Gratitude & Glimmers #108

Making gratitude your default emotion will single-handedly alter the course of your life.

—Topher Pike

1. A couple of evenings ago I noticed the half moon against rose-lit clouds, so I stepped outside for a better look, and was rewarded with a rose-lit contrail and a couple of swallows flitting around catching bugs. A glimmer indeed!

Welcome to my post of glimmers (of joy and wonder) and gratitude for the month of March. You can find links to more posts like this one at LeeAnna's blog, Not Afraid of Color. 

RSC Catching Up

Earlier this year, I completed my first Rainbow Scrap Challenge quilt. It ended up going in a slightly different direction than I’d first planned. I then got busy with the quilt that’s in the current issue of make modern as well as the planning and sewing for my annual quilt along. I’m pleased to say that I spent the last couple of days finalizing what will be the next RSC project for the year and I am caught up with six months' worth of blocks. Because June is pastel colours, here is my pastel blue block.

I’ve wanted to make this block forever; think the first I saw it was way back on Craftsy! Diann of Little Penguin Quilts made it last year and it reminded me to keep it in mind for this year.

Black With a Pop of Pink Tote Bag

Another one of my yoga peeps in my Yin classes have asked me to make her a tote bag. She wants it for a carry-on for travel to Vancouver in July. She had a look at my Etsy shop and was drawn to the black and white makeup bag. So that’s where we started. She also asked for a pop of pink in it.

She asked for a button and loop closing as oppsed to the magnetic snap I often use.

After several photos and back and forth emails, she settled on these seven fabrics and their placement. I fussycut the Eiffel Tower fabric so that the panel featured two completed images. Those towers are 6” high!

Arabian Nights

I first put this collection of fabrics (minus the tan and gold leaf fabric) together probably a year or two ago when I was either combining fabrics for a totebag for someone or my Etsy shop, or combining fabrics for a a Project Quilting prompt. I am glad to have found a design that lets them shine.

This is a third option in my latest pattern release, Lyra. 

Lyra Quilt Along - Quilt Parade

I think a few of us have been looking forward to today! It is the culmination of my tenth quilt along where we show off our finished quilts! I’ve seen a few floating around the internet, and it truly gives me a thrill to see the variety.

Today would have been my dad’s 100th birthday, that famous Canadian father of mine.😉 Today is also the New Moon, as well as the start of the G7 Summit which is in Evian, France this year. Quite the date!

Leo the Lion

Brady’s Leo the Lion quilt is a very happy finish. As I stated in the progress post, this is a pattern I bought from Tartan Kiwi Designs ten years ago, knowing I would one day make it for him. I intended it to be the centre of a quilt, and even when I first started making it, that was the plan. However, as I often say, quilts talk, and this one decided it wanted to be THE star, and so it has become a wallhanging.

I think he was right: he is the star.

Gratitude & Glimmers #107

The significance is hiding in the insignificant.

Appreciate everything.

—Eckhart Tolle

Welcome to my post of glimmers (of joy and wonder) and gratitude for the month of March. You can find links to more posts like this one at LeeAnna's blog, Not Afraid of Color. My apologies that this was not out on Thursday, but where did May go?

1. For the third year in a row, we attended a couple of Jane's Walks in Windsor. Jane’s Walks celebrate our local communities: "neighbourhoods, and the people who live there.” This year Windsor’s festival, the last weekend in April and the first one in May, was the fourth largest in Canada, pretty good for a smaller region. One of the two we did was in Butterfly Lane, a nondescript back lane in Walkerville, which is a neighbourhood in the east end of Windsor.

Homeowners gave permission for artists to paint on their fences or garages.

Local artists did the beautiful butterfly artwork in the lane to raise awareness of brain injury in their community. There were many beautiful pieces.