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!

Happy Father's Day!

Thanks, Dad, for all the things you do for me and letting me be me!

Love Carol

Feeling Creative!

"I am a Tree"......a hint of things to come!

A Quilted Bird

I received this lovely, hand-painted bird from a friend and blogger! It's a metal napkin holder, but she has painted quilt blocks on it. It's gorgeous and sits in my window! Thanks friend!

I've done a bad thing! I've joined Facebook! I said I wouldn't do it but I did! Egads another computer time-consuming activity! It's mostly work related, but I have some quilting friends on there (you know who you are!) and joined the Liberated Quilters Facebook page...will I ever have time to quilt, or just talk about it!!?? and what about gardening?...I can't help it I started another blog (that makes 5)! I guess I like to compartmentalize....this one will follow my struggles with vegetable gardening, you can visit that blog here.

No quilting last weekend. A new community garden has been started in a park near where we live, and we decided to rent a plot to try some vegetable gardening. Where we live, we have barely any property, let alone enough sunlight for veggie gardening. It is brand new and has no fence or rainbarrels yet, but I have been told we will get them.

Here's our plot (below), the southwest corner. More space than I need, I think! I will probably share the rest with the neighbour!

On Sunday my dad helped me rough in 2, 4'x4' square plots. I got this book out of the library about square foot gardening, it made vegetable gardening sound easy and not overwhelming, so why not give it a go? The hardest part was building this trellis for our vine climbing veggies.

Got some good rain the last 2 days, didn't have to go down to water, but I did check to make sure my garden didn't wash away! There are lots of people who have kids running around there, my mom thought we might trap some children in our trellis contraption. Ha, I checked, we didn't catch a single one!...and it is still standing!

Odds and ends or May confessions

What is it about May, so many of the blogs I follow have hit a stop in posting around the middle of May, even mine...my excuse is that I am so busy! I can hardly catch my breath. One project or event ends another begins! and of course Spring finally arrived and so much work to do in the garden...last year I let it slide and now my garden is in much need of TLC, also this year we've got to put in a new fence and gate, so quilting may get pushed to the back of the priority list! Also, I have been a bad blogger, I have been reading a few blogs regularly but rarely commenting...and what is the etiquette for responding to comments? I appreciate all the comments I get, but unless you ask a specific question I don't usually respond back. So to all those who enjoyed my Canada wallhanging, I say Thanks!


I was checking out Camp Follower Bag's blog and noticed that my 2 blocks I sent in for the Bushfire quilt relief project have been made into a quilt. Wow! What a job she has done organizing such a huge project and sewing all these lovely quilts! I am so proud to have had even a small part of it. My blocks are the middle ones in the top and bottom rows. What a lovely quilt! What a great job she and her volunteers have done! Kudos!

I have been handquilting my 9 Lives quilt a lot lately, so I expect I will get the whole thing done by the fall; I am trying not to rush, but enjoy the process. I am using bamboo batting, left over from Andrew's Scrappy Bargello quilt, and I must say I am not too happy how linty it is and how the white batting is popping up through the dark fabric...it is too late to take out all I've done so far, so I am hoping a lint brush will help to get those stray pufts...

I have the book Art Quilt Workbook, and every once in a while I dabble in some of the projects they suggest. I am not committed to doing them on a schedule, but whenever I feel I need some new stimulation. I am currently dabbling in 2 of them. One is taking a photo, drawing it and then recreating it with fabric. In the book they used a pear...me I used Alfred Hitchcock.

The colours are a little odd, and I have no idea where I am going to go with this...but hey...it's just fabric doodling.

The other project I am working on is the one where you put somewords in a box and randomly pick one and randomly pick a colour palette and create something out of it...well, I didn't really like the words they suggested and I thought, it's not too challenging to work with my words, so I asked my husband to write on slips of paper:

5x song titles, 5x verbs, 5x animals, 5x emotions, 5x comic related, 5x adjectives, 5x music related words.

Then I created a list of colours and themes, such as plaids, or primatives, or pastels, happy, sad, etc. I chose 2 slips from his box and one from my box. So right now I am doodling "I am a tree", rhythm, and wacky. I am giving myself a couple of weeks of doodling and then a couple of weeks of creating and they will be no bigger than 8.5x11. I'd like to do one per month, but....I don't know...

I have been watching a new TV show that is probably not that well known. It is Canadian, it is called Rabbit Fall. It is about a lady cop who moves to Rabbit Fall, Saskatchewan from Toronto and the strange characters and aboriginal mysticism she experiences. It is a little Twin Peak-ish. I really like it, it is only a half hour show, and each episode has a crime to solve, but everything is not wrapped up in a tidy "murder she wrote" little bow at the end. The acting is realistic without being "too Canadian" and the directing is awesome! I like it because it is not predictable and cliche....and you know what this cop dresses like and looks like a lady cop, not some hollywood starlet pretending to be a cop. (on the other hand, my other favourite show right now is Burn Notice, which is just the complete opposite of Rabbit Fall!)

O Canada Guild Challenge

Thursday was our reveal for our Guild Challenge. The theme was O Canada, what Canada means to me... and the other stipulation was that it had to have a maple leaf on it.

I doodled many a complicated drawing and then in the end, I thought what do I want out of this challenge...just something to hang up on Canada Day. So it's really just my scrappy version of the canada flag, not too much in the deep meaning, but it is all my design. I designed my own paper-pieced maple leaf and randomly pieced the red and white strips and using the lazy gal letters technique I spelled out Canada.

It looks really great at my house.... away from the competition of the guild! There were some really great entries, so great I didn't even vote for myself! You can view the rest of the guild challenge entries here.

Round Robin thanks!

Thanks for all the kind words about our round robin. If you click here you can see all the past posts about the round robin, since, gasp, January 2008!

And for those that are curious, I get to keep the one with the "poppies" in the middle and Christine gets to keep the one with "Daisy on a stick".

For those attempting round robins, I recommend the Collaborative Quilting books by Marston and Moran! The "parts department" is a wonderful resource/idea!

Round Robin reaching the finishing line!

Two Christmases ago my friend Christine and I exchanged these blocks for a round robin...

....well, life gets in the way and things slowed down with our round robin, but Christine surprised me by giving me this:

...and I am going to pass this one on to her.....

I think we are getting close to the end!

Grand National at the Joseph Schneider Haus

My friend The Quilt Rat and I sent quilted postcards to the Grand National this year. They selected the "Terrific Twelve" postcards to print into a postcard book. The Quilt Rat had both her entries chosen for the book!!! She is so talented!You can read about her entries on her blog. Mine, although not chosen, was displayed in the Joseph Schneider Haus along with all the other submissions. I have not been to see them yet, but Quilt Rat sent me this photo showing my postcard (it is the 4th from the left) hanging on the wall...way cool!

Freddy & Gwen Collaborate Again!

Can't talk! This just arrived! too busy reading! drooling! woohoo!

Birds and Canal Houses

My neighbour left a bag of scraps in my mailbox, there were some weird bits of fabric in there, fabric I wouldn't normally use, some terry cloth, faux suede, bits of jeans, etc...there was also this square of randomly pieced red and white fabric. It was uneven and the seams were thick and varied in width, top-stitched in places... I thought hmmph...I found out later that she and her daughter made gift bags for a party out these pieces and this was left over...anyway, they went away for easter and I am taking care of their cat, so I am giving this piece back to them, altered my way...!

Spring Grackle!

I am obsessed with birds lately! I guess it is spring!

Anyway, I'll leave it on their table, for when they come home and they can do with it what they will, maybe they'll hang it on their wall or turn it into a pillow, or whatever...It's their turn in this make shift round robin!

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I've got this great Eyewitness Travel Guide to Amsterdam, and inside they have this pull out section of the houses along each of the canals. I've always wanted to make some pieced canal houses. Most pieced houses are a door, window, roof and chimney, but these canal houses are so interesting.

It shows details of the different types of gables of these houses.

So I drew some of my favourites. Trying to keep it simple, and using scraps I attempted my first house (below, based on sketch on left)

I think my windows are too square and the pink is a little lost, but I am just trying to build not be perfect on my first attempt. My second attempt is the warehouse style house, it has those great big shutters.

Much better, I think the windows are better proportioned and the colours are a better contrast, I like my pink shutters.

Goodbye Winter!

There are 5 cardinals in this photo, can you spot them all?

My parents sent this photo taken in their backyard. They attract a lot of birds with their birdfeeders, but usually the cardinals visit singly or in pairs, but what a treat to see 5 at a time! This is an older photo, the snow has melted in London, Ontario!

This photo, below...just because, who can resist those yellow characters with their googly eyes.

Sorry, no quilting here today, have been working on Secret projects...finished my Guild Challenge quilt! Woo Hoo!