Kindred Spirits

Kindred spirits, the name of my Sewcial Bee Sampler is done! This is a Quilt Along designed and hosted by Sharon Holland and Maureen Cracknell that started in the summer of 2017. I started the blocks about six months later when my friend Tish @tishnwonderland asked if I'd like to make them with her and her husband We made the first blocks on January 1, 2018.

I never realized until after I was cropping this photo, how perfect the bed of orange leaves are under the quilt!

 

We made a few over the next few months, sewing 'together' sometimes texting as we sewed, sometimes FaceTiming. Tish lives in West Virginia, and I am in Ontario. We first met in a New Quilt Bloggers group back in 2015, but we have met up in real life a few times. She's most definitely a kindred spirit: love of quilting, love of free-motion quilting especially, love of pibbles (at the time she had two pitties, brothers, and I had one, Rocco), a love of nature, and reading, and more.

I took these two photos in a favourite place near my house, Kennedy Woods. This first area by the parking lot is called The Sugar Bush because of these massive sugar maples throughout it.

Sewcial Bee Sampler Blocks

Like an itch you just have to scratch, I continued making the rest of the 25 blocks for the 2017 Sewcial Bee Sampler. I knew that if I started focusing on the next pattern I plan to release, the stack of blocks might get put back in the cupboard and I really didn’t want that. Here are the last nine blocks I made since I pulled this UFO project out last week. The first two were in a previous post, and all been shown on Instagram.

Top row: Block 17 Spools and Block 18 Square Peg; Bottom: Block 19 Circle of Friends and Block 20 Irish Chain Variation

This quilt along was hosted by Sharon Holland and Maureen Cracknell, both designers for Art Gallery Fabrics. It was the first one they did. 

Back in my Sewing Room

Do you find that after you've been away for a week or two, it's hard to get back into the swing of sewing unless you've left mid-project? I had everything tied up before we left other than quilting the Tropical Puzzle quilt. That entailed sewing the backing yardage, so that is the first thing I did. I have the perfect backing, a Wilmington Fabrics piece I'd picked up in the clearance section of Sew Sisters about... eight years ago, knowing it would be a great back somewhere.

This quilt is it. Here is the first little bit. I saw a cool pantograph in an older quilting magazine on a Christmas quilt that I quite liked and thought I could probably free-motion. It doesn't look too much like the panto, other than big swirls, in continuous S shapes, but I'm liking it and I think it's perfect with the tropical theme: swirling winds through palm trees. I'm using Hobbs 100% wool with Connecting Threads 50 wt cotton in Sky, love.

Social/Sewcial

Tomato/tomato....

Happy start of a new year, both exciting and a bit daunting as one looks down the next stretch of 364 days. I hope you spent last night doing just what you pleased. I did. More on that in the second half of this post.

Social

I am super-excited, and pinch-me-I-can't-believe-I'm-doing-this and well, yeah, a wee bit nervous, to announce that I am one of the co-hosts for the 2018 New Quilt Bloggers Blog Hop.

Don't you just love the button Beth made? I sure do.  Some of you will know what this is all about, and well the title and sub-title pretty much explain it, duh.

However.

It is so sew so much more.  In the coming weeks we will be giving more details, but for now here are a few deets that need mentioning:

• registration opens February 1
• if you are a new or relatively new blogger, which means your blog is under 3 years old, then you are welcome to sign up