Saturday, August 31, 2019

DrEAMi! #31

Yikes! Here I go again, not realizing it's Saturday, the last one of the month, and that means it's time to celebrate those moments when we Dropped Everything And Made it! over the course of the past month. I should've scheduled this one as I have with the past several, so this slipping my mind thing doesn't happen!

Well, part of my excuse is that I had a DrEAMi! of a non-sewing, but quilting related kind over the past two days: putting my nose to the grindstone (for both entire days) and focussing solely on finishing my Oh, the Places You'll Go! pattern for the quilt I made in January for Island Batik.
It is ready to go. I'll pop back to this post with the listing deets once I give it one last 'fresh eyes this morning' perusal and list it on Etsy.

Thursday, August 29, 2019

I Like/Love #31

I'm sharing my monthly list of things for which I'm grateful. You can see other posts written by like-minded peeps, or join in and write one of your own and link it up with LeeAnna at Not Afraid of Color.

1. I love books. I am on track to reading two books a month this year, which is actually peanuts when I consider how I often would read nearly 50 in a year... Retirement and part-time working is not as full of unplanned time as one would think. I've been reading my own library, having learned the hard way once never to take a library book with me when I fly away somewhere. Still, I did take Harry's Trees with me, but left it in the truck parked safely at Toronto airport while we flitted around Europe and the UK. Finished it on the drive home. It's excellent.

I read these two while we were gone:
I have one more to read in the Rhanna saga. Good to read about an imaginary Hebrides island when one is travelling to Scotland! 
If you haven't read any Derek Tangye, you must. He and his wife had very intense jobs, his was in MI6, hers in a top position at the London Savoy Hotel. They left it all and went to live on a little farm in a 17th c cottage in Cornwall, making their living by selling daffodils and potatoes, which they grew on their farm. He just has such a gentle way of describing their lives, musing about life in general, and telling us about the cats that adopted them over the years.

Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Scraps Boxes

I now have two more of these scraps boxes complete!
That photo right there makes me HAPPY! I cannot wait to have them all done, in a pretty rainbow, in my new sewing room one day in the not-too-distant future.

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Rainbow Scrap Challenge Projects

I've spent my first week back just having fun messing around in my scraps. Do you find sometimes after you've been away, getting started sewing again takes a bit of time? I meant to dive right back into Brady's football quilt, and only take a day or two to catch up with the Tiny Tuesday and arrow blocks, but there's something so satisfying to me to just delve into my scraps and make something pretty. So I did. I am officially 100% up to speed with Tiny Tuesday and my RSC arrow blocks project!
Here is the January (red) Tiny Tuesday block 3. I have very little left now of the Cranston red floral print I made the cat out of. It was from those infamous smocked dresses I made my girls in 1989.

Monday, August 19, 2019

I'm Mostly Back

In some ways it feels like I never left, and in others it feels like I was away a lot longer than 3.5 weeks. I'm in that in between time when I keep revisiting moments and places of the vacation, dreaming it, and then morphing, mirage-like, into my regular life with the what time do I have to do such-and-such, and we need some groceries, and what about banking, and oh, let's go see the tall ships in the Kingsville harbour!


Wonderful. Magical. Mystical. Inspiring. Mighty. You can read more about the festival, and see much better photos here.

I did manage a wee bit of sewing to get my Tiny Tuesday RSC quilt back on track.

Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Beat the Heat! Island Batik Blog Hop - Ripples

Welcome to my stop on the Island Batik Blog Hop where we are showcasing Spring 2019 collections. I got the fantabulous Electric Desert by Jackie Kunkel collection.
Isn't it divine? For the challenge we had to create a lap size or larger quilt, using as many of the fabrics in our line as possible. I used every single one of these 31 chops! I knew I wanted a modern style of quilt, but as per usual, I waffled on what design to do: invent a fresh one (started to sketch out some basic blocks to use my AccuQuilt Go! dies), then thought I could do my own design that was recently published in an ezine, and actually started cutting the 2.5" strips for it with that fabulous die, and then, I opened a recently purchased book that I just love, and want to make every quilt in it, The Quilter's Negative Space Handbook, by Sylvia Schaefer. You know when the universe aligns and you just feel it deep in your heart, your solar plexus your mind, your third eye and you hear the choir voices soar? Yeah, that all happened....it was heat all right, of the This is the one! kind.
A quilt in a tree, Lake Erie in the background...pretty much all you need to know about me in one photo.