Thursday, December 30, 2021

Rainbow Bowties

This was the first project I planned on for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge this year with Angela at soscrappy. I knew I needed to control those strings of mine. Did I succeed? Well a healthy throw-sized quilt later, and .... yeah, hard nope! They just multiply like crazy.


The skies are grey yet again but I hung this from our deck for natural lighting. Just a whisper of wind in the back yard today, so I got a pretty good shot. Could use a weighted bar at the bottom to straighten out that wavy. It is straight, trust me.

Sunday, December 26, 2021

Letting the Bags out of the Bag

Well, Christmas is about over for another year as I write this, and it was a very special one for me, as I flew to Alberta to spend it with Brianne and Brady. I had the joy of being a part of two other special Christmas presents this year. About three or four weeks before Christmas, within the span of a week, two of my yoga students approached me, asking if I could make them the tote bag I bring to each class as a present for a loved one. They actually spurred me on to get my pattern, Positive Flow, finished up. It had stalled because I intended to include the tote bag... Below is the original bag, which I designed to showcase my Blogger Bundle I curated for Bernie's (now closed) shop, Needle and Foot. (that's her blog, always a good read).
Thought we in the northern hemisphere could use a little Caribbean Sea and sand about now!

Thursday, December 23, 2021

Gratitude #59

Welcome to my last gratitude post of 2021. Foof! but it's been another 'interesting' year hasn't it? Gratitude and pausing to just be thankful for what I see around me, for little happenings, discoveries, events, just regular stuff, has again been very therapeutic. I hope you will pop over to Not Afraid of Color, where you can read our host LeeAnna's weekly post, and visit several others who write these posts. Here are mine I've kept track of through December. 

1. Some good news regarding the environment in Canada. A 93-year-old man has donated the 7-acre island, called Île Ronde, which he bought in the early 1960s to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Multiple offers came over the years from developers but he refused them all. Now he's protected it for (hopefully) good, even after he's gone. Read the fascinating article here.

Map turtles (so named due to the map-like appearance of their shells) are endangered, and so the natural shoreline provides them nesting and sunning habitat. Most of the developed areas have been shored up with concrete walls and turtles cannot climb them.

Saturday, December 18, 2021

Small Sewing

I've been busy sewing up a storm of little projects, some secret, some not so secret. The majority of them have been bags.
Some of the above are gifts, some are in my Etsy shop. Here are a few details, with a link to a tutorial I wrote four years ago for the mug rugs.

Monday, December 13, 2021

Bye Bye Birdie Baby Plus Quilt

Another item on my Q4 #wipsbegone2021 list is checked off. I made this quilt when I released the updated version of my On the Plus Side pattern back in September. As part of the PHD programme that Gail hosts, anything new I start has to be finished by year's end, so with the year waning, I popped it on Avril and quilted it up!

Organic wavy lines were fun to quilt across it, and it went pretty quickly.

Friday, December 10, 2021

Positive Flow Pattern Release

Well, it's been three years coming, but I have finally put together the pattern for this fun quilt! 
I've made this quilt a total of four times: three throw size (one for the original ezine publication) and one baby size. This baby size is perfect for a partial jelly roll you may have from another project. I also have another wonderful addition (see what I did there?!) to the pattern...