Knitting, Binding and Cross Stitching

I'm still stitching away on February's cross stitch ornament from Linen and Threads.  I will add some more stitches this weekend for slow Sunday stitching.  I need to buy some extra skeins of these colours so that I can use them for all 12 ornaments. I have a plan in my head for a project which will include all 12...

My friend, Pat, is teaching me to knit.  This week, I made the big leap from working on my red practice sampler to actually starting a real project using a pattern!  We went shopping yesterday at the local knitting store and I purchased knitting needles and stitch markers with a gift certificate that my husband gave me for Christmas.  Pat gave me a pattern for a cotton dish cloth and showed me how to read and follow the pattern as well as do yarn over.  She sat beside me and coached me as I did the first few rows.  The new circular knitting needles are stainless steel and are very slippery, but I am getting the hang of it.  Yesterday, after she left to go home, I knitted for a while and got this far...

This morning, I went to town and got to the point where I had to start reducing the number of stitches on the needles.  She had not shown me how to do this, but I figured it out and now my dish cloth looks like this:

Knitting is obviously addictive!

Earlier in the week, I made a quilt top with the nine patches I showed on my last blogpost.

I only had one yard of the fabric I wanted to use for the backing so I used up the leftovers from the jelly roll and added more length and width to my backing to make it big enough.

The gray fabric has little rabbits on it.  You can see below that I did straight line quilting with my walking foot in a diagonal grid through all of the white squares.

I went searching through my stash for the appropriate fabric for the binding and found this yellow print.

I hand sewed the binding down on Wednesday as I wanted to have the quilt finished in time for show and tell at guild on Thursday morning.

Here is the finished quilt. 

The March pattern for the London Modern Guild HST BOM came out this week so I made my block.   I have 4 blocks done now--there were two in February. 

I am happy to announce that Spring has officially arrived in my back yard.  Our witch hazel bush is in bloom.

Finn continues to offer guidance and assistance as necessary to my daughter on her stitching project.

I will be linking to Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching link up in the morning.  One less hour of sleep tonight but one extra glorious hour of daylight after supper from now until the Fall.  Have a great week!

Another Baby Quilt Underway

I have had this jelly roll in my stash for a few years now.  I love the bright colours and decided to use it to make a baby quilt in waiting...a gift to have on hand.  

When Christine and Jacqui were here on Monday night for an evening of sewing, I made 10 of the 20 blocks I will need for this quilt.  Each "S" block is 10.5 x 10.5".  The quilt will be 40" by 50" so I can use one of my 2 yard pieces of flannel for the back without doing any piecing!  I will do the quilting myself.  

I am using up some solid scraps from my stash...there are lots of colours in the jelly roll fabrics to choose from!  

My purple cone flowers are in bloom this week!  

Baby Quilt in Waiting

This week, I finished off the baby quilt I started a couple of weeks ago.

I pin basted it, machine quilted it and attached the binding when Christine came over to sew on Tuesday night.   It was a very productive evening!

 

I did an organic cross hatch over the entire quilt with light gray thread.

I took these pictures outside this morning, before work. A few colourful leaves are still clinging to the branches of our worplesdon sweetgum tree.

 

I bought two of these little chipmunk fence sitters at a store in London, Ontario. They help the real chipmunks in my backyard to feel welcome!

I like the turquoise binding on this quilt.  I finished off the hand stitching last night.

The backing is soft flannel.

 

Someday, this will be gifted to someone who has a baby girl. In the meantime, it will live at my house.

 

 

Slow Stitching with Frank and a New Project

I was at a conference for a few days this week for work.  One of the vendors had an artist present doing caricatures of whoever wanted to stand in line long enough to pose for a picture.  I had to tell him how I love to spend my time...of course, I told him I was a quilter!  He immediately asked me if I had Rubbermaid bins of fabric.  I had the feeling that he had run across a few quilters in his time!  He has me quilting by hand and machine at the same time, using my feet for the machine quilting.  I am not so sure I could do that in real life.  

I made some progress on Frank this week and only have a bit of outlining and cross stitching left to do.  There will be some time tomorrow during a car trip to see if I can finish this project off.

I spent some time this past week organizing my sewing room.  In the process of putting things away, I found a jelly roll and decided I needed to make something.  I have made 16 blocks and will be putting them together this week into a baby quilt in waiting.  No baby on the horizon to give this to but it is good to be prepared with a gift just in case!

Here are my fabrics:

And here is what I did with them:

I have 16 blocks made to make this into a square quilt.  I hope I can find something in my stash for backing.  I will quilt this myself.  

Happy sewing to you!!!

The results are in...

and it has been concluded that I am not in need of the type of intervention that my SIL thinks I need! Thanks for your support of my decision to buy batting by the roll!

Tonight, I made a couple of post cards--one for the London Friendship Quilters' Guild postcard exchange and  one for my aunt and uncle.

I also worked on adding some borders to these diamonds.

I will have a four quilts completed soon--one is at the quilter's already, two are going tomorrow night and RRCB will be ready to go shortly. I have purchased the backing and just need to add the label and cut the batting before it goes off to the quilter.



More Baskets...and a new project!

I made 7 more baskets yesterday in between doing some jobs around the house.

As you can see, I have lots of the white parts cut out for the next baskets. The pile of fabric in the upper left corner of the photo will be used for the baskets. I still don't have a plan set in stone for these baskets, but I do plan on making more!

I opened up another Bali Pops jelly roll yesterday and started sewing some of them together and cutting them up again. I need another project like I need a hole in my head...

Stay tuned for progress on this new quilt top.

Have a good week!

I must be CRAZY!

I have a confession to make...I started another new project yesterday...

I was blog surfing the other day, quite innocently of course, when I found this hexagon quilt-along pattern at Jaybird Quilts.  I had a couple of BaliPops in my stash and I had been keeping an eye out for a project for one of them.  These hexagons are the perfect project for these batik strips!  I have had this ruler forever and have never used it.

It took no time at all to pair up the strips and sew them together.

I cut out enough triangles to make two hexagons with each pair of strips.

Then I had to decide how to put them together...

How about this one?

Or this one? 

I decided on the windmills and cut a few more triangles out tonight and sewed three triangles together to make the two halves of each hexagon.

There will be more colour variety as I cut into more of the strips but I am liking it so far. I will decide on the final layout once I have all the half hexagons sewn together.

The BaliPop set I am using is called "Sherbert".

I will have to see what I can find to make with my other BaliPop...  Do you have any suggestions???

Sewing all Weekend...

I sewed Friday night with Christine and most of the day yesterday as well as this afternoon...and I am pleased to announce that my Blue Ridge Beauty flimsy is done!!!  My husband was away for the weekend so I had lots of uninterrupted time to just sit and sew.

It was raining and snowing all afternoon, but after supper, the sun came out so I asked my Dad and my husband to hold my quilt so I could take a picture. My Dad is a little shorter than my husband so the left side of the quilt is a bit lower in the picture!

This picture shows the detail of the borders--all made from leftover 2 1/2" and 4 1/2" strips from making the quilt blocks.

There are lots of memories in this scrappy quilt--places I have visited, friends who have given me strips of fabric, previous projects, and gifts I have made for others. The turtle, rabbit and dragonfly fabrics were purchased from a speaker we had at the London Friendship Quilters' Guild a few years ago. The blue dotty fabric was leftover from my Liberated Wedding Ring quilt which I made from selvages.

The blue daisy fabric was once a window topper in my daughter's room when she was 7 years old.  The white fabric with the flowers on it in the middle of the photo was purchased about 25 years ago for a hand-sewn sampler quilt that I never did finish.

My husband did a little shopping on his way home today--he stopped at the Quilt Foundry in Maumee, Ohio and bought me a Moda "Just Wing It" layer cake and a Bali Pops "Blue Hawaiian" jelly roll.  He is such a good husband!  He was the only man in the store.

Now, I will have to figure out a couple of new projects to use these up!

Fall Table Runners

Back in July, I gave my SIL a gift certificate for a Fall table runner for her birthday. I was on a short family vacation in Ohio this past weekend and went to a fabric store in Olmstead Falls where I purchased a Moda jelly roll of Fall fabrics called "Pumpkins Gone Wild" among other things. I used this jelly roll to piece two table runners (one for my SIL and one for me) and a place mat (to be donated to Meals on Wheels through the Elgin Piecemakers Guild) . Tonight, I machine quilted all three items. I have a plan on what to use for binding for all three, but this will have to wait until later to be completed. For now, here are pictures of the table runners and placemat to this stage.