Round Robin

I added the vines at the sides and introduced some green leaves into the piece. Christine is upset with me because she hasn't started her round yet, but I don't have 4 kids, so I wasn't expecting hers to be done...my free time is much more predictable than hers.

We went to a quilt show in St. Mary's. It was a nice outing and I picked up a few things I needed in order to finish off a few more UFO's. The weather has been fantastic, almost summer. Temperature has been in the low 20's Celcius, that's in the 70's Fahrenheit. We have hardly had any rain this spring so my early spring plants are struggling...although they have been threatening snow on wednesday! ha!...I'll bet we will have a wet May to make up for the warm dry April we have had.

I am feeling kind of Dutch today!

Here are this month's postcards I made out of my Dutch fabric. One is going to the guild swap and one is going to my cousin in Holland! Hopefully she will receive it before she reads this post!


More playing with my Dutch fabrics. I made this Shadow and Light mini block, but how shall I frame it?


And here is my round robin returned from Christine! She hasn't finished the centres of the poppies yet, but no worries.


Also check out my friend's new blog: The Cozy Quilter, that I 've added to my blog roll.

Round Robin: Daisy part 3

Here is what Christine gave back to me:

This is what I will send back to her:

(I have to post one photo at a time, because I am still having posting issues, I will post the last one later today, I hope)

Here are 2 postcards I created, inspired by David Mack's work:
The first one is directly inspired by the Kabuki books,with a little Moody Blues and Cat Stevens added. The second is inspired by the sunshine and a hope that spring is on its way.

Recovering from the storm

I'm having problems uploading photos, so I have none to show you.

The sun is shining after 24 hours of snow! Still not as much snow as the big storm of 2006, but still we shovelled the driveway 3 times yesterday and we have to do it again today! Our property is pretty small and we have no room for the big piles of snow! Along one side of the driveway the pile of snow from the driveway is 5 feet high! We can no longer throw the snow that high! Am I ever stiff from all that work.

I received my Daisy round robin from Christine at our Quilt 'til you Wilt day and I've completed my row. I am quite pleased with it. I was very careful with the measuring and my points all match up.Yay me!

I am still on my David Mack kick. I've received more volumes in theKabuki series and just loving the way he integrates the art into storytelling. As a quilter I also love his use of shapes...liberal use of triangles, circles and squares. Kabuki is being held in a cell in isolation, but she receives messages from another prisoner scrawled on squares of toilet paper, folded into origami animals, falling from the vent above. "Every falling note...the shape of a different creature." "Piece by piece, square by square, her story unfolds." I love that, it could be a quilter's mantra! He acknowleges in the book that the idea about the toilet paper, came from the book The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom, a true story about a Dutch prisoner of war. He never forgot that they were rationed 2 pieces of toilet paper each and that one prisoner saved hers to make a deck of 52 cards out of them. I, too, have read this book and have seen the movie. Corrie Ten Boom was from Haarlem, my mother's home town.

I also received a dvd about him called The Alchemy of Art: David Mack. Oh very interesting! His mother, a grade school teacher, was a very big influence on his art. They didn't have a TV (he was born in the 70's) growing up and didn't buy his first TV until he was in his 20's. Without TV he and his brother were able to use their imagination and make up, build, draw, create their own games.

I also just read for the first time A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Not bad, I enjoyed it, but was a little confused by so many mixed messages. In the book Meg defeats IT because of her love for her little brother...but it seemed to me that it was her individuality that defeated It, not love. They also make reference to Man shouldn't mess with things they don't understand, but if they didn't they wouldn't have been able to rescue her father in the first place, it is Man's nature, and specifically it was Meg's nature to do so. I suppose this was a reference to the atom bomb and what people felt about it at the time. Man can create so many problems but Man can create solutions too. I guess it is a book about Man's place in the world and with God and what kind of God, an all knowing and controlling God versus one that creates a"sonnet", Man just fills in what ever words it wants, as long as it doesn't break outside of the rules of a sonnet. I guess, it was a good book, if it made me ponder these questions! :) On a side note, let me mention a Simpsons moment! There is a Simpsons episode where Professor Frink is explaining the 3rd dimension to all these 2 dimensional cartoon character after Homer crosses into it. That scene is so lifted out of this book when one of the Whiches is explaining the 5th dimension to Meg!

I am going to try one more time to add photos to this post. Nope it didn't work.

Round Robin part 2: From Christine

This is the block Christine gave me! Isn't it lovely! I love the boldness and the colours! I need a name for it though, I can't keep calling it From Christine! or can I?

But what to add to it. This was a lot harder than I thought! First I pulled some matching colours from my stash, I have lots of the red and blue, but what to do about the brown. Should I add another colour? What type of add on do I make? I started perusing my old mags looking for centre applique pieces. A lot of them had flying geese borders, which I like, but I just did that on my Echt Hollands; I wanted to do something else. Some turn it on point and add giant triangles to form a square in a square, which if I used the red and blues I had, it would really darken it up; or turn it into a star, which I also did in my Echt Hollands, so, no...something else. Then I decided to consult my Collaborative Quilting book by Marston and Moran! Lots of ideas! yes!

I settled on Four Patch on Point, gives a similar effect at flying geese but a little different. It all started well enough, but I tell you, no matter how hard I tried, I got a wonky strip, and of course some of my corners a little cut off. However, I like the overall effect and I will live with my mistakes.

Round Robin: To Christine

This year for Christmas, Christine and I decided we would exchange applique blocks as gifts and start a round robin. We would add to each block and pass it back to each other, eventually ending up with a finished top; mine would be with the original block she made me and hers, with the one I made for her. This post is about the block I made for her, next post will be about the one she gave me and what I add to it.

Christine has a westie named Daisy. I knew I wanted to make her a block with a westie and a daisy on it. Here are a few of my sketches:

Christine has a Scottish background, so I was thinking of putting in some plaid somewhere, but I just didn't have the colours to work it out. (I ended up making a plaid westie for her Christmas Card, see previous post instead.) I played with baskets, westies, daisies, and wind vanes...


Until I came up with this, viney, tentacle thing:

Finished product! I used left over fabric from my Robyn Pandolph project, plus the red was from a fat quarter I won at a guild meeting, the green pot was fabric that Christine gave me for my birthday.

I am really pleased how this turned out. I call it The Daisy Block, but sometimes refer to it, affectionately, as Daisy on a Stick!

I kept wondering how this block would look repeated in a four block applique, so in Picasa I made this collage for fun:


Neat, eh? If you don't have EQ5 or whatever, this is the lazy man's design tool. I've tried this 4 block applique a couple of different ways, the hearts in the middle was the best.