What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

 This was a busy week with lots of activities every day, so, not much sewing happened.  I did manage to add more stitches to the sky in my cross stitch project and discovered that I was going to run out of one of the colours. I purchased a skein at the local craft shop and I'm ready to keep on stitching. Someone asked last week if there are sunflowers in the picture--the answer is yes...there are several sunflowers in a combination of stitches and beads as well as a button at the bottom of the picture.  I will ...

I had a little less than a yard of the sashing and border fabric to set my colour challenge blocks and crossed my fingers that there would be enough to add 2.5" sashing and a 3.5" border.  I cut the pieces out that I needed to do this and had just a few scraps left.  Phew!  I'm happy that there was enough!  Now, I just have to figure out the backing--this will be pieced using fabric from my stash.   I will use a solid for the binding--not sure which colour I will use yet. 

I worked on ...

 I must admit that adding stitches to the sky in my current cross stitch project is not that exciting...I try to break it up by adding stitches to the bottom part of the picture too.  You can see from the picture that progress was made on both fronts this week. Someone asked about stitching on perforated paper--the paper is quite thick and I have not had any issues with it tearing.  I have had to unstitch in a couple of spots and did not have any issues.  

My daughter has been working on her crochet in the evenings this ...

 My daughter was here for the past week and she and Finn went home yesterday.  It was nice to have her here.  Finn was very excited to see her.  He loves it when all of us are together.  I did a little bit of cross stitch this past week, but no machine sewing.  I finished the framing stitches and added more sky stitches as well.  I hope to do more today. 

 I cut out some orange squares and half square triangles this week for my Rainbow Scrap Challenge blocks for May.  Today, I made one orange block...there are more pieces cut out for the other blocks but nothing is put together yet.  I will show them in a future post when they are done.  The background fabric has orange square dots instead of round ones.  It has been in my stash for a while. These blocks use up most of a fat quarter of background fabric. 

A couple of weeks ago, I started to make a little folk art doll for a 5 year old's birthday.  This week, I finished it.  It has black hair, just like the five year old.  Purple is her favourite colour. 

I continue to work on my Mill Hill cross stitch on perforated paper.  It's coming along nicely. The green line of stitches on the right goes all the way around the picture. 

I spent a couple of hours working on handquilting my pineapple log cabin quilt this week.  The blocks were made a couple of years ago for ...

 I signed up for a subscription to The Thread House Academy this year.  It is a series of online classes, one per month, led by Lynne Goldsworthy, Karen Lewis and Jo Avery.  One of the projects is a modern sampler quilt with three types of blocks released every four months.  The first three blocks were released at the beginning of August so I have pulled my fabrics--navy, aqua, and magenta prints and a light gray on white print for the background.  Everything came from my stash.  Here are my first two "blocks"--this is not a traditional 12.5" block ...

 I have been in the mood to finish some quilts and so I have another finished quilt to show this week.  My yellow and green potato chip quilt is done. I'm calling it "Sunny Day". The striped binding was in my stash.  This quilt will be donated to my MIL's nursing home to be raffled off as a fundraiser. (Another quilt is quilted and will be bound shortly--it is a gift so no pictures yet)

I spent quite a bit of time rug hooking this week and made great progress on my project.  Lots of blue still  and ...

 My friend, Christine, and I had a few days away at the cottage last weekend. We brought our sewing machines, projects, and handwork with us, as well as some books to read and good food to eat.  It was a pretty relaxing weekend.  A storm blew through and the power was off for 12 hours, but we found lots to do.  We even toasted bagels and boiled water for tea on the BBQ!  

I started a Tiny House quilt (online class by Jo Avery).  My houses still need roofs and chimneys but I did didn't have the right colour ...