it out and appraise whether it is worthy of finishing.

I’ve been feeling a bit quilt-mad lately which is interesting – and have been devouring all sorts of books on both modern and historical quilting. Just yesterday I downloaded 25 Ways to Sew Jelly Rolls, Layer Cakes & Charm Packs: Modern Quilts from Contemporary Pre-cuts by Brioni Greenberg and it is without a doubt once of the nicest modern quilting books I’ve seen lately. I bought the Kindle version since these days I prefer to keep all my sewing, crocheting, crafty books on my computer – so I don’t know what it’s like in print – but I am super inspired by her quilt designs and can hardly wait to make a couple of them.

Also, I was looking at some photos of Dear Jane quilts and feeling the lure of the sampler – something I have never done before but always wanted to. I’m thinking I might join in on the Aurifil Block-A-Month for 2014 since it’s a free quilt-along and the two blocks so far are appealing to me. Also I have a bunch of odd pieces of Kona Snow leftover from a couple of projects and some blocks with many small pieces would help me use them up.

So at the moment my project list looks like this:

• Finish pillow shams
• Cooper Bag for me
• Figure out what to do with the ugliest quilt ever
• Cooper Backpack for summer
• Stamp Collection pillow
• Finish red cardigan started last February (one more sleeve to go)
• Jan/Feb Blocks from Aurifil patterns
• Picnic quilt (this is another project started and never finished that clutters up my sewing closet)
• Contraflow from the above book (my reward for finishing all the WIPs is that I get to make something entirely new with entirely new fabric)
• Patchwork bathmat
• Cotton crochet pullover (for the trip to Hawaii)
• Woodland Cape (I have this amazing vintage blue wool fabric and this is what I want to make with it)

As you can see, the list of things I want to do kindof goes on and on. And it changes all the time too. This weekend I am going to finish the pillow shams and then start my Cooper Bag which is already cut out. Then we’ll see what happens next.

Happy Love Day everyone!

This was actually supposed to be finished in January in time for my niece Grace’s birthday, but because I was ill and my trip to Victoria got postponed – the whole thing got pushed into the first week of February.

For this project I used a template by Ann Wood – first sewing fabric onto card stock printed with the horses on the back, and then cutting the horses out and gluing them together. After putting down the background fabric on a cheap canvas, I glued the horses on top and then glued on their buttons (sewing through layers of cardboard and fabric was going to take too long and leave me frustrated, so I opted for lots of white glue).  Everything was mod-podged about four times afterwards to get rid of the uneven surface and it turned out quite nicely (this picture makes everything look a bit orange).

I didn’t get a picture of Grace receiving the picture last weekend, but she did point at several of the horses one after another – taking them in – which I hope she will continue to do over the next few years as this picture hangs on her bedroom wall. This was a fun project – there’s something so lovely about the prancing horses and I’m glad I have a two year old in my life to make such fancies for.