Thankful Thursday #3

As always, I have a ton of things to be thankful for today.  Here are a few:

The sun is shining and the sky is mostly blue with a few fluffy white clouds floating on by.

Very good friends, our next-door neighbours, are coming over for supper tonight.  We are having one of my favourite salads: Romaine, spinach, with fruit (today it's raspberries, blueberries and mango), sliced almonds, Vidalia onion, grated sharp cheddar, chia seeds, sunflower seeds, topped with Mango Chipotle dressing. . .

Before dressing

and spaghetti (long-time favourite dish of mine).  Two sauces, both of which have been slow-cooking all day:  meat, made by husband. . .

and marinara (or marijuana sauce, as Dayna used to call it when she was about 6!)made by moi. . .

Of course there will be a choice of fresh grated Asiago, or grated Parmesan and Romano to sprinkle on the spaghetti, and a baguette.  Dessert is apple pie (not homemade) and butter pecan ice cream!  Yum.

I am also thankful for my yoga teacher from Rosemary Court Yoga in Sarasota, Florida, with whom I keep in weekly contact every Thursday.  I do the Ashtanga Primary Series on my own here, sometimes the Full practice, sometimes Half Primary, and I check in with her to let her know I did it and how it went.  She is a wonderful teacher, good friend, and now my email "practice-buddy".

Most of all today, I am so thankful and ecstatic, to be honest, that my caption was one of two chosen in Fat Quarter Shop's first Caption This! Contest at Quilt Market this year!  I WON!!!!  I WON!!!!  Each day they posted an interesting photo, and asked blog followers to send in a caption.  I missed one of the days, but sent comments on the others.  You can see them all here.  This is the picture with my caption that won:

My husband used to say this to our girls, minus the "for potential quilt patterns" phrase if they caught him nodding off!  Since I've been meditating on a daily basis, one of the things I notice, is that sometimes I do see flowing colours on the insides of MY eyelids, so this just seemed a perfect pic to combine his saying with my experience.  Oh I'm sure I've left myself wide open for a sarcastic comment from my loving sister, Linda....

What do I win?  A Moda fabrics bundle of Miss Kate Flannels by Bonnie and Camille!  EEEEK!!  I am just a tad excited about this!  Cannot wait until it arrives!  I adore Moda fabrics, always have, so this means a lot to me.
:-)

Summer Days (Daze) A Finish!

And. . . the name of this quilt got hit by??  my menopausal melon. . . sigh.

The pattern is called "Summer Daze" and I blogged about it already here.  I loved the name; I adored the display quilt in Guildcrafters Quilt Shop.  Well, as I was writing on my label, getting it ready to sew into the backing (those of you who have read my blog know that's what I pretty much always do), this is what I wrote:

Bloggers' Quilt Festival Entry #2

Yesterday I posted about the first of my entries, Seaside Rose.  Today I'm showing you my second entry, Hidden In Plaid Sight.  I'm entering this quilt into the Original Design Quilts category.

My original post about this quilt is here.  This was a Moda charm pack of "Follow Your Heart" by Kathy Schmitz I'd bought in 2007.  I petted it, riffled through it several times over the years, and this winter I decided to let it grow up!  I wanted to maximize the 5" squares, so started playing with them on my design wall.  I realized I had four colourways, black, green, red and taupe, so thought perhaps I could shade from dark to light...

Here goes...

With a deep breath, I am going to enter two quilts into the Bloggers' Quilt Festival.  Amy Ellis, from Amy's Creative Side hosts this event.  This is the first time I've even heard about it, so obviously it's my first time entering.  If you like this quilt, you can vote for it in the Large Quilt Category beginning May 24.

You can see my second entry, Hidden in Plaid Sight, here.

The first quilt I am entering is Seaside Rose.  I blogged about this quilt four times (here, here, here and here) over two months last Fall.  It was the subject of my fourth post after starting my blog!  I bought the quilt as a kit, adorably packaged in a blue wicker basket.  I made the centre and when it came to the borders, I was flummoxed.  So she was folded up for years, yep, years, (8 to be exact) in a drawer in my sewing room because the pattern both stumped and frustrated me.  To make the double row of prairie points, they asked you to apply a strip of the pink gingham fabric on top of the twill, and then to cut away triangles.  From there the remaining triangles were to be hand-appliquéd down.  No thank you!  Long story short, I did the prairie points in two different ways, the inner border using a seminole piecing technique, and the outer border strip-piecing triangles of the prairie point gingham and the border fabric, and sewing that strip to the striped twill border fabric.  It was a test of my patience as well as of my ingenuity as to how to do it all by machine.  It was worth it.

I took her down to our beach on Lake Erie at the end of November 2013 for her final photographs:

on the shore

ready for a picnic?

The sand and blue sky that day really showed off her soft palette of colours.

I took a few new pictures this evening for this post.  This was the first quilt kit I had ever bought.  Later I found the same fabric in Florida so I bought enough for the back.

This past Fall, I decided enough was enough, and I wasn't going to let that final border stop me from completing this quilt.  Many hours later, for both figuring out and doing all the prairie points and then more hours for all that appliqué, I had a finished top!

The hurdles were not all done, however.  I wanted the quilting to be extra-special.  This was only my 7th quilt I'd quilted on my new-to-me Avanté.  It has a LOT of quilting on it, but it is still soft and cuddly.  I took Angela Walters' "Free Motion Quilting With Feathers" class on Craftsy, and I knew this would be my class sample on which to practise feathers.  I did swirls and pebbling on either side of the feathers.  I was so pleased with the result:

The centre of the quilt has many different motifs, several from Leah Day, one of Angela's, one of Gina Perkes', and one feather motif adapted from Karen McTavish.  I also designed a quilt motif of my own, the seashell that you see (sideways) in the above picture.

Close-up of appliqué with quilting detail

I replaced some of the star appliqués with the seashells applied with raw-edge appliqué that you see in the above picture to emphasize the seaside theme.

 Soft colours on a hard concrete patio!  You can see my very own seashell motif in the picture below:

Love all that texture, mmmm

Rolled up!

Quilt specs:
69.5" X 78"
100% cotton  Seaside Rose by Three Sisters for Moda
Three Sisters Pattern

Entered into the Large Quilt Category in the Bloggers' Quilt Festival!  Head on over and take a look.  Lots of eye candy!  Voting begins May 24.

Thanks for visiting and reading about Seaside Rose.

Thankful Thursday #2

Yes, this is the second post today; the previous one was supposed to happen last night, but I ran out of steam.

First of all, I am thankful for finishing this scrap quilt in the Scrap-a-Palooza series on Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework!  I understand it's called a "flimsy finish" because it's only the top that is done.  Oh, I do love the way it turned out!!  It is going to my darling grandson, who loves red.  I am so very very thankful for him; words cannot begin to describe how much he enriches our lives, and the lives of all he comes into contact with, really.  He is a little gentleman of such depth, such personality, and only 5 1/2.  Hmm, I have not named his quilt yet!

Christmas Scrap Quilt Top Still In Progress

And I love, love LOVE it!

This is my third in Cynthia's Scrap-a-Palooza series, and they are all such fun.  This one was rather serendipitous.

I knew I wanted to do it in Christmas scraps, and I'd kind of thought at first of not having any colour pattern, just throwing them in rounds willy-nilly.

But upon sorting through my scraps, and seeing definite predominantly green,  or red, or blue, and a few multi-coloured, I thought, hmm, maybe I could do a round of each colour. . .  However, I didn't have very many predominantly blue scraps, so thought never mind, maybe alternate rounds of red and green, and end with one multi-coloured, like Cynthia's:

Over the hours of cutting, letting my mind wander, (it's very therapeutic, isn't it? a kind of meditation) and remember I was also cutting for the scrap quilt using 3" squares that I have in my head, as well as Cynthia's 5th scrap-a-palooza quilt, that I realized I did have enough blue to at least do the centre.  Then Cynthia posted a few pics of various quilts others have done in her series, and I saw one that had double rows of 4.5" squares... well, the quilt just made itself in my head right then and there.

Musing:  hmm, maybe that is the kind of thing that happens to authors who say the characters just "do" and "say" things in their heads, that they really have no control of their characters.

Regardless,  here is the quilt in construction, with a few tips thrown in as to keeping it all organized.  Apologies for the lighting at times.

Organized Chaos again:

In the above picture you see the blue centre.  I used my "Book It!" method, chain-piecing the first two blocks of each column, and then adding the third, still chain piecing so the entire column stays perfectly in order as it was on the design wall.  Yep, there's my snowmen!!  And yep, there's a 4-patch in there too!  And I even worked in (found them after I'd cut enough other blues) scraps from my Snowman Placemats!!  Yippee!

Piecing each row of 3

Look, ma, no pins!  With pressing each row in opposing directions, the seams butt up against each other wonderfully.  I'm still not cutting apart the rows either.  If the entire column is long enough, I will join the two bottom rows, then the top two, and alternate, so I can continuously feed them.  I LOVE chain-piecing.  Saves time and thread.

Terrific thread for piecing

I try to pick up the 3000 metre cones of Gutermann thread on sale or at JoAnn's (online only) with a 50% off coupon.  I also love and use Aurifil, but I've never had issues with Gutermann, and this is a good buy.  I picked up the dark green which I'm using for this quilt at Fat Quarter Shop half price!  They have notions and thread as well as fabulous fabric.

For the double rows at the top and bottom of each round, I took the squares off the design wall, laying them on my sewing table in order.  With many similar fabrics, as you can see above, and doing the chain-piecing method, AND with my menopausal brain, it is SO easy to confuse the row I was piecing... uh, does the next square go on the top or the bottom?

HOWEVER, with this little trick, I never screw up:  leave the tail of threads on the first two squares you piece.  Do you see it there just below the two squares at the top, waiting to be joined?  That is my first row.  Because I laid out my rows of squares as they were on the design wall, I know the top ones go with the top row (the one that has the tail of thread) and the bottom ones with the bottom row.  Ya, note the huge distance between the top and the bottom rows of squares, all to keep it obvious for me in this annoying neverending interesting stage of my life!

One Step Forward...Two Back?

I think this is the longest stretch I've gone without posting, from May 9 to May 13 today.  I feel like the salmon spawning, struggling against the current of life.  However, it's all good.  This morning I felt a little anxious about my lack of accomplishments over the past few days, but I went for a 5 km walk with Rocco after reading email and hopping around on several of the blogs I follow.  Barely 1 km into our walk, after breathing in the chi of Lake Erie and the ancient cottonwoods, savouring the wonderfully warm and humid air today, I felt much better and centred once more!

Here is one of the on-the-go projects: quilting Summer Daze.  I am doing a basic stipple, but I might go back in and "ribbon" the stipple, a tip from Cynthia's Quilting Is More Fun Than Housework.

I've also been cutting and cutting, and sorting through my scraps...

Organized chaos this evening

I think there are the makings of three quilts in that picture.  Note the cool Rubbermaid drawer organizers I picked up at XS Cargo in Windsor for $1.99 on Saturday!  Perfect for storing 2.5" squares.  And yup, that is a mostly cleaned-out dish of catfood in the top right corner....Bella has taken to preferring to eat on my cutting/pressing table, as well as drinking water out of a juice glass. . . cats!

For the scrap quilt #5 in Scrap-a-Palooza, I noted that I seemed to have rather a scant supply of dark blues.  Cough.  Not.  I totally forgot about the under 1/2 yard roll-ups I keep in my plastic drawer organizers.  Yay!  So I've been happily slicing off 2.5 strips and cutting the strips into 2.5" squares.  I think I have about 120 squares of both the dark blues and the lights.  It's not enough yet.

And, ta-da!  Here is the Christmas scrap quilt #2 (#3 for me as I'm not doing them in posted order) on the design wall.  I DID have enough Christmas blues to do the centre blue, and then thought that green would flow nicely for the second spiral, meaning the outer one would be red.  As a result, I needed a LOT more red 4.5" squares.  Since I am planning on giving this to my grandson, and red is his favourite colour, it just all fell into place perfectly.  You'd think I planned it that way.

I hope to sew it up tomorrow, finish quilting Summer Daze and MAYBE sew up some blocks for the scrap quilt #5. 

And where is my Self Round Robin?  On the design wall...off the design wall...on the design wall... I am avoiding the appliqué round, I openly admit it!  The guild meeting is one week from today; did I mention yet that I work well under pressure?!