What Are Quilters Blogging About Today?

 Christine and I spent last weekend at Camp Kintail at the crafter's retreat.  Others were making paper crafts, scrapbooks, knitting and painting. Four participants were quilting.   It's always fun to see what everyone is making. The food and snacks were plentiful and tasty too. 

My first project was an open wide zipper pouch that I had started at home. This one may just stay here for me to use.  This project was a good place to use the large scale print that I loved but would not be good to cut up into smaller pieces 

I tried to get into my sewing room every day this week and managed to get lots done.  First up, I finished the rest of my green blocks for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  I have to look and see if there are enough darker green scraps to make a 5x5 HST block.  I don't have a lot of dark green fabric in my stash.  

Next up-- I shortened a pair of jeans for my husband.  He received them as a Christmas gift and, now, he can wear them.  I also added a hanging sleeve to my little sashiko wall ...

 We are in the "between the holidays" period right now...I love this time of year...quiet after the busy-ness of Christmas and before a new round of activities start up in January.  I have been spending my time reading and crafting and watching movies with my husband and daughter.  

I have one more gift of Christmas to share with you...  I made this vinyl fronted zipper pouch for my daughter for her crafting projects.  As you already know, she is an avid crocheter and embroiderer/cross stitcher so this pouch will be put to good use.  I picked some ...

It is no surprise that I made an Autumn Quilt in Spring :-) Meet Sweet Dreams.

Autumn in Spring

• Project Type: Quilt for Quilts Across America
• Size: between 50” to 60” wide and 75” to 90” long. 
• Fabric: Any, in colors that appeal to children aged 2-17.
• Work with any size unit that you want, you can also use ...

The Island Batik June Challenge reads as follows:

Use one of your precut bundles and play with the versatile Flying Geese blocks to create a fun quilt or table runner! Your project must use Flying Geese blocks as the focus but you can combine other blocks to enhance the project. 

Now, I am not a fan of Flying Geese Blocks. The construction is a fiddly multi-step process, regardless of the method you choose.  Even when the method works for you, you need a specialty ruler for precision points. In my opinion a flying goose block is made up of two ...

Marrying someone from halfway across the globe has its perks.  There is always something new to learn. Recently Paul introduced me to the Addams Family.  I fell in love with Wednesday and she is the inspiration for my May project! 

Wednesday Mock-Up in EQ8

The Island Batik challenge for April is Crazy Quilts with Aurifil Threads.  

The Zippered Pouches - in progress

I received the Frangipani Color Builder from Aurifil Threads.

To ensure that these threads/embroidery/stitches showed well on the fabric, I decided to use Island Batik solids.  Since I also wanted to make a modern interpretation of Crazy Quilts, the solids were a perfect choice ...

 I have been missing in action the last couple of Sundays for my weekly blogpost.  Our Christmas took some unexpected turns this year ---as the saying goes, life happens when you are making other plans.  Our daughter's dog, Finn, had surgery on Dec 19th to remove a broken tooth. After the surgery, he went into kidney failure and was in the animal hospital for 10 days in intensive care to receive treatments to improve his kidney function.  Thankfully, his kidneys are now working normally again and he is home and feeling much better.  The vets at the hospital called ...

 I have been furiously sewing this week to finish off some Christmas gifts in time for the big day.  Just a little bit more to do! My cousin and her husband came for lunch on Friday.  We do not get to see each other very often but often talk on the phone about our mutual genealogy project--shaking the family tree on our mothers' side of the family to see what we can find out.  The majority of our family members are Scottish with some Irish as well.  I made my cousin a wide open zippered pouch with some fabric I ...

 The Island Batik Ambassadors challenge for November 2022 is Creative Christmas Stockings.

Paul: Well, some people may actually use it for stuffing Christmas presents.
Me: Hmm... I thought about that.
Paul: And?

 I belong to a sewing group at church--we get together every couple of weeks for a few hours to make items for our upcoming Christmas Bazaar.  This past Tuesday, 5 of us met at the church to sew.  P and I made two zippered pouches each.  J and M made bunting for Christmas, Valentines and Halloween.  K worked on another type of pouch.  The bin with our new items for this year's bazaar is filling up. We also have some stock left over from the last bazaar in 2019.   Here are the pouches that I made.  The pattern is ...

 I made some rug hooking progress on my class project. The sheep is now done, including the tail and the legs.  The wool strips are not trimmed yet so the wonkiness in the legs and tail is due to that.  Next, I will work on the flowers.  Then, there will be lots of sky and grass to fill in.  

The red scraps were flying in my sewing room this week.  I have decided to do three rainbow scrap challenge quilts this year. When I made the selvage hot pads as Christmas gifts, it quickly became apparent that my selvage collection is out of control!  I had sorted some of my selvages into bags by colour so I grabbed the red bag and some light-weight non-fusible interfacing and made two squares. 

Let's ignore Paul for now.  I have been consumed by the bag making process and my excitement sometimes (okay, often) spilled into his area.  

Island Batik teamed with ByAnnie for the September Challenge.  We picked a pattern of our choice from ByAnnie. I chose the backpack Got Your Back 2.1.  All fabric was provided by Island Batik. I chose Moonlight Sky - designed by Kathy Engle for Kate Colleran of Seams Like a Dream Quilt Designs

ByAnnie provided the detailed ...

Our office recently moved to a new location.  There are no lunch places within walking distance but there is a café in the basement. The food is good and the service is great. Naturally, I became a regular :-) Fami works in the cafe and she is usually behind the counter so it was a few weeks before I noticed her pregnant state. To be sure, I asked Frank - Is she expecting a baby. Frank nodded. When I asked, he told me that the baby is due in October. She'll be going on leave soon.

So I did what most ...