Winter Glory

Hi there!  Welcome to anyone who has arrived from SewCalGal's Christmas Quilt Show.  I've been trying to decide what quilt to show, and the ones I think of first are ones that I made for swaps, and don't have any more.  They are still some of my fave's so I'm going to share one of them.  I hope you enjoy it, and please don't forget to go check out the Christmas and Winter quilts that are linked up over at SewCalGal's!
I've gone back a few years for this one (see earlier post here), but it is still one of my favourite little winter quilts that I've made.

Winter Glory

It was made for a swap hosted by Michelle at the Quilting Gallery.  The theme was Winter Time Minis.  I used my own hand dyed fabric and had fun playing with free-form curved piecing and sparkly free motion quilting.  

Sparkly Snowflake

I still intend on making something similar for us - maybe this year???
Happy quilting!

There was a blip

My apologies to anyone who came looking for my site and was greeted by a page saying, to the effect, that I wasn't here anymore!  Yes I am!  Hopefully that was just a temporary glitch and we'll have smooth viewing from now on!

Happy quilting!

Making slow progress

Work has been really busy this last little while, and I've not had a lot of energy to get much done in the evenings, but I am making some progress, albeit, slow!
I have finished the feathers on my Coin quilt (see earlier blog here) and am working on the big scale cross hatching of the coins themselves, and some filler quilting around the feathers.  I started working on this at the VMQG Sew-in on Sunday, but it just didn't want to happen - broke a needle, had my smaller sewing bed with me and it has sharper edges, so I kept catching the quilt so it wasn't flowing smoothly, and then I ran out of bobbin thread.  I just took it as a sign to put it away and work on something else!  Here's what it looks like so far - I'm loving the textures on this!

(I did piece a table runner after that, but will post about it later, after I've taken some photographs, as well as my Habitat challenge reveal).

Last night I did get some quilting done and managed to finish all the quilting on my African Collage.  After keeping pretty much to just outline stitching and stitch in the ditch in the centre, I wanted to do something more interesting in the borders.  See the frame that surrounds each of the animals?

I used that as my inspiration and had a lot of fun with it, doing a whole slew of different free motion quilted designs.  It doesn't show much from the front, as the black on black print pretty much hides it all,

but I do like how it looks from the back!

Here's what all the quilting looks like from the back

I just need to bury a few more threads, bind it and add the beads down the side, and then I can call it done!

Linking up to WIP Wednesday @ The Needle & Thread Network

Happy quilting!

African Collage

Last weekend I spent at a workshop with Pippa Moore.  This is one great woman!  Go check out Pippa's website to read all about her quilting and the work she is doing in Africa - What a great weekend!


I started with a kit that Pippa provided - 3 screen prints , and a whole pile of other African and commercial prints and batiks.

We made a variety of borders:

checkerboard

Seminole type squares

I couldn't just make mountains, they had to be wonky mountains!

flying geese

saw tooth triangles (again a little wonky!)_

Then we worked on adding these borders, strips and strings to the starting blocks.  I found a couple of white print panels that I liked, but they were too stark, so I tea dyed them.  Eventually, I added more colour to one of them - quite like how it has turned out - subtle colour, but more fitting now.

I played with my layout, and added a few more bits here and there, and this is where I am now

Borders on, beads will be added when quilting is done

I've started the quilting tonight - won't be anything too fancy - with all the colours and patterns it is already pretty busy, and the quilting would just get lost.  I've free motion outlined the animals, and stitched in the ditch around the feature blocks.  I think it will be mostly in the ditch stitching, although I may have some fun in the borders!


We shall see!
Happy quilting!

Fresh Sewing Day!

Can't believe that October is gone already!  At least I had a pretty busy productive month!   Here's a sampling of what I got done - yeehaw!  I had fun -thoroughly enjoyed some thread sketching and quite a bit FMQ - gotta love that FMQ!

but then I realized there was more!

mug rug for DH finished

Boo Blocks for VMQG

Habitat Challenge, VMQG

Just click on the mosaic to go to my Flickr stream for more info, or wander back through my posts!  

Make sure you select the blog button at the beginning of the post to go check out what everyone else has been doing!
Happy quilting!