LFQGuild Challenge 2008

Well, we finally had our Guild Challenge Meeting. We had 36 entries (3 of which were mine and I know Christine submitted 2) out of 126 members. It seemed like a fair amount. What is the participation rate for challenges at your guild, or does it just depend on the type of challenge? You can watch the slideshow here and you can see the winners here.

Here is my first piece I entered. Keep in mind I only used fabric from my stash and the Challenge fabric. This one is called Blowing Bubbles. That is supposed to be a Blue Whale blowing bubbles from his blow hole. I had an idea that I wanted the fish to be inside bubbles using the reverse applique method. This piece also uses fusible applique and freezer paper-needle turn applique.


The second piece is called Heads or Tails. I tried the facing the piece instead of using binding. This will be a gift to my friends in Michigan, after I show it in our Guild Show in October.


The third piece is called 2 Lost Souls, after the song How I Wish You Were Here by Roger Waters of Pink Floyd..."We are just 2 lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year..." That is such a moving song!


I've also managed to finally finish my Amy Butler quilt, from fabric I bought a year ago at the Kitchener-Waterloo show. My working title has been Rob and Amy Go on a Picnic. The quilt contains Amy Butler and Robert Kaufman fabrics. Now I am just calling it Picnic for short. All though I am not really firm on the name :)

Happy Mother's Day, Mom!

I just wanted to wish my mom a happy mother's day! My mom doesn't make quilts, but she did sew a lot of our clothes when we were kids. I can appreciate all the work that went into it now, but I don't think I appreciated it then, when I had to wear matching clothes with my brother who is 2 years younger than myself. In the collage below the first photo in top left corner...we look like twins, we even had the same haircut! (am I on the right or the left?) LOL!

I also wanted to share some line drawings my mom has made. She and a friend took an art course together and ever since then she has been making these wonderful drawings of houses and buildings. The first is of my house, the second of her father's home in Nigtevecht, Holland, and the third of a maple syrup farm in Ontario.

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.

My New Header!

Do you like my new header? I am thinking it may be a little big. I used an old photo that I cropped a bit; it was from the old camera and it is a little fuzzy, I think. I may experiment and take a new photo that is a little clearer. But still doesn't Our Man Spike look great up there? I am happy to report, almost 21 years of age and he's still alive! Go Spike!

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.

Delft Baskets

I have been playing around with my favourite Dutch fabrics. I have been making so many unusual wall hangings for the Guild challenge, that I had the urge to go back to something traditional. I've never made a basket block before. I got the idea from a Gwen Marston book I found at City Lights a used book store, Twenty Little Amish Quilts (1993). I had a heck of a time, though, there was something off in the measurements and I had to cut down all my centre squares a half an inch. The instructions said add 1/4 inch seam to template, but by doing so it made the centre square too big for the little squares. weird. But these things don't phase me anymore and a trim here or there is no big deal, I added sashing where there wasn't any, and anyway this is the result, Delft Baskets, I call it:


Spring has finally arrived. I know this because I refuse to wear gloves and my boots anymore, and of course the Thames river has flooded because of rain and snow melt. This photo shows the park behind the HMCS Prevost. As you can see the bicycle path has been completely flooded up to the base of the hill.

I like to use this sewer pipe as a guide to river depth. The first photo shows one of the lowest depth of the river, this was January.


This was March 31st:

This was April 1st:


So what is that 10 feet, maybe more? egads! They say this is the highest it's been since 1977.(I have since found out it rose 13 feet!)

Why my lights will be on

I don't usually use this space to rant about politics or religion, but this one takes the cake! Earth Hour. We are encourage to turn off our lights for one hour today to symbolize our fight to save the climate/earth/environment/electricity, whatever.

It's like having a pep rally, but there is no game! The world is not ending! We are not killing the planet. The"climate" does not have to be saved. (I actually received an email from someone that said "we have to save the climate"....how do you save climate? in a bottle? Who says the climate we have today is the one we have to have in a hundred years, anyway?)

Environmentalism is the new secular religion. They say that many people do not go to church anymore, this is their substitute. People seem to need something to believe in, so if it is not God, now it is the Earth. They worship it, they make laws about it, you cannot have dissenting views about it, they indoctrinate children in schools, make them write essays, make posters, come up with slogans.

I am happy I live in a world of electricity, I like my light bulbs, my furnace, my air conditioner, modern medicine, flush toilets, refrigerators, sewing machines, they make my life easier, I will live longer than my ancestors. I believe progress is better than the alternative. I choose light over dark. These are my slogans: I choose ideas over stagnation. Enlightment over endarkenment. Go to the Light. Do not choose the Dark side.

People often talk about light pollution, that you can't see the stars when you live in the city. That is true, but look at the satellite image of the world at night. Look where there is no light. North Korea, China, Africa. It is not because they are kinder to the environment it is because they are oppressed, they do not have freedom, they do not have progress or the environment is too harsh for humans. Turning the lights off to me symbolizes oppression and that is not what I want to emulate!

And you know what I think is sad... there will probably be more people willing to turn off their lights for 1 hour than there are who are willing to take a minute of silence for those who gave their lives for our freedoms on Remembrance Day...that is sad.

Walk to the Park

What a cold, gray day in March. Hubby and I took a walk around downtown and through Harris Park. I took my camera, but as you can see it was all grays, whites and browns. Here's hubby under the sycamore tree. I like these trees, they have neat bark, it peels off easily. There are not very many in London that I know about.


Here is some more neat bark. These trees by the river must be so very old, they are huge!

This log had no bark! It must have washed up on the shore when the river flooded and then stayed behind when the river dropped again. It was so white almost as if it had been painted!


And here is the view with the old and spent black eyed susans peeking out of the snow. The silvery brush is russian sage, I believe.


They redid the banks of the river 2 years ago with perennials, and last year it looked quite marvelous! Here is a photo from last August to remind us what colour looks like! It's almost the same view, just a little closer to the bridge.

another view in the opposite direction...sigh, green vegetation, bright sunny flowers...soon, soon...

Table Topper for CQA

Last weekend Barb from Babs 'n Jas Designs held a free table topper workshop for our guild. The CQA has asked for donations of table toppers for the up coming Quilt Canada in St. John's, Newfoundland. 2o of us spent National Quilt Day making these:



I also managed another block for my super heroes project. Instead of a symbol I tried a mask. Here is Ironman:

Woohoo! I Was Published!

This was the highlight of February for me! An article that I wrote, about how quilters' guilds can use blogs to improve their presence on the internet, was published in the Canadian Quilter a quarterly publication of the Canadian Quilters' Association!


Besides this blog and my store blog, I also edit our guild's blog. As our guild president often says, "I'm doing the happy dance!"

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 storm part 2

Aha! I figured out a way to get around my blogger photo uploading problems. I am blogging straight from Picasa. I don't usually do it this way. Picasa doesn't have as much editing choices...like how do I make this paragraph flush to the left instead of centering...? Also it doesn't want to allow me to choose different photos from different files...maybe there is a way around this, I don't know yet,

Anyway here are some of the pics. Yesterday the storm, this is a cardinal trying to feed in my parents' backyard:



My house around noon:



My house and hubby today around 2PM, a big difference!

Where to put all that snow!? Backyard is not big enough!

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.

Quilt 'til You Wilt

Our guild had our annual Quilt 'til You Wilt at the Stoneridge Inn; great time as usual! I didn't know what to bring with me. I brought my entire stash, minus Christmas fabrics; it fits into one laundry basket!

I ended up spending most of my day making this tote bag out of an old Kabuki (by David Mack) t-shirt I found. This shirt was from the baggy t-shirt days, not the clingy babydolls of today, so I hardly ever wear it anymore. The art was a little long, so I cut off the word Kabuki. David likes to use triangles in his sketches, so I thought I would fuse some random triangles on it to jazz it up. Luckily I had some great purple batik to use.




Then I cut the word Kabuki into individual letters and then fused them onto the batik, I then fused that onto the tote bag. I machine stitched the applique all into place and completed the bag.



When we finish a project, we have to show it off to everyone, and there is a lot oohing and aahing, and photo taking. The ladies are asking me who Kabuki is and I am nonchalantly telling them 'Oh, she's a Japanese government assassin" And then they all break out in laughter! These women think I am crazy!

Anyway, a great use of an old t-shirt, I think. You can see other projects I've made out of t-shirts here, a quilt here, and a postcard here.

I've been tagged!

Sewnut tagged me, but I am a little late in responding. Here are 7 strange facts about myself:

1. this is often how I watch TV, sometimes it gets a little uncomfortable:

2. the messiest sewing room ever! This is a bit of a cheat as I was in the process of cleaning it and assembling a cupboard, so I just moved the stuff to one side of the room!

3. This is my favourite vacation spot; Oxtongue Lake


4. This is my first quilt, made in 1995; my friend Christine and I took a course together and have been quilting together ever since!:

5. My house used to be a Montessori pre-school, in fact I used to work there for 5 years.
6. I absolutely can't stand those bushes at the side of the house. I think they are called bridal veil Spirea. The flowers smell horrible, and it is really hard to trim! It only looks pretty from a distance. trust me.

7. These are my favourite slippers! I take them everywhere. When they wear out I buy new ones up at the cottage near Oxtongue Lake.


That's it. The rules are to tag my 7 favourite blogs and email them, but most of my favourites have been tagged already, and I recommend all the ones on my blog rolls.

Happy Valentine's Day!

Here is my February postcard for the guild exchange; I made a second one for my parents for taking care of the cats while I was away. Thanks Dad!

Hubby and I went to visit our friends in Michigan. We had a great time despite the deep freeze on Sunday! We took in the new and improved Detroit Institute for the Arts (DIA). Very nice! It's always nice to be inspired by great art.

I don't know why, but I really enjoyed this statue of Zephyr dancing with Flora! and this small bronze of The Freedman:

And this The Communicant...I thought she was going to step out of the painting!

I didn't take a lot of photos because you are not supposed to use a flash, and the lighting is quite subdued. There were so many more that I enjoyed... there was a Rembrandt I really liked and some Degas, Church, and more.


Here's our gang:

This and That

Here is the postcard I received for the January guild postcard exchange. Isn't it pretty? The antennae are made of beads and the wings lift up!

I have been busy with a lot of hand quilting, but not a lot I can show you. On Black Cats Staring I've outlined all the letters and have started with spider webs for the rest of the background. I used 3 strands of embroidery floss (variegated orange) around the letters and then I found some purple variegated hand quilting thread which I am using for the webs. I am not in a hurry to finish this one, it doesn't need to be done until next October. So I moved onto my guild challenge. I've made 3 wall hangings already! I am trying to keep them a secret until they are due to be judged. I got all the hand quilting done, now they just need binding.



With all this hand quilting practice, these are my likes and dislikes: 2 strands rather than 3 of embroidery floss. I like using up all the beautiful colours I have on hand and I don't have to go out and look for and buy quilting thread...the selection of colours is not as great. I like the big stitch look you get with embroidery thread, but I don't like the needles I have to use, much sharper, ouch! I look at big stitch quilting as a type of embellishment so picking the right colours is easier with all the floss I have on hand. Although embroidery thread is fine for wall hangings, I am not sure it is very strong and might not be appropriate for a utility quilt. Next I've experimented with different size perle cotton and I like #12 best and I can use a regular quilting needle, again selection of colour is not as great or as easy to find. As for hand quilting thread, the jury is still out. The purple I am using is Coats&Clark and it seems fine. It is good for the smaller stitches. I've also used Gutermann hand quilting thread, I think it is thicker and stiffer than the Coats&Clark.

Below is a photo of the apartment we lived in before we bought our current home. We lived on the right side of the main floor. It was a great apartment, walking distance to work, near the park and was owned by an 87 year old German woman from Switzerland. When I paid the rent she always gave me a bunch of home-made muffins! She lived on the main floor on the left side and rented out rooms above her to students. She was as strong as an ox and could always be found in her vegetable garden in the back. Once I found her chopping wood in the backyard. She is still alive, she is 97 now!


When we moved I made up this cross stitch for her as a present. I just came across the photos today, I had to scan these--pre-digital camera!