Along Came Quilting

 

I’m home, after spending a few days teaching at the new location of a great quilt store in Calgary.  Take a look at their web site here:   Along Came Quilting.

They have gorgeous fabrics, lots of books, patterns, and threads.  There are wonderful samples on the walls.  There is lots of parking.

And the students were fantastic.  Even though I made them work hard, they hung in there for two days (and many for three days) of learning how to use the Electric Quilt computer program.  They explored libraries, used worktables, colored blocks, designed quilts, added sashings and borders to quilts, imported fabrics and on and on until I’m sure their heads were spinning (I know mine was!) .

Many thanks to Linda and her wonderful staff for inviting me to Calgary.  I’ll be looking forward to visiting you again. 

A new (old) project

I've had a set of star blocks in a box for many years.  I received them in a swap with internet friends and somehow never got around to putting them into a quilt, although when I opened the box recently I discovered that I had added coordinating fabrics to the collection of blocks and had printed out quilt layouts from Electric Quilt.

The latest project for Scrappy Club involves Log Cabin blocks.  I intentionally wrote the plans for the blocks to be the same size as my long-neglected stars.  Here are some of the blocks on my design wall.  I think this will work!

I can see that I need to spend some serious sewing time on building more of those Log Cabin blocks.

Display of Preemie Quilts at the Fall Fair

Those Preemie Puzzle quilts we made earlier this year were put on display at the Fall Fair on the weekend.  Marianne and her fall fair helpers provided us with a great location complete with tables and a display wall.  We filled all three sides with preemie quilts, a few Memory Quilts, some knitted hats, and a framed write-up explaining the project.
Here are some pictures:
Don’t they look great!  (Can you see the one you made in there?)  I understand they attracted a lot of attention and interest.   Now they will be bagged up and taken to the Hospital in Kamloops to be put to use.

It sounds like some people are ready to do it again. Watch this space for a new preemie mystery starting in January 2012.

Meet my quilting fairy godmother!

 

 

This is Thimblena, my own personal quilting fairy godmother.  (Why does she have green skin, you ask?  Because the instructions challenged us to be creative.  And because I needed two values of the same colour, not too textured or printed, and green is what I found.)

Linda at Paper Panache.com regularly posts paper-pieced Mystery Blocks but this time she has outdone herself – every one of the Godmothers is  different!  (I have no idea how she did that!)

 

 

There is a parade of godmothers on the site right now.  Take a look at  http://paperpanache.com/  The results are fantastic – some are young, some are old, some look stern, some are gentle.  And the wonderful variety of fabrics and embellishments will astonish you. 

Until the 10th of September you can vote on your favorites in several categories.  Not only that, the pattern is still available, free of charge, so you can make one of your own. 

A new tote bag

A small challenge group I belong to chose the theme Water.  This gave me an opportunity to play with some curved piecing.  I’m happy with the result (but I’m not quite sure why the waves are running up and down…..)

August UFO -- Hexagons

By the time we got to August, this bag was nearly empty. Back in January it contained my samples from a strip-pieced hexagon class.  But I finished up the lap quilt months ago  when I needed it for a special gift. 

This meant I just had a table runner to complete.  I pinned the layers for quilting and decided that a simple stitch-in-the-ditch would suffice.

But all that open muslin was too tempting to ignore, so I let myself do a little more…..

Harvest time begins

 

We didn’t plant potatoes this year.  But about a dozen plants appeared in the garden and thrived.  Today we decided to see what they had produced.  We have two buckets of lovely spuds, plus these small ones.  I can see oven-roasted baby potatoes, perhaps a touch of garlic, for dinner……