May Mini Quilt

sorting scraps

This month's mini quilt was started during a zoom meeting. I had a pile of scraps that were slightly out of view of the camera, and I enjoyed myself so much more by multitasking with fabric!

sewing the last goose

When the meeting ended I began sewing a few flying geese blocks and just kept going until I had enough for a little quilt. You can see the piles of scraps still needing to become part of something. My January mini quilt was made from the same collection of scraps.

stitching the hanging sleeve

Sometimes I wonder why I make these little things. They serve absolutely no purpose, except to make me happy in a way that is not logical or explainable. You can see that the hanging sleeve is about the size of my needle.

And here it is... may I present to you "Of course I still love you". 

"Of course I still love you"

The title is the name of the SpaceX drone ship which was repeated so often during the televised launch yesterday. I was stitching the binding while watching the replay of this historic event.

Finished size: 5" x 5.75"

Hop over to Wendy's blog The Constant Quilter to see more miniature quilts made in the month of May. 
Linking up to Cheryl's Favorite Finish, Alycia's Finished (or not) Friday, and Cynthia's Oh Scrap party.

Slow Sunday Stitching

Welcome to the weekly celebration of hand stitching! It's the one time a week where we make sure to set aside some special moments for playing with needles and thread/yarn. We hope you will join us!

We had a heat wave here this week, so I was only doing hand stitching since it was too hot to sit at the sewing machine. The only comfortable place was in the back yard in the evenings, so until the mosquitoes made me their evening snack, I enjoyed some hand stitching time.

One of my happy moments this week was watching the online quilt auction for the Mennonite Relief Sale. I have attended this fundraiser for at least 15 years, and was so sad that since COVID rules prohibit any public gatherings, it needed to be an online event this year. They managed to host a great online event and raised a lot of money for their international charity work. I stitched my way through the event, trying not to miss the real in person event, the strawberry pies, the tea balls meeting my quilting friends, etc.

And since my goal is to make Slow Sunday Stitching posts encouraging and positive, I wanted to share with you a gift I received this week. I have made a lot of masks over the past couple of months, including masks for any of my kids' friends that wanted them.

Tuesday night I found this on the porch... a lovely thank you card and homemade brownies! 
The card says...
"Making the world a nicer place, one mask at a time"!
I must say that made me a little weepy. 

Okay now it's your turn.
What are you hand stitching this week? Do you have any good news to share to cheer us up? Link up your blog post below and share your hand stitching project with us.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

From Green to Pink

We are finishing up dark green month at the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. It's not my favourite colour to sew with, but it is one of my favourite colours to see at this time of the year especially. I didn't accomplished much in the sewing room, but in my life there has been a lot of green!


I planted a variety of seeds that are finally sprouting. I think this is an emerging zucchini plant.



And I've made lots of healthy = green meals. 
I think I'm coming to the end of my soup making obsession. I only made one batch this week with 3 different green veggies in it and still managed to make it taste good!


So now we are moving on to pink month.
Pink is one of my favourite colours to sew with and I am looking forward to playing with the pink scraps!

Part 6 of the Unity quilt needed a lot of pink HST blocks. I always trim them down to the exact right size, although when I look at this photo I wonder about my sanity... look how tiny the slivers are that I am fussing around with! 

Now I am cutting out pieces for round 8 and this is how the block will look. It has all the recent RSC colours... blue April, green May and pink June, so it's the perfect block to sew today.
Linking up to the RSC party.

Heating Up!

We went from snow and hail on Mother's Day May 10th to a heat wave this week. 

hail on pile of quilts

This is a photo of the preparations for Mother's Day - a pile of quilts to wrap around my 2 kids who were coming for a backyard, socially distant visit. It was cold enough to wear our winter coats and be wrapped up in quilts. 
Over the past 2 weeks the temperature rose more than 30 degrees (Celsius) . It's quite an extreme and rapid weather change for which I was unprepared! I don't have the window air conditioner installed in the sewing room yet and it's too hot to sit at the machine and sew! 

Hand stitching to the rescue!
Sometimes is has even been too hot to hold the needle without sweating, but evenings have been comfortable.
I'd like to give a shout out to Kathleen in Connecticut, who is a hand stitcher and wanted to know the size of this embroidery pattern. I measured it for you and the length of the rolling pin is 6.25". You can order the pattern though Colonial Patterns. It would be a great tribute to your pie making Mom and sister!

Your smile for the day... if it wasn't so hot outside, I'd consider returning to this old style of women's clothing to help me maintain a safe, socially distant life! 

Unity Sewing

The weekend provided some time for catching up on my version of the Unity mystery. I have been delighted at how easily each round of this medallion mystery has attached to the growing quilt top. The practice of adding so many borders really does help to improve the skills. I don't know why it seemed so hard a few years ago?!? LOL 

another finished cone of Aurifil

I played thread chicken when adding this long border. Can you believe that I used up another large cone of white Auriful thread. That's 5,900 metres of thread (or 6,452 yards if you aren't familiar with metric measurement) which represents A LOT of sewing. Luckily I have another cone of white thread ready to keep on sewing.

Here is the quilt on my too small design wall after adding part 5 to the top and bottom. I can't believe how much I like this quilt considering the fabric was completely unplanned and all from stash.

This week I will sew some letter blocks for the next word in part 7. 

Linking up to Small Quilts

Slow Sunday Stitching

Welcome to the weekly linkup where we celebrate the art of hand stitching! 

Make a cup of your favourite beverage to enjoy while you visit the blogs of slow stitchers around the world. It's the perfect way to start your Sunday! 

I have been enjoying lots of outdoor time and doing spring time chores like digging in the dirt, planting seeds, and trimming everything that is growing so quickly this time of year (including weeds). But still, Sunday is dedicated time to slow down with hand stitching. 

Some progress is being made on my Stitcher's Revolution 
embroidered tea towel. The inside of the design is stitched and I'm working on the outside. I like how it all fits inside this perfectly sized hoop.

What are you hand stitching today? Link up your blog post below and share your project with us.

You are invited to the Inlinkz link party!

Click here to enter

Scrappy Saturday

For the past 2 months the two primary projects in the sewing room have been the Unity mystery and mask making. 

musician face masks

The requests for face masks is starting to ease up, so that means more quilting time. Yah! For some reason it doesn't feel as "heavy" or emotionally intense to sew the masks as it did in March and April. Are you finding that too? Maybe it's because it appears as though the medical staff have enough of the approved N95 masks at the moment and the worry about their safety and protection has eased a bit?

I am actually starting to enjoy picking fabrics from my stash to match the interests of receivers. I'm seeing about a quarter to a third of shoppers wearing masks around here. And I get compliments every single time I wear mine (the one at the top of this photo) to the grocery store! 

May Mini Arrowheads

And in between those two projects, I am using my mini arrowhead blocks as leader-ender pieces. It's just fun to watch blocks build slowly over time. These are the green blocks made in May so far. If they look familiar it might be because I finished a blue bed size Arrowhead quilt last month. These little blocks will be 3" in the mini RSC version.

Here are the 25  green blocks in the collection so far. You can see more of the block collection here.  

Linking up to the  RSC weekly scrap party.

A whole lot of sewing going on!

Starting the Quiltville Unity quarantine project was such a great idea! It has been a wonderful distraction and a ton of piecing of small scraps which I really enjoy! 

Be adaptable!

I loved sewing these green and blue flying geese blocks for part 5 and think it was my favourite step of this mystery.

The blocks for part 6 HSTs and then part 7 spinning pinwheels were quite labour intensive. But using the bright pink was a great decision. It kept my interest and filled the sewing room with bright energy.


I am almost completely out of neutrals so am looking forward to the time when I can visit all my favourite quilt stores to stock up again.