Winter Wheat

Well, my cousin has left for the Netherlands, today. sigh. It was such a brief but fun visit! Unfortunately, we had pretty lousy weather, but we still managed to do lots of fun things. This will be the first of a few posts of the visit. First, the weather...ugh I think it was sunny for about 2 hours the whole time she was here, it rained a lot, it even snowed and hailed once, but we still had some fall leaves left on the leaves as you can see from these photos.

This was our visit to Winter Wheat in the small town of Sparta. It is owned by folk artist Lucy Ogletree and her partner Mike. The store is surrounded by a grove of pine trees and corn fields. Amongst the pines you will find chain saw sculptures like this rabbit and his clocks "where time stands still". Other sculptures include a crow playing the piano, and along the highway the fenceposts are angels with halos lit with christmas lights! After exploring the store and the grounds you can pause for complimentary tea and cookies. It was a delightful, warm experience! I highly recommend it!

It was so nice! Winter Wheat offers 2 small houses in which you can sit and have complimentary tea or coffee and cookies. In one, my tante Janny relaxes and enjoys her coffee in the cosy, warm studio, and the gang (Marjon, Dad, Tante Janny, & Mom) stands outside the front. This house was decorated with original Lucy Ogletree art.

My Dad sits inside the glass house, made of recycled windows.

Here's a view of the driveway back to the highway, with the studio tea house to the left.

Echt Hollands

WooHoo!!! My cousin and my aunt have arrived from Holland! And catch your breath, these are the lovely fabrics they gave to me! (I am soooo spoiled!) Real Dutch fabric! And guess where they bought it! At Irma's Sampler Patchwork and Quilt Shop in Haarlem, where a certain Lucy works!
It's such an amazingly small world with the internet!

Can't write much more, have got to explore Ontario with the family!

Quilt Envy

We had our guild meeting on Thursday, and as usual it was inspiring as well as depressing! Nancy Trowbridge (?) gave a wonderful trunk show. Apparently she teaches many classes on quilting, so many of her quilts were designed to teach specific lessons. They were great! The depressing part is to see how many quilts these people have. I look at my paltry collection and I wonder where all my quilts went! I know, I know, I've given them away as gifts, mostly baby quilts. It's a good thing most of my friends have stopped having children! My new goal is to make and keep quilts for myself! (I've highlighted it to remind myself)

My four entries into our guild's quilt show are all wallhangings. So I must try and make another bed-sized quilt. I've only ever made one in the 10 years of quilting!

Also, I must tackle the UFO's: there is of course the Spike and Suske quilts, the remembrance day quilt, an old sweatshirt I want to dress up, my NBX (Nightmare before Christmas) quilt...I've drawn it out by hand and on EQ5 and have the fabric, but haven't started cutting....also a basket full of sampler blocks. I would go through my quilting magazines and see many nice quilts, but wasn't ready to make a whole quilt, but I wanted to try a block. I got this idea from one of the magazines, this lady would try out all her blocks on Christmas fabric and then turn those blocks into a christmas sampler. Well I decided I didn't want to use Christmas fabric so bought a bunch of Debbie Mumm fabric that I liked at the time and did my samples in that. The problem is I'm not as crazy about the fabric as I once was. So I think I should finish that one up and start a new bunch of samplers....maybe this time in batiks... or should I pick a theme, maybe not christmas, a colour theme, or a season, autumn,...hmmm ?

I think I'm going to make fabric postcards for Christmas, this year, too!

There. No more quilt envy, I've got a plan!

(next post: the best laid plans of mice and men...)

Here is my Remembrance day wall hanging, as promised. I was crazy to get this done, and worked at it all weekend. It was a glorious Thanksgiving weekend! It was sunny and warm. I managed to get a lot of things done as well as this wall hanging. I washed and put away all the lawn furniture and table. Cut back the wild perennials and even planted daffodils! Also managed to eat 2 yummy Turkey dinners! Thanks Mom and Mom-in-law!

As for the wall hanging, it is not exactly as I had originally pictured it in my head. But it was a totally improvisational effort. I started with the wonky letters and they were hard to do!(By the way that "F" is an F and not a "P", there is just a dark spot on the light fabric, which makes it look like a P in the photo) The letters were a bit bigger than I expected. I was going to put 'lest we' on one line, then the poppy, then 'forget', but 'forget'was big enough! So I rearranged them that way. I like the green fabric that I picked it an army green tone to it. I am thinking this could be good in wools, perhaps even made from old army uniforms....hmmm, something to think about.

Next photo is an update on the Spike quilt, it's looking good I think!

Here is an update on the Spike quilt. As you can see, I've started the free fan hand quilting around the outside. I had a photo of the whole quilt but you couldn't see the detail of the handquilting.

Let Freedom Ring

On September 22, 2006,as an expression of thanks to Canada and its Armed Forces, the Dutch community presented London with this Carillon for their role in the liberation of the Netherlands and Belgium during World War II.

The memorial consists of 3 sections. First, 18 bronze bells suspended on a large stainless steel tower decorated with a spiral of maple leaves. The bells were cast in Holland. The bells will chime on the hour, year round and can be programmed to play any tune. Second is a granite sculpture at the base of the bells that show the location of Canadian Forces cemetaries in the Netherlands and Belgium. Third, a beautiful garden was created to encompass the site.

The money to build this memorial came mostly from donations from the Dutch community in this area.

My mother took the following photos when she attended the dedication ceremony. My parents are originally from Holland and also donated money for this memorial to be built. I think my mom's photos were better than any that were printed in the local papers. However, there are some other nice photos of the veterans that attended the ceremony here.

Here, you can see some of the veterans and some Dutch-Canadians dressed in traditional Dutch clothing.

A veteran touches the memorial.

Keep On Quilting

I've started the handquilting on the Spike quilt, and I must say I really like it! Thanks Tonya , for the inspiration! I am doing her free fans around the outside and then I will outline Spike and then probably do full concentric circles in the middle (at least that's the plan). I don't have photos yet.

I have an idea for a remembrance day wall hanging. I think I will use Tonya's wonky letter for "lest we forget" with a big poppy in the middle, in fall or muted tones. I can see it my head. And I will also post some photos my Mom took of a Veteran's memorial dedication that took place in our city. They are very nice and I think moving photos. It is sad how fewer and fewer seem to take pause to remember their sacrifice, especially now that there are so few of them left.

The Shoplifters Saga continues...

Yeah. Well the second soandso (I'll call him Thing 2) came in the store on friday. double grrrr. First his 2 spotters came in. They weren't regulars and they had never been in a comic book store before, didn't know what they were looking for...a bad sign...I was going to ask him to leave his bag at the counter... I didn't trust him, then Thing 2 came in, right away I asked if I could help him and right away he was hostile."why did you ask me that for? there are other people here too" (????) Anyway I knew it was Thing 2, he too has tattoos all over him, I said "I want you to leave my store you've been asked to stay away." " No I haven't why do I have to leave?" "Are you soandso?" "no that's not me" (didn't fall for it this time, could he have been speaking to Thing 1?) "you match the description, please leave." "This is f****** g b******t", he says as he's leaving" don't be surprised if this place burns down" (???) " is that a threat?" and then he asks the other guys to leave with him (so they were together, it's the old distract the sales clerk while one of the other ones steals the stuff, grrrrrrrrrr.) I called the police (not 911) at around noon and didn't see an officer until 5:30 (!) Apparently a very busy day for them. Thing 1 and Thing 2 of course were in the police computers, 30 year old ne'er-do-wells, drug and alcohol dependancy, last known address: the men's mission...oh surprise. The officer said he would go there and see if they're there and serve them with a tresspassing ticket, but they probably won't be still there, which is probably why they didn't know they were banned from the store in the first place, the police can't find them. We have to catch them in the act...but of course the police say don't confront them, just call 911, they'd be gone by then.

So the good news is: no alarms went off in the middle of the night and our store is still standing!

Real Life Interferes with Quilting

Well the Spike quilt is all basted and ready to be quilted. I am thinking about trying out Lazy Gal's free fan method of hand quilting on this. I am really intrigued by it. I like the idea of using colourful embroidery floss. It seems right somehow. I don't have a fancy sewing machine to do machine quilting, so if I have to hand quilt this might suit me. But then I was on Fibermania and Melody's ode to the ginko tree had me weeping, it was so beautiful to me. The colours! She machine quilted around the leaves but hand quilted these simple circles and it was quite nice...so now I'm thinking maybe less is more.

I must stare at the quilt some more. I am at that point where I just look at it and look at it trying to imagine what it would look like finished. Then I go to bed and think about it some more. I am not a plunge right in kind of person. I look before I leap, I think about it too much!!!aaak!

You know when I can't make a decision, it's because I've had a bad day at work. I had to confront some punk kid and tell him to leave my store. He's a known thief, he's stolen from us and other stores and has been banned from the store. But he had the bloody nerve to come back. grrrrr. He thinks because he shaved his beard we wouldn't recognize him, but, you know, if you're going to be a thief perhaps tattooing your body might not be such a good idea! They call them identifying characteristics for a reason. The first time we talked to the police about them (there was a pair of them, then) all we had to do was describe the tattoos and the police gave us their names. So I went up to punk kid and asked is your name so and so or so and so and he said yeah I'm so and so ( is this who they were thinking when they made up the Darwin awards?) Well I said I am asking you to leave my store and not come back and then he has the nerve to ask why? I told him, but does he think we're stupid? It's a good thing my anger is stronger than my fear when it comes to confronting these individuals, because I'm sure his rap sheet includes assault, but after I was shaking. Grrr I hate shoplifters!

OK, I've vented. I feel a little better. It's time to watch some Lost (we're re-watching season 2) and relax :)

Suske as inspiration!

Don't mess with me!

Big girl sleeping.

Here you can see she does have bits of orange on her tummy.

I actually was a busy little beaver and I finished the top for the "Suske" quilt, again without embellishments (it still needs some whiskers). This is the Morning Mews pattern from McKenna Ryan. (see link in sidebar, to compare)

This is the first time I've done this kind of applique or even made someone else's design. I usually steal parts of patterns, very rarely do I make one complete from pattern. Having said that, I just fell in love with the pattern when I saw it, but of course had to change "Dora" to "Suske" and of course my colours are different, but pretty close I guess. Suske is a mostly black with bits of orange tortoiseshell, so I thought that particular batik caught her essence.

I found all the cutting pieces a bit tiresome, as well as arranging and pressing them a little difficult, but I muddled through. The steam and seam was interesting too, you actually draw on the fusible part and if you don't cut inside the line some of those lines can show through along the edges.It didn't happen too often. I think once I quilt it, they'll disappear. That's of course the next question, how am I going to quilt that?