Quilt Canada 2014

While I'm on a roll making challenging quilty decisions this week, I went ahead and made another big one.
Drum roll please....
I am going to Quilt Canada 2014: Wonders of Niagara!
Yes I am!
It's a lot of money for me to spend, but it's so close to where I live, I just can't not go, right?!?!
I've only been to one other Quilt Canada conference in 2008 (read about that amazing adventure here).  It really was a highlight of my life so far, so my expectations are pretty high for this one! 
I am pouring over the class listings and trying to decide which techniques I would like to learn more about. Okay, taking all the classes is not possible! There are 20 classes offered each day. It has been enlightening for me to try to narrow down the options in terms of clarifying my current quilt interests. This is a hard, but delightful job! 

I am leaning towards the classes with Cheryl Arkison, Gail Garber, and Pippa Moore.
So now, I am back to my tried and true, scientific method of eeny, meeny, miny, mo!
Is anyone else in blogland attending Quilt Canada?!? If so, what classes are you taking? Do you have any tips for me?!? So excited!

Making a Decision

I have been so amazed at the feedback from my post on Frixion pens, and on my Temecula quilt layout! There were so many varied opinions and options to consider.  Everyone has their own expertise with previous experiences, preferences, and creative ideas. I was very thankful for all the input and helpful information, but then found myself really waffling even more on all the decisions :)
I now recognize this "waffling zone of uncertainty" as the

From: Be Brave

kiss of death for my quilting projects. I become immobilized by the fear of making a mistake, or doing it "wrong", and am so freaked out that I will turn my growing creative masterpiece into a piece of junk, that I put it in a box and hide it deep in the UFO cupboard.

Not any more!
I am going to be brave and make a decision. Any decision.
Because the votes for the Temecula quilt background were very unhelpful because they were pretty much evenly split for all the option, I went right ahead and decided to use the ever popular "Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe" decision making technique. 
White is it!

I got to work sewing the inside section together and organizing the border blocks. I wish I would have made more red blocks, but that's okay. I think I will use red for the inner border and the binding, like the sample quilt. 
Breathe. Sew.
I'm not building a nuclear bomb... just a quilt!!

Tuesday Treadling

I haven't done a Treadling on Tuesday post since last year! Why is that? 
Because I haven't done any treadling since then. 
I was reading Cheryl's blog post about her vintage sewing machine booth, and started to miss my treadle machine, and wondered why I haven't been using it.
In fact the sewing

Treadle covered with "Quilter's Blessings"

machine has been hiding stored safely in the cabinet for a while. Sometimes I slip into this scarcity thinking pattern in which I believe that I should put special things away so that they don't get broken or dusty or used too much. 
But I have learned that when very special things are put away safely, they are forgotten about and never used! Since I put the machine into the cabinet, I have not been tempted once to sit and treadle when I find that I have a few extra minutes.

Today the sun was shining on my treadle, and I decided that it was going to come out in the sun shine where I could see it and enjoy it, and be tempted to sit and treadle whenever I wanted to relax.






Ahhhh.... that's so much better!  I will thread up the machine and I bet you that I will be tempted to sit down and treadle every time I walk by.
How about you? 
Get out your special machine and give it some love and appreciation!

Temecula Hearts on the Design Wall

I am still sewing away on my Temecula hearts quilt. It's a little late for Valentine's day, but I'll be early for next year! I have all the 9 patch heart blocks finished and on the design wall, but can't figure out which fabric to use for the background squares.



This was my original idea for the center background squares, but I think it looks too busy.

So then I tried a red on white background fabric, but I'm not sure if it works or not?








And then I tried a plain muslin background, and it was much calmer.

But is it too boring? 
Too dull?
Just right?

Do you have a preference or suggestion?

Here I am sewing more heart blocks on my Featherweight.
Of course I had to put on my red shirt to sew my red blocks! My friend Diane loaned me her Featherweight book to read and I found a picture of my Sweet Baby Jayne in this resource  book. It was very interesting to read about the history of these machines.

Guess how many finished heart blocks are in that bag?!
There are exactly as many as I need to finish this quilt!
I just need to decide on the background fabric. What's your vote?
To see more design walls, hop over to Patchwork Times.

Slow Sunday Stitching - Stencils & Frixion Pens

Have you ever used a quilting stencil before? I have very limited experience with them, but my Journey quilt really wanted a cabled border. I found the right sized 3" cable border stencil and then had to decide how to mark it. I remembered the information on Lori's blog and Lee's blog about the Frixion pens, and decided to try them out.
The Frixion pen was easy to use, just like a regular pen, and the marks showed up well on the fabric. I drew some lines, and tried out the iron to see if the lines actually disappeared as they were supposed to... 
and they did!
Completely gone! 
Reviewers say that the marks reappear if you put the quilt in the freezer or take it outside when it's really cold, but then you just have to reapply the heat to get the marks to go away again. I think I would be nervous to use this tool on a white quilt, but I was willing to try it on this busy print border.
So I took the plunge and marked the whole border. I easily got the hang of adjusting the cable sections to make sure there were whole designs across all sides. I just had to lengthen two of the cables by about 1/2". 
And when I made a mistake, I just took the iron to it, and started over again. 
Loved it! 
Now which thread colour should I use to quilt the cable? I'm thinking pink or green?

What are you hand stitching today? Link up your hand stitching blog post below so we can celebrate your slow progress with you.

Scrappy Saturday - just let the pink go!

I'm having a hard time leaving pink month behind and moving on to aqua for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge! This is partly because I love pink, and partly because I used up most of my regular aqua scraps last July.

I have been organizing some aqua batik scraps to make some Alamo stars, but I seem to be combining them with leftover pinks from last month! Yikes...that's a really low contrast block in the center that I didn't notice until I saw it on the computer screen.

Okay... I'm going back to pressing and cutting little bits for more blocks, and I'm going to try to leave the pink scraps in the bin and get a better variety of scraps in this project!
Hop over to SoScrappy to see what other quilters are making with their aqua scraps.

Votes For Women

Since finishing my Civil War quilt sampler last month, I am focusing on my other Barbara Brackman sampler called

Grandmother's Choice - Votes For Women. I decided to divide my blocks into two piles, and border one half in grey paisley, and the other half in raspberry red paisley. This is how it's starting to look...sweet!
I'm very happy with how it is coming together and will continue bordering the remaining blocks. 
I also have to make one more block, since I realized I was missing the last block #49.
  

This quilt sampler was another wonderful project from Barbara Brackman with a weekly history lesson about suffragists. I looked forward to every post and enjoying making each of the blocks...yes, even the applique ones! Now I have to move on and get started on her 2014 sampler called Threads of Memory.
So many quilts... so little time!

A Mini Finish

While at Quilt Camp last month, I made a cute little

mini quilt and almost forgot to post about it on my blog.  My quilty friend Sue made a larger size quilt from the red scraps in her stash, and she had some leftover pieces which she generously shared.This little gem finishes at 4" x 3" plus binding. So cute and tiny! My friend Barbara helped with the cutting, so it went together really fast.

The best part was the machine quilting... hearts all over the place!
It was so tiny, I was afraid it would float away, so I put some "quilt weights" on it just in case! Maybe the best part was eating the quilt weights?!




I have found the perfect place to hang it in my quilt studio! It makes me smile every time I look at it.

Design Wall Monday - Plaid Beauty

Did you ever think you were finished a quilt, but the quilt insisted that it wasn't done?

I finished sewing my Plaid Beauty blocks together and although I didn't plan to add borders, the quilt insisted on having some. It was 48" x 60" which is the perfect size for a lap quilt. But apparently this quilt wanted to be a bit bigger.
Who am I to argue?
I added two simple borders.
And now the quilt is happy...
and quiet! 
To see more design wall postings, hop over to Patchwork Times.

Slow Sunday Stitching Linky Party

This week I tried out a new (to me) product called "finger cots" which were  recommended by Teresa at Fabric Therapy (see blog post here). I finally located some at Shoppers Drug Mart. They worked great and I liked them for pulling the needle and thread through easily. It was more convenient than constantly picking up the needle grabber discs that I had been using. 

I was getting very co-ordinated with the thimble on my middle finger and the cot on the first finger, until the cot cut off the circulation in my finger! I fixed that problem by cutting into the rim at the edge and it worked perfectly, and my finger stopped turning purple. 

My big announcement is that this week I finished hand quilting the 9th block on my Journey of a Quilter....the 9th and last block! I started hand quilting these blocks in December 2012. I have just loved every step of making these blocks - the fabric selection, block construction, hand embroidery, and the hand quilting. This one block has over 30 different fabric scraps in it, and even the light background fabrics are scrappy leftovers too.

Here is how the quilt looks today...

YUM!

I spent some time running my hands over the stitches, admiring the texture that hand quilting gives. My mind revisited many memories from working on this quilt over the years. One of the benefits of having a blog is that you can easily review your posts about a quilt's journey - you can see the 35+ posts written about this quilt since July 2007 by clicking here. 

My biggest hand stitching challenge today will be that I am puppysitting my granddog Max. And he doesn't like hand stitching, or anything slow! He wants me to play with him. All the time. It's cute for a while and then it's annoying!  "Come on Grandma... play with me"!

I hope to be able to get the border design marked today. I had been debating about hand quilting an unmarked design, a "liberated" free motion kind of quilting. Since I didn't do any marking on the blocks, it seemed like I should do the same for the borders. But I really had my heart set on a cable pattern around the border, and I can't do that in a free motion, unmarked way. Still thinking about it.

What are you hoping to stitch today? I hope you have some time to enjoy your hand stitching project, and link up your blog post below. 

Two Birds With One Stone

This month I am combining my participation for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge with my UFO for A Lovely Year of Finishes. I am going to work on a teal (more blueish than greenish) and brown UFO.

A few years ago I bought some yardage of the Sweetwater Pure line of fabrics, which are mostly soft teals and browns.
I made a full size mystery quilt from that fabric (see the quilt here) and from the scraps I made 12 blocks for the block sampler quilt-along that Jo hosted two years ago. Here are some of the blocks on the design wall auditioning some sashing and border choices. I loved these blocks but never got around to putting them together.  

Now I want to clean out that box of blocks and scraps. Do you have this pile of stuff for your UFOs? Leftover fabric is on the left, smaller scraps in the box, and a block pile on the right. This is a great quilt waiting to happen, and this is the month to do it! 
I am going to quilt the blocks in the "quilt-as-you-go" style. Each week I am going to quilt 3 blocks and by the end of the month, all 12 blocks will be quilted. Hopefully! And as I go along, I'm going to cut up the scraps in the box into useable pieces for my Rainbow Challenge projects. We shall see how things evolve!
To see more Rainbow Challenge projects, visit SoScrappy.
To see more UFO goals, hop over to A Lovely Year of Finishes.

Plaid Beauty

I did it! I got all my plaid blocks sewn together into a quilt top before the end of the month!

This was a tricky quilt top to sew together. 

Just look at this mess of seams and blocks!  It was very easy to get the blocks twisted around, and I'm still not 100% sure that I have them all oriented correctly, so if you see a block out of place, please tell me :) 

To see more February finishes, hop over to A Lovely Year Of Finishes.

Product Report and a Finish!

Three years ago my friend Marjorie gave me a bag of leftover HST's that she was going to throw in the garbage (gasp!). I was happy to rescue them and you can see the beginning of the project here. This is a long term leader/ender project and I was really happy with the layout that evolved over the years. I finally pulled it out again to work on last week at quilt camp, and decided this would be the perfect quilt to experiment on. I usually use my Machingers or old dollar store gloves to help with moving the quilt around, but this time I tried out two new (to me) machine quilting aids that other quilters had brought to camp.

"Batt Scooters"

They were "okay" to use, and gave me good control over the quilt movement. But my hands tired easily from picking up the batts and moving them from place to place. It might be "user incompetence", and if I used them more, I might find a better way to move them around that would be less tiring.


"Steady Betty Bands" 

These bands worked really well, and were easier to use with less hand stress than the batts. However, they allowed me to get way too close to the needle, and guess what happened? 

Yep... sewed right through the side of my finger! OUCH! I didn't get any blood on the quilt, and managed to finish the quilting anyway. It was also probably "user incompetence" but if this happened to an experienced machine quilter, I wouldn't want to have beginners trying them!
Honestly I wouldn't buy either of these products and prefer to use gloves for machine quilting, although they can be hot to wear in the summer. In the winter, like today where it is minus 15 degrees Celsius, but feels like minus 26 degrees... I want the gloves! 
The quilting that I figured out is a continuous design which means I started in one place and didn't stop until the whole thing was quilted. Well, I did also stop when I was bleeding! The design is curved lines around the light star HST's and in the centers of the blocks, and a swirly vine and leaves in the sashing. 


This photo shows the finished quilt and the truer colours. It's a fun finish to enjoy, after it started 3 years ago from some garbage!
I have finished the binding but not the label because it doesn't have a name yet... any ideas?!?

Plaid Beauty UFO

On the design wall today is my UFO of the month - Plaid Beauty. This project came to quilt camp with me last week, but for some unknown reason, it never came out of it's bag. I just didn't feel like working on it then, but today I am wishing I had, because now I only have 4 more days to get these blocks sewn together! 
It took a while to get the project sorted out and remember what my plan was for this quilt.

This is a Bonnie Hunter pattern from her Leader-Ender book called "Blue Ridge Beauty". I have two more blocks to sew, and then I'll start to web the rows.
To see more design wall postings, hop over to Patchwork Times.

Slow Sunday Stitching

Photo from Handi Quilter

It's Sunday again... time to sit down with a cup of tea or coffee, and enjoy some relaxing stitching. This week as I stitch, I will be thinking about the wonderful friends I have made through my quilting adventures, and the great time we had at quilt camp last week. I can't tell you much about it because the rule is "what happens at quilt camp, stays at quilt camp"! 
But I can say that I feel very blessed to have these wise women in my life and to be able to laugh with them and learn from them - about quilting and about life in general. I enjoyed their company and was very sad when it was time to come home. 

While at quilt camp I enjoyed some hand stitching and finished the scrappy binding on my Civil War quilt which I posted about on friday. 






And I added a few more stitches to my Journey of a Quilter project. I am so close to finishing this quilt, it's getting harder to stay away from it. I am debating about the border quilting design as I finish this last block. So exciting!

The linkytools website is having issues but as soon as they are up and running again, I will post the Slow Sunday Stitching linky party. Until then, go ahead and put a few more stitches in your project!

**UPDATE**
The linky tools are fixed and we can get this party started!

Rainbow Scrap Challenge

I am just back from a wonderful vacation at quilt camp. I am starting to unpack all the projects that I took along, but it is a real mess in my sewing room at the moment! Order will hopefully be restored today.

These are the 3" pink spool blocks and 2.25" Alamo Star blocks that I sewed at camp.
I really enjoy sewing with pink, because there is such a wide range to play with, from the pastel pinks, to orangey pinks, to the deep reddish pinks. February has been a short month and I didn't get all the pink blocks sewn that I had cut, so you'll likely see a few more stragglers  next Saturday. I wonder what the colour will be for March?!?
Hop over to SoScrappy to see more pink projects.

Civil War Quilt Finished!

I am so excited to post that my Civil War Quilt is finished and I love it!

I got my friends to help me take a picture of it, even though the weather was "the usual" for this very cold and snowy year. They were fearless, and we went outside and got some interesting shots.
This was a block of the week pattern by Barbara Brackman that started in January 2011 and my quilt top was finished in January 2014 (read about it here). 

As you may know, my sewing machine was broken and in the shop for so long, I used that as an excuse to ask Cathy from Eagle's Wings Quilts if she would machine quilt it for me. Luckily she agreed and we decided to go with an angels wing design (which you can see here). I even got to visit Cathy at her quilting studio and see her Millennium machine! 


The angel quilting design is so perfect for this quilt. From far away it looks like a soft and flowing design, and when you get up close, the angels appear. It's like a little surprise! Can you see the angel design on the top of the flag?

This is a photo of the back of the quilt, which is almost as interesting as the front. It includes four extra blocks that didn't make the cut for the front, a panel of the war generals, the "flags of freedom", a strip of liberty bell fabric, and the declaration of independence.

By the way, I have an extra panel of the declaration of independence and will give it away to the first person who leaves a comment that they want it.
A big thank you to Barbara Brackman for the wonderful Civil War history lessons each week, and the interesting and sometimes challenging block patterns. Thank you to Cathy at Eagle's Wings Quilts for the fantastic job she did on the machine quilting. Thanks to all the readers who left encouraging comments on the posts and layout ideas. Also thanks to my quilt holders Cynthia and Barbara. 
It takes a village to make a quilt... and a blog post about the quilt!