The Birds

With all this lousy, rainy, cloudy weather we have been having, I've actually spent a bit of time trying to clean my sewing room! Ha! As I was sorting all the lovely scraps given to me by my sister-in-law, I was inspired! among those scraps were some charm squares. Lo! These would go great with my Hitchcock I was working on!


et voila!

It measures approximately 13x13 inches, I might use it for my calendar of challenges, since it was an Art Quilt Workbook exercise.

Radishes and Tomatoes!

We have had a lot of rain lately and our gardens are very plush and lots of weeds too! But my tomato plants are huge! and I've even got a few fruit on them! Just waiting for them to ripen.

In the mean time I have been eating lots of radishes!

If you want to see more progress of my veggie patch visit my other blog Riverforksgarden.blogspot.com

I am a Tree!

While on vacation, I was able to finish hand quilting my Art Quilt Workbook exercise. Essentially, you put some words in a hat and pull them and create something from those words. I asked my husband to choose the words, so I wouldn't have a clue what was coming....that is very challenging! The one thing I asked him was to put 5 song titles in there. The words I chose were "I am a Tree" (a song by Guided by Voices), Rhythm, and Wacky.

I started by sketching, every day, ideas that those words inspired. Early on, I sketched a happy tree with a face dancing in a field, later a musical staff represented rhythm and it became the fence in my landscape. The fabric I chose represented the wacky... a sky with tiny carrots, and the field of giant VanGogh-like sunflowers, plus a tree with a face, dancing..isn't that wacky enough?!

I fused the tree, and birds, apples and apple basket on. I machine stitched them all in place. The apples and birds were fussy cut from some left over Debbie Mumm fabric, just the right size and proportions! I actually sewed on 2 different fabrics for binding and didn't like them, so I faced the piece. The finished piece measures 9x9.5 inches.


I plan on making 12 of these and then making a 12 month calendar with the photos. It gives me an end goal.

Next words: "I am Mine" (a song by Pearl Jam..thanks Gord!), Whale, Monthly!.... Wish me luck!

Quilter's Road Trip!

My friends Christine and Jill and I went for a drive to Cambridge and Kitchener on Sunday. We visited the McDougall Cottage, built in 1858 in downtown Cambridge, home to the Baird and McDougall families. Now it is a museum, tea house (sort of) and gallery. Each year it holds the Wee Quilt Challenge and displays the submissions on its walls. Jill had 2 pieces entered, which we had to see! This year's theme is Plaidvertising. Below Jill's piece is the top right one, called Plaids behind the Ads. For more about her entries you can read them on her blog here.

Next we visited Joseph Schneiderhaus in Kitchener. This house was built in 1816 by the Schneider family, Mennonites that travelled from Lancaster County, PA.

Part art gallery and part a re-enactment museum, we caught the volunteers, dressed in period costumes, taking part in their Sunday activities. The site houses a outdoor oven where they bake bread, a pump house to pump water, a vegetable garden grown from heritage seeds. One lady showed us her quilted petticoats which she had to sew herself.

The art gallery housed this year's Grand National Quilted Postcard Collection. Jill submitted 2 postcards and I submitted one. (that's me with my postcard :) 2nd from the right)

Jill's were chosen to be put into a postcard book! They blew hers up for display purposes, the actual one is dangling in front of it. It was kind of hard to take a photo of it swirling around.


This is just another one on display, it was so cute, I had to share....unfortunately I didn't catch the name of the person who did it, but isn't is just darling!

It was a fun day!

Next Post: I am a Tree!

Cloudy! the sky is grey and white and cloudy!

Here are some pics from our trip last week to our friends' cottage on Oxtongue Lake. Unfortunately the weather was not kind to us. We did manage a short trek in the kayaks, you can see how omninous the sky was!

A short trip into Huntsville, we checked out this beautiful bookshop for the first time called The Bookcase.
Waiting around for the bibliophiles...

It's always fun to spend time at the cottage with bibliophiles and pyromaniacs!



The clouds parted for us on Canada Day and we were able to build a fire and watch fireworks over the lake!