Christmas quilts

Each Christmas season I enjoy putting up my Christmas quilts around the house.
The oldest one is this Cardinal Quilt (which is a good example of why we should label our quilts when we make them!)  I THINK it was made about 1998.  Pattern is from the book Go Wild with Quilts by Margaret Rolfe. This one hangs on the quilt rack in the dining room.

Somewhat newer is the Star Sampler that was made with a group of friends in 2004.  We chose fabrics together and each made a set of stars.  Then we swapped blocks so that each person had one of each star.  I really enjoyed figuring out the set for this and piecing the borders and setting blocks.  The values don’t quite work (the large star into which the others are set doesn’t really show up), but I hang this one by the back door and remember my friends every time I see it.

The little Nativity Quilt is a pattern from Linda Worland at Paper Panache.  For this I used some batik scraps and I had a great time choosing the fabrics for each section.  This is displayed in the entry way on a display rod that I found at Ten Thousand Villages.

Putting out the quilts is one of my favourite parts of the Christmas season.

Technorati Tags: Christmas foundation piecing

UFO for November

No, it isn’t completely finished, but it has come a long way from the stack of blocks that languished in a bag for years! 

I made the hexagon blocks from a pretty pink daisy fabric some years ago.  I bought the fabric and the One Block Wonder book by Maxine Rosenthal on the same day.  But as pretty as the hexagons were, I wasn’t happy with them with the One Block Wonder technique, and they were put to one side.  I have carried them around with coordinating fabrics for YEARS!  Every November at retreat I would vow that this would be the year.  Another retreat has come and gone, and there was still no progress. 

The sticking point with this project was in making the decisions – which fabric? where?  One day I sat down with EQ and considered my options.  I made some decisions.  I started to sew.  Nearly came to a halt when I didn’t like the way one fabric was working out, but I made ANOTHER decision and carried on.  (I’m sure you didn’t notice where I used two different fabrics because there wasn’t enough of either to do the job!)

This still needs some borders, but I have enough of the original daisy fabric plus a coordinating dark pink or dark green.  So that part will be easy. 

There is one UFO left in my stack for the year.  It is the African Collage from a class with Pippa Moore at Quilt Canada in 2010.  If I put the pieces up on the design wall, do you think they can be turned into something by the end of the month? 

Technorati Tags: UFO,One Block Wonder

Pin cushion excavation

 

I reached for a pin in my pin cushion the other day and had to hunt around to find one.  It was then I realized that the pin cushion contained a MESS of all kinds of pins and other tools, many of which I don’t even use. 

 

Time for an overhaul.  I removed everything from the old tomato and was surprised at some of the things I unearthed.  This pin cushion had belonged to my mother, and I’m sure some of the things I discovered were leftovers from Mum’s sewing days.

I found all sorts of pins.  The flower head pins don’t belong there, because I keep those in the pin cushion that hangs beside my flannel wall.  The ones with the large pink heads belong downstairs with the longarm.  T-pins and safety pins have homes of their own.  I threw away all the thick, fat, ugly, bent, corroded pins; they almost filled up the old film canister that I use for Sharps disposal. 

I thought the job was done, but when I looked more closely at what I thought was an empty pin cushion, I realized there were a few needles that had been pushed down inside.  It called for pliers to get some of them out – I found 15!  And some of them look too big to ever have fit inside the tomato.  These I sorted out and put in storage (or discarded). 

Then I refilled my pin cushion with lovely fine glass headed pins and put it back into the little pottery dish my son made in art class at school.  Doesn’t that look better! Now I know that whatever I find when I reach out for a pin will be something useful and a pleasure to use. 

Technorati Tags: pin cushion

Home from retreat

I spent a wonderful weekend retreating and quilting with friends.  As usual, we laughed a lot, stayed up late, ate too much – and got lots of sewing done.

One morning began with a gorgeous sunrise.  I wish my photo could capture the depth of the colours – the vivid pink sky was reflected in the lavender lake.

 

 

 

The  quilting on my current Happy Villages project is completed.. I think this will get a  dark binding and perhaps piping – pink?  How about the name “Village at Dawn”?

 

 

One project I took along was a bundle of fabric strips that had been donated to the Prayer Quilts group.  I made fifteen off-centre Cobblestone blocks with the strips, then was delighted to find a bit more fabric at the bottom of the stack to let me make one more.  Sixteen blocks is enough for a preemie quilt.  Next morning I was in the sewing room early and I took advantage of an empty table to lay out my blocks.  I was amazed to find that there were now nineteen of them!  I found a few scraps and made what my friend Brenda called my “renegade block” so that I could have a full extra row.  Now it is too large for a preemie quilt.  I will find some borders for it and see what it becomes. 

Technorati Tags: retreat 2011,Happy Villages

October’s UFO

As my son would say -- “Yeah, about that….”
At the beginning of the month the contents of  the bag looked like this:
There are two batik New York Beauty blocks along with some fabrics that may or may not coordinate.  This collection came from a UFO swap with friends a few years ago, and I was supposed to “do something” with it.  I have an idea of what this could become, but at the end of the month, I’m afraid it looks exactly the same as it did. 



I am going to claim a finish anyway.  A donated Lonestar top turned up at our quilting group.  Not the right size for a prayer quilt, and besides it would have been an absolute waste to simply put ties in something that complex.  There was a fund-raiser auction coming up, so I took on the job of finishing the quilt for that.  Here’s how it looked when it was done:


I’m guessing this had been in storage for a while before being donated.  The colours take me back a decade or so.  It has been beautifully pieced.  I wonder about the story behind it – why it languished unfinished and then simply was donated. 

Here is a close-up of the quilting on one of the plain setting squares.  I used a variegated thread to give a bit of texture to the plain gray fabric. 

Technorati Tags: UFO,quilting,challenge

Lots of pinwheels

 

The ladies of the quilting group at the church have discovered the “Lil’ Twister” template and have been busy making wreath table toppers.  Several are busy making seconds and thirds after we were asked to lend them for table centres for the Christmas banquet coming up soon. 

We found a fantastic set of directions here: 

Twister Wreath directions

Some of us were dismayed at having to cut up the panel of squares which we had so carefully sewn together, but it is great fun to watch the simple arrangement of squares turn into pretty spinning pinwheels.  (The non-Christmas one is mine – a scrappy summer-time wreath.)

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Technorati Tags: twister,Christmas,scrappy

Remembering when

It has been several years since one of the founding members of our quilt guild, Del Reynoldson, passed away. Her daughter is still working through her mother’s stash, sorting things, flinging things, finishing up projects, finding new homes for things. I was offered one of Del’s quilt tops for the Prayer Quilts group at the church. I was very surprised when I saw this – it was a sampler quilt I designed many years ago as a block-of-the-month project at the local quilt shop. I remember how honoured I felt at the time to know that someone who had been quilting and teaching others to quilt for much longer than I had would decide to do my project.

I designed the blocks using Electric Quilt software, probably version 4. The blocks each month were chosen to focus on a variety of quilting techniques, strip piecing, half square triangles, curved piecing, templates, etc. The blocks were in a variety of sizes and we made various simple “fillers” so the quilt could be put together in a “custom set” – this seemed like a very daring idea at the time!

Del certainly made the quilt her own. She added more blocks and her own personal touches to several of the blocks. 

This quilt top has brought back memories of a dear friend, and I know the church group will enjoy finishing it up so that it can bring joy to someone as a prayer quilt.

 

Technorati Tags: sampler,Electric Quilt