Best of 2015

Cheryl is hosting this linky party at Meadow Mist Designs.  What a great idea for us to share our top five posts from 2015, great for our readers to fondly revisit some beautiful quilts, great for others who might see them for the first time, and great for us to look back over our work during the past year.  The criteria for picking your five "Best of" posts is wide open.  I decided to pick my favourites.

1.  One of my goals for 2015 was to get a pattern published.  This little makeup or tchotchke pouch was published on Moda Bakeshop in May.

2.  A Namaste Hug for Gillian was a quilt I made for my first Yin yoga teacher and my friend. We also did our Ashtanga Teacher Training together.  She is fighting breast cancer, finished chemo now, but still not out of the woods.  It was the first quilt where I used Minky.

3.  I was part of the New Bloggers' Quilt Hop in the summer.  When it finished we had the option to participate in a new block blog hop for Fabri-Quilt.  I designed this block, which has a 3D tactile component in the small white triangle.  I wanted to create a secondary pattern when combining blocks; I plan to make an entire quilt and donate it as a Fiddle or Twiddle quilt.

4.  Parisville Weave is a quilt kit I bought from American Patchwork & Quilting Quilt Sampler 2011 magazine.  I sewed it up a winter ago and finally quilted it up with several custom designs on Avril, my Avanté in August.  When I bought it, I didn't even realize it fit the "modern" quilt criteria at the time, nor had I heard of Tula Pink fabric; I just fell in love with the colours.

5. This seashell runner is a pattern I bought on our second trip to Florida, back in, ahem, 2005.  It is designed by a Florida quilter.  I had a lot of fun making this unusually constructed quilted and appliquéd runner, which fits, by the way, on both the coffee table in our Florida home as well as on the one in our Ontario home by Lake Erie!

Only five is hard!  I could have picked ten!  Be sure to hop over to the linky and see some beautiful eye candy, and if you haven't, maybe pick your five and join in!

One more thing to remember, is that today is the last day to take advantage of Craftsy's year end sale on supplies.  It ends at 11:59MT tonight, so for us in the east that means 9:59ET!!  Hurry! Hurry! I may have already taken advantage of some of the amazing deals, like fat quarter sets that work out to $4/yard Canadian dollars, yep!

If you click here to the sale, I will get a 'leedle' compensation (which we all know will go RIGHT back to them lol) and I thank you very much for enabling, er supporting my passion!  ;-)  I'm going back I think, to pick up one or two (or several) more items at these ahhh-mazing prices.

Happy New Year everyone!  

Thanks for reading, for leaving such wonderful and helpful comments (Rocco is about to test a couple of super-rugged chew toys after my last post, so stay tuned), and for sharing your knowledge, your ideas, and your friendship.  I truly have loved this past year of QBL.

Musings on Comments

Several of you commented to me that I've really been getting a lot done lately.  And I do think I have.  The main reason was that I stayed out of QBL for a week or so.  By that I mean I did post (4 that week I believe) but I didn't respond to the comments right away (some were 2 days later) and I didn't visit back the blogs right then either (those visits happened over the period of about a week, and I may have read a few posts in a row that I'd missed).  I've really been reflecting on this phenomenon.  We talked about trying to find a balance amongst the New Quilt Bloggers group I was a part of this past summer.  My good friend Julie of Pink Doxies recently wrote a great post on this subject and what she has done to find a better balance.

Here's my take, and do with it what you will.

What I did seemed to work for me.

Although I did have some angst about not being on top of the responses to your lovely and thoughtful comments, it was gone when I did respond.  I did not ignore one of you.  :-)  I visited you randomly and then I spent time visiting you these past 3 days in a purposeful manner.  Gosh that sounds rather like teacher jargon, but it's not meant to be.  It took me 2 hours just this morning to get completely caught up with visiting and commenting.  Okay, I spent about 10 minutes doing the banking thing I always do on Saturday mornings too!  Still. TWO hours.  Yesterday I spent many more, writing yesterday's post, and responding to all the comments from that Autumn-Coloured Glasses post, and getting my gmail inbox down to zero.

I've heard from several friends in QBL lately of varying degrees of angst regarding not posting enough, time taken away from sewing, not getting many comments, the volume of blogs they follow being out of control, stats of viewed posts, readership etc.

Here's the thing:
I don't really think about the number of comments I get, unless it spikes and then I think whoa, that resonated.  I don't expect each of you beloved commenters with whom I have a back and forth chatting by email/iMessage relationship to comment on each and every post.  If you miss a few, it's okay!  If you comment on a couple posts in one email or comment that's okay too!  If you don't comment on a few or several posts in a row that's also okay!  Life happens, as we all know.

So.

Here are two gifts from me to you:
In this week of firmly sticking to doing only what makes me happy and inspired, I want to tell you all to please, not feel you have to comment on every post. Start with this one.  Read it, if you do, and then leave.  It's okay.  I feel your reading vibrations here in lovely Kingsville anyhow. :-)

on the Chrysler Canada Greenway yesterday, the southernmost section of the Trans-Canada Trail

Don't be offended if I don't comment on every post you write either.  I am hereby giving myself permission to sometimes not.  It just means I'm finding ways to cut down on time taken from me and my Bernina. (cue "Me and My Shadow" song now in my head)

However, I do need to point out something I wholeheartedly and firmly believe:  comments do make the QBL go round.  That and only that is what has led me to form close relationships with, well, lots of you wonderful wonderful people.  You are my guild, my homies, lol.  I nearly put the exact number of my extra-special, in-my-heart blogger friends down, but no, we know who we are.  In all honesty, the number who I consider close friends is about a fifth of my bloglovin' followers. I'm not counting my friends and family in this group who rarely if ever comment! (Linda, you're the exception; you comment on each and every post, have done since Day 1, and I love you for it.)

I must say comments do increase the close relationships numbers, and I know that that number will most likely go higher because of them.  For example, I've recently met Janine Marie who blogs at Quilts From the Little House, through comments she made here and my visits to her blog.  We've discovered several things we have in common!

I rarely look at my stats pages more than oh, once a month.  I'm not doing this for the stats.  I just know I do love writing this blog, and it has taken off and improved my life in many ways, ways I could never have foreseen, and I am so grateful for all of the growth that has occurred and continues to occur through it.  I'm just tickled when I see how many people do read this blog, or how many followers I have on bloglovin'.

Therefore I want, make that I am going to always feel happy about my blog, about QBL and about the fabulously talented and interesting and warm and caring people I have met and continue to meet through mmm quilts.  Working this way, where I post, don't always immediately respond, and then visit blogs in chunks, actually has seemed to work a bit better.  I still spend too much time on here IMHO, but part of that is my own doing, as I (cough) tend to overthink things, and over-proofread and wordsmith my writing.

My second gift to you this morning (oops it's now this afternoon) is a terrific easy and so healthy recipe I made this week for company we had for dinner.

Roasted Beet Hummus

Happily displayed on a Thanksgiving runner I made circa 2002/2003 (no label, gasp, I know).  I know this because that fancy stitch was done on the Husqvarna I had for a few months before I traded it in on my beautiful Bernina.  Fabric pumpkins were made around that time too.

Roasted Beet Hummus
--taken from a great site that I've mentioned before, Blue Zones, you can find the recipe here.

Ingredients
2 medium beets (or 1 large)
1 16-oz can chickpeas (unsalted; I rinsed mine first)
1/4 c lemon juice
3 cloves garlic
3 Tbsp Tahini
1/4 c olive oil
sea salt and pepper to taste

Directions
1.  Rub beets with a small amount of olive oil, wrap in foil and roast (about an hour) at 375F until very soft.
2.  Cool the beets, slice and put in food processor (I used my blender).
3.  Add remaining ingredients and blend to desired texture.
4.  Serve drizzled with a little olive oil. (I added a sprig of parsley for decoration.)

We've had it with crackers, but it would be great on a wrap too.  Hey! It's after 12 noon, so that is what I am going to go and do this very minute (once I proofread this only once, wink) and then spend the rest of this rainy afternoon sewing.

Happy Saturday and weekend to everyone. <<Mwah!>> to you all.

Happy Second Anniversary mmm quilts! Giveaway!

Flash back to September 18, 2013.  I'd already had a dummy blog set up since the Spring of that year.  It took me six months to get up the nerve to publish that first post.  Funny, the subject of that post, Seaside Rose, took 8 years from start to finish, and just this past Tuesday at our guild meeting, as a member of the new executive, it was my quilt for "My Favourite Quilt" we had to show.

The first heavily quilted quilt I did on Avril, my longarm