Bloggers' Quilt Festival - Spring 2015 - Entry #1

Good thing I have good friends like Judy who cue me in to the happenings in quilting blogland. Otherwise I'd remain under my rock, that, or find out about things too late.

So I did know about Spring Quilt Market in Minneapolis May 15-17; I've really enjoyed reading all about the prep work that goes into making a booth for the show in Carrie Nelson's posts for Moda Fabrics.  Well, Amy at Amy's Creative Side holds a Bloggers' Quilt Festival for those of us who can't attend market, so that we get some eye candy and inspiration, fun and friends to help quell the emotions of wishing we were there!  I just found out on her festival page that she has been doing this since 2009, twice each year! Wow.  I've entered twice before and each time encounter new blogs and many many creative people.

My first entry is Gears for My Gearhead, a suggestion by Judy.  I would not have even thought of it!  I am entering it into the Art Quilt category. Here is the original finish post and here is the construction post.

Vamps Like Us, Avril We Were Born to Quilt

Get it?!

(sidenote: so this was basically ready to go last night, minus the final outside shots, as I had to wash the quilt this morning.  Gremlins!  None of the photos I took this morning would show up in picmonkey, none would even show in blogger--grrr---messed around for a long time...finally restarted the computer and all was found by the programmes I need.  Love/hate technology.)

It's a wonderful thing, walking Rocco.  I get into quite the meditative state, and good ideas, inspiration, and profound insights abound.  It happened this morning, inspiration for a post about Avril, my Avanté.

I love Bruce Springsteen.  MacGyver and I bonded over Bruce,  Bruce's "Born to Run" LP  to be exact.  We both had it.  My taste in music did, and still does, cover a wide range, from classical, to blues, to hard rock.  So does MacGyver's, but more in the jazz, to blues, to hard rock and heavy metal range.  We converged in Bruce.

Thankful Thursday #10 - Humour and Scraps

When I shared this hilarious story yesterday with Lara of Buzzin' Bumble, I realized it was good fodder for spreading some cheer...at my expense.  But hey, if you can't laugh at yourself, well, you must be a pretty grouchy person! It's going to be a bit wordy, so I will interject some garden and some quilty pics as we go.  If you persevere, I'm sure you will laugh out loud at the moron I can be all too often...

So today I am so grateful for my sense of humour!

My blog is named a rather odd name for a blog that mainly is about quilting.  It started about 3 years ago when my brother and I exchanged several pensive, soul-searching emails regarding life at the eyebrow-raising age he was approaching and I had just entered, the 50s.  Your life is half over.  Yet you have the coming half to look forward to, and, if you've been careful and wise with your spending and saving, you will have SO MUCH to look forward to.  We covered various topics but a lot had to do with age, and working and how long to work and what to do when not working, etc.  I had a few events placed in my path thanks to the powers of the Universe, Great Benevolent Presence, God, Goddess, call this Divinity what you will.  These events helped shape the path I was contemplating, that of quitting my job pre-pension-receiving age, a full 9 years before I'd be even eligible for  a full pension, of moving to the other end of the country, 2000 miles away from my family, and taking a step into the unknown.

Land of Hope and Glory (and the SMS Giveaway Winners!)

I'm feeling rather misty this evening.  My mum left this afternoon, taking the beautiful weather with her, and, as I type, is being buffeted a bit by the jetstream as she flies west to her home in Alberta.  Sniff.  The west winds buh-LEW hard today, as a cold front blew in.  Just what IS with this anyhow?  Please Mama Nature, blow gentle spring breezes my way, warmth that stays.  I am sitting on a quilt, another one on my lap, slippers on...come ON, enough already!

So I just sat and finally read through all 114 comments and I must say, this contributed to my general state of mistiness, as many of them made me choke up.  Many made me smile.  A few I read aloud to my husband, such as "meeting" another WSU mum whose daughter graduated the same day as mine, hearing from another who grew up in Kingsville and taught at the high school in town, or another whose own mother also lives in Alberta, 2000 miles from where she is now... Thank you for writing personal comments, thank you for sharing your fun ways to spend time with your mums, thank you for writing such nice things about my blog and my quilts, and thank you to those of you who are now following me, even one on Feedly!  Who knew.

Here is the reason for the first half of the title of this post:

I got the breakfast tray mat done in time for Mother's Day!  Okay, confession: I gave it to my mum sans binding; but I bound it that night.

The back - so glad I found this fabric at Hawthorne Threads!

My mum's favourite colour is green.  I had hoped to do the turn-the-backing-to the front for a self-binding technique I've used in the past, most recently on my dot to dot placemats as well as on hotmats. Unfortunately I didn't have enough fabric.  I had this green left over from Shamrock, and it was perfect.  Speaking of leftover fabric, the red and the navy are scraps from several years ago, and the white is Kona cotton that I already had, both in my stash and in my scraps.

I didn't do (okay, I forgot to do) a label, so I wrote right on the fabric to document the little quilt.

You can see that I machine-stitched the binding down, not my preferred method, as I prefer the hand-stitched look, but this is quick and durable too.  And I'm getting better at stitching in the ditch on the front and catching the edge on the back with one pass!

This morning I washed the placemat, and then set the stage for the crinkly look photo shoot:

I happened to have a fair number of quite quintessentially English "props" if you will!  The tea cosy on the teapot was made by my great-auntie Ruth, my nana's sister.  She, like a few quilting people I know, couldn't follow a pattern, so she just made it up as she went.  Talent.  Capital T.  I didn't realize how well her cosy went with the scene until I set the teapot down (oh yes there was tea in it; my mum's from breakfast!).  My mum bought me the Lancashire Eccles cakes (my mum's home county) from the British shop in Edmonton, as she also did the Smiths Chipsticks.  Both have been sampled, of course!  We also found Blimey's, a new British shop in Harrow, a mere 13 km from me!  They, too, carry these very same Eccles cakes (dangerous) as well as Dolly Mixtures, Vimto, and many other British foods and items, including Downton Abbey, Coronation Street, and Dr. Who swag.  Another "who knew" that I found thanks to my mother.

Then I remembered the Lancashire cheese she'd also brought me, and that she found at Fred's in Windsor!  So previous photo: tea cosy on..... next photo: tea cosy off!

The 2-cup teapot is a gift from my eldest daughter, Brianne.  Keep Calm and...

 Drink Tea.  Of course!

Okay, that was too much fun.  Here you can see the mat, nice and crinkly.  The binding was perfect too I think, a nice frame to finish it off.

And, for those of you fit and proper, "Britannia rule the waves" souls such as my mum, this Union Jack is true to the actual flag, as per this British site.  The narrow white stripes are in their proper places, as are the wider white ones and the white-red-white stripes in each of the four quadrants are not on the diagonal.   I got this tutorial, which is very well written, from Molli Sparkles.

This completes one of the goals on my list for the second quarter of 2015.  I am linking up with several of the buttons on my sidebar, including Oh Scrap! Let's Bee Social, TGIFF and Finish It Up Friday.

Gosh! Nearly forgot!  Bahaha.  Here are the three winners of the giveaway so kindly sponsored by Cheryl, of Meadow Mist Designs.  I started counting comments last night around 9:30-9:45 when I did the random number generator, and well, I was TOO TIRED!!  This morning I tried to figure out how to change the HTML code with a great link to a tutorial (thanks Judy) so that my comments are automatically numbered, but I am at sea (on the waves, get it).....so I have had to count by hand after all... and if you are like my sister, Linda, who studies each photo, you will notice I drew the third winner this morning.  That's because apparently I really was tired last night: the third number I put into the random number generator I inserted 11 instead of 1 as the lower limit!  So I redrew this am to be fair.  ;-)

The winner of the Peanut Butter Quilt pattern

is

Kathy H. (her second comment was #104)

The winner of the Charming Quilt pattern

is

kupton52

And finally, the winner of the Pike's Peak Quilt pattern

is

Mindy

Again, thank you from the bottom of my heart for entering and for leaving such wonderful comments. I read every single one.  :-) I will be contacting these three lovely ladies by email today.

Creative Space Tag - Diamond in the Rough

Good morning!

In this momentous week of my life, the brightest diamond is my darling daughter Dayna.  She graduated yesterday from Wayne State University in Detroit with a Bachelor of Business Administration cum laude, double major, in Finance and in Global Supply Chain Management.  I am such a proud mama bear!

Ford Field, Detroit

But this is a sneak peek into my creative space, my happy place.  Julie at Pink Doxies started this Creative Space Tag.  To take a look at her space, go here.  And, if you haven't, you should check out her Saturday Pet Project Show linkup.  Lots of eye candy and inspiration, for sure.  Lara of Buzzin Bumble tagged me last week in her post.  Check out her Golden Girls - knocked my socks off, and inspired me to think about giving my own golden girl a much-needed spa treatment à la Singer-style!

Mum Time and a Giveaway!

This post will be short, words-wise, and (I hope) sweet, while my darling mum is visiting me from way out west in Alberta.  When we lived here in southwestern Ontario in the 80s, Mum always would come around this "end of April beginning of May Spring is busting out all over" glorious time of pink trees.

Pink magnolia tree

Dot to Dot Placemats

Yay! A finish on Friday!  But "sniff" as well, because I missed the ALYOF deadline on this project by mere hours.  All I had left last night at 10:20 was about another hour's work...and then to blog about it, so make that probably two hours, knowing me.  Because I was again going to Mysore yoga for 6:30 this morning, I was going to be up before 5:30, so I thought, nope, ain't gonna happen; I need sleep.  What did happen yesterday besides a long but good meeting with our financial advisor, was dropping off all our stuff for income taxes.  Normally they're due April 30 in Canada; because of some glitch, the deadline has been extended to Monday, May 5.  Glad all that money stuff is out of the way, but it interfered with meeting this particular deadline.  Ah well, so I lost out on some possible prizes; I won in the new placemats division, right?

Bright sun or inside were my options, so a little over-exposed

This morning I set to work on them as soon as my "had to" list was done, and an hour was all it took.

I worked on the royal blue sections in the Dot to Dot class I took last week with Angela Walters (in case you missed it, not on Craftsy, but in person).  The Merged Lines design (top left) I did at home. It's out of her Shape By Shape book, but she did show a group of us how to do it during the class. The designs in the pale blue squares are ones she showed us in class, but I stitched them at home.

I did the royal blue sections here as well in class; the designs in the pale blue are from Shape by Shape

Remember that weird-looking triangle design that I nearly ripped out?  I'd mentioned in that post if I added in something symmetrical (one of her many tips) on either side, maybe I could salvage it?

I think it worked out pretty cool!

I did a different filler in the four "mountains": pebbles, ribbon candy, wishbone and then back and forth lines.

Here are the green placemats.

Feathers? In a Dot to Dot class? I just had to; they're my favourite...and yep, been there, done that as in took Angela's Feathers class on Craftsy ;-)

The designs in both green placemats are from this class, the Craftsy class I took last year, and her Shape by Shape book

I did all four on my Bernina (which is now, woot woot, dropped into my IKEA hack sewing desk, yay).  I don't have any rulers to use with a DSM, so these were all FMQ, no walking foot except for the lines in the white sections.  For the longer lines I used my Hera marker to help guide me.  They aren't perfect, but, as Angela said over and over, FMQ is NOT perfect.  I just LOVE the design in the lower mat, lower right square; I used it several times on Shamrock.  But I also love the design in the opposite corner, the aqua rectangle!  That is actually a border design from Shape by Shape but I thought it could work in that rectangle.  I added one more echo of triangle shapes.  Need to do this on a big quilt!

What do they look like on the back?

Pretty freaking cool I'd say!

Label crazy, that's me; I just put one on...sorry about the shadow at the bottom

I used the same thread in top and bobbin, Isacord for all of the FMQ; white Sulky rayon for the walking foot quilting, and Robison Anton black rayon for stitching down the self-binding.  I think that's what you call turning the backing, which is cut 1" bigger all the way around, folding it twice and stitching it down.

Think the angle is a little better here...whatever; they just look so cool!  btw that's Pelee Island wine sitting in the Ann Arbor, MI pottery wine holder, just had to point that out.

Bella is happy to be directing my sewing efforts in the "up north" sewing space.

The lake and the temperatures were absolutely beautiful today, about time!

Once I wash these babies up, I'll take another picture or two...maybe in the shade!

Our daffodils are way behind everyone else's but that is because Joe only planted them last Fall, so they're just babies.  I'd forgotten he'd done that; what a nice surprise to come home to!

Placemats stats:
Size: 18 3/8"X 14 3/8"
Pattern: my own design
Fabric: Kona solids
Warm 'n Natural batting scraps
Threads: Isacord #3951, 4421, 5450, and 3600; Sulky rayon 1001; Robison Anton rayon
Quilted using Angela Walters' Dot to Dot designs

Linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts, and TGIFF