Round Robin tops done!

Here's my poppy round robin, I love the liberated sawtooth border Christine added to it! I don't have a photo yet of Christine's finished top, but I will get one soon.

I've also finished the handquilting on my 9Lives wallhanging, but it's been too dark in my sewing room and it's been rainy and overcast so I haven't been able to take an outdoor photo of it either. So you will have to wait.

My friend Quilt Rat has lent me an old Pfaff sewing machine of hers to practice machine quilting on...my Kenmore machine does not lower the feed dogs. So, I have been practicing. It's is as hard as it looks! I might have to stick to hand quilting!


Christine and I are off to Gwen Marston's BIQR 2009 in Michigan on Tuesday so will post lots of photos when we get back!

Postcards and stuff

It's postcard exchange time at Guild again...I like to make more than one postcard at a time, one for guild exchange and one to send to someone else. From the ones above, I sent the bottom flower to my sister in law, because most of the fabrics I used were ones that she sent me and they are perfect! The one with the bee, I am saving for the October meeting, as I will not be there and I made in advance.

From the photos below, I submitted the single bird one for exchange and the one with the birdhouse(I call it Home Tweet Home) is for a friend who just bought his first home with his new bride.

This is a project I have been working on for a long time, and the top is finally completed. It is called Moody Blues, because it is mainly blue fabric and the quote is from a song of theirs, Thinking is the best way to travel.

It's very scrappy and primitive in the lettering, it is supposed to represents the child's sense of wonder to space and space travel, not to mention that Man can achieve so much by using his brain.

Paris, Ontario

Still haven't done much quilting lately, but I did go to Paris last weekend with friends, Paris, Ontario that is! There you will find the closest Mary Maxim store and they had a tent sale and we had to check it out. Me, I didn't find any bargains, but I did pick up some much needed batting to finish up some UFO's.

Paris is a small rural community located on the Grand River. Around this area you can find old buildings made of stone. The main street backs onto the river and in between a couple of buildings they made this cute lookout over the river.

Above, Kathy and Ann, fellow bargain hunters!

My Photos won!

The London Community Resource Centre which organizes all the community gardens in our city had their First Annual Green Thumb Shutterbug Community Photo Contest. There were four categories and 3 photos were chosen from each category.

This one was chosen in the Bountiful Harvest category:

And this was chosen in The Wild Side category:

I won 2 gift certificates to VanHorik's Greenhouse and Garden Centre! Woo hoo!

The other winners can be seen here, and all the submissions can be seen here.

New Postcards

The Thistle postcard I sent to a friend and the mouse one is based on a comic called Mouse Guard by David Petersen. Lieam, the mouse with the green cape fights a snake. I really like the artwork in this comic, it is superb! David Petersen is from Michigan and is doing a signing at Paradise Comics in Toronto on August 22!

I have not been quilting too much lately, and have been spending a lot of time in my garden. Here is some sunshine for those plagued by too much rain!

Thanks!

Quilt Rat gave me this award and I thank her! She is an enormous source of inspiration for me, as well. I've nominated my favourite blogs before and most appear on the blog list at the side...so I am going to choose one that is not on my list but I really do enjoy the photos she takes....the envelope, please..........................

Little Red Hen!

Check it out!

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!