Hundreds of Blog Posts - in my head

Hi - remember me? 

Its been months, LOTs of months actually since I have sat down and blogged, more like a year and a half.  Lots of time has passed and I have probably ''written' hundreds of blog posts in my head but never got around to writing them down here. 

I'm tired of beating myself up for not posting things (or doing a ton of stuff in general!) but I feel like I need an outlet for my creative voice (and my various "other" voices) to come out and talk - so here I am.  I feel like I have reached a point where I need to get back to ME, I need to get back to doing some things that give me Joy rather than feeling like everything is a Job.    I know I can't lay on a beach and eat bon-bons all day, as much as I would love to, but I can get myself refocused on what I enjoy doing and maybe share some of that with you all. 

With that, I hear two little ones starting to bicker upstairs so its back to my most important role I go, time to be Mom.  Hopefully this afternoon I can get a quick bit of sewing done and be able to share it with you all. 

Thanks for stopping by,
Kari 

I've finally got my Mojo Back!!!

Its been a while - and when I say a while I mean MONTHS but I think I finally have my sewing mojo back!  Its always been hanging around a little bit, but I haven't felt that burning desire to get upstairs to my sewing room and create something for a while.  I think a combination of summer holidays - the kids and I have spent almost 60 nights up at our trailer since May, and still have a few more nights to go before school starts back up again - and just being away from the chaos of my house has left me wanting to go back upstairs and work on something.  They say absence makes the heart grow fonder and I think that is totally whats happening with me, when I was at the trailer I couldn't quilt because I didn't ahve my machine with me!  Now that I'm at home I have actually got a an entire crib sized quilt done in a few nights!  Too bad I can't show it since its going to be a gift in a few weeks but after the baby shower I'll be sure to post lots of pictures of it.

I CAN however post some pictures from our Calgary Modern Quilt Guild meeting from tonight.  We have some amazingly talented members and I am always inspired when I see what everyone else is working on.

This quilt is a charity quilt for Flood Victims of the Calgary 2013 Flood:

 

Another charity quilt for the Calgary Flood Victims:

One more Charity Quilt!

One of our members Katrina made this with a Quick Curve Ruler, I MUST get one of those rulers!

Katrinas wonderful Tula Pink Blocks

Another quilt of Katrinas - she is my hero!  I have no idea how she produces so many quilts and projects but I want some of her mojo!

I LOVE this quilt that Rebecca did - its so happy and fun.

A super fun quilt from another Rebecca in our guild.  The yellows are amazing!

Probably my favourite quilt of the night, I adore the Constellation fabric line and love it even more now that I have seen it in person.

Lastly we did a potholder exchange and this is what I came home with!  I am super happy with it and almost don't want to use it since its so awesome!

And because I am so AWESOME - I totally forgot to take a picture of the potholder that I made for the swap!  It was pretty cool and totally not something that I normally would have made, that being said I am looking forward to making a few more one of these days!

Thank you so much for sticking with me while I took my hiatus, hopefully I'll be back soon!

Festival Of Quilts - Heritage Park

I spent some time this weekend at the Heritage Park Festival of Quilts - our guild had a booth there (for the first time!) and I spent Sunday afternoon telling anyone that would listen all about the Calgary Modern Quilt Guild.

5 members of our guild brought quilts to display and it looked fabulous!!!

My two quilts are the scrappy trip on the bottom right and the black and white mini quilt (that I just finished and need to blog about - its VERY neat!).   I was so honoured that my quilts were displayed along side some beautiful quilts and didn't look like something out of a Home Ec class - I'm getting better!!!

I spent the majority of my time at the booth but I did manage to sneak out and take a quick look around but I totally forgot to take lots of pictures! That being said two quilts really stood out and I had to break out the ol' iPhone to show you all.

I found this yo yo quilt at one of the guild booths, they said a 92 year old lady makes these quilts:

It looked like such a happy quilt to snuggle up under or to put up on display.

This Gargoyle quilt was displayed across from our guild booth.  After kind of starting at it for at least two hours I had to get up and take a closer look, it was all machine appliqued with  an insane amount of machine stitching all over the entire thing.  It was incredible!

Sadly thats all the pictures I took - next year hopefully I'll have a quilt or two in the show and I'll bring my big camera and can do the festival justice by taking some pictures of it to share.

Thanks for stopping by - see you soon.

Hemming Diamonds - A New'ish WIP

ISometimes I feel like the worlds biggest scatterbrain when it comes to my fabric choices. Some days I love crazy bright prints and others I yearn for the softness of a more traditional print. 

I got the fabric for the Hemming Diamonds quilt for my friends fabric sale last year and have been dying to make a quilt from it I just haven't gotten around to doing much with it yet. I did cut the fabric into half square triangles and then after pressing I put them away for a later time. 

That later time came this evening. I am SO in love with this quilt so far and I'm nowhere near done!  

I still have 10 more rows of 10 blocks but I think it's going to look spectacular when it's done!  

It's really too bad that blocks don't square themselves!  That would save me a LOT of time but I am enjoying the process on this quilt a lot.  

I can't wait until I get to the machine quilting stage on this quit - my new machine is going to be so much easier to use and produce much better results. 

Thanks for stopping by - see you soon!!!  

Whats Up on my Design Wall - and Possible Sewing Machine News!

I love seeing what everyone has up on their design wall and I thought it would be fun to share what I have on the go on Mondays (or whatever day I can get around to taking a picture of my wall!).  

Right now its a total mix of a bunch of stuff that I have going on.  The top left is an orphan block that I did for a color theory lesson at our Modern Quilt Guild meeting.  The random funky blocks are my Modern Monday (or Manic Monday as I think I will call the quilt) blocks the large purple block was me playing with pinwheels a few years ago and I just found the blocks the other day and the bottom two white blocks are just stitching projects in different phases of completion.

I may have some big news tomorrow - I might be getting a new sewing machine!!!  My Brother NX-650 has been a fantastic little machine as I learned how and got into quilting.  Now that I am getting a little better and want to improve my quilting skills I've decided it might be time to get a new machine.  My Brother pieces really well, I cannot get it to give me decent stitches when I machine quilt.  I don't do anything fancy (yet) but even when doing long straight stitches my tension was horrible and my machine kept skipping stitches.  I know part of this is operator issues, but I also know that the small throat plate doesn't help when I'm trying to smush a medium sized quilt through!

If I do wind up biting the bullet at the store today I'll do a few posts on getting to know my new machine!

Thanks for stopping by - see you soon!

Monthly Quilting Plan - May

I must admit, I've always been a big planner/deadline lover except for when it comes to my quilting.  I've always taken on a 'it will get done when it gets done' attitude and that has pretty much resulted in not a lot of finishes and a TON of WIPs.  Now that I have finished a few quilts in a row I'm loving having something to show for all that work - an actual finished project!

Last month I sat down and wrote out all the WIPs I could think of that I had on the go and attempted to organize them into manageable 'piles'.

I had it organized into Almost done, On the Go, Need to Quilt, Want to Start, and Will take Forever columns.   Thankfully I have already managed to cross off the Eye Spy quilt (I need to do a blog post on that one!!) and my Scrappy Trip!  Two down, only a zillion more WIPs to go!  ;)

I only have to do the binding on the Party Monster Quilt so that shouldn't take too long - I just have to hunker down and put a few hours of hand stitching in.  Then I also have some binding to do on the Tumbling Rubies quilt.  An amazing lady from my quilt guild offered to do the FMQ on that quilt and from the pictures she took its incredible!!  I am so happy and I can't wait to get the binding done and have another finished quilt.

Aside from the binding on those two quilts  pretty much everything else is in the piecing stages.  I really want to get the Crazy Cat quilt done for my Mom (its only taken me almost three years), and I also want to get the girls quilts done but I am waiting on fabric to come up from the states.  I ordered it a few weeks ago so hopefully it should show up sometime in the next week or so.

I have a few 'extra' quilts that I have started but I'm not sure what I want to do with them so they aren't high on my list of priorities but I would love to get a few of them done.

Lastly I have my Dirty Thirties quilt that I wanted to have done by my 31st birthday (I'll be 33 in September) that is the epitome of meticulous and after calculating how many individual cuts I would have to make I got horribly discouraged and vowed to take it out much later.  I know that I have gotten so much better with my piecing over the past few years that it won't be so bad now but I just have to make some time to get to work on it and I'm sure it wont seem like such a daunting task.

My deadline of June 1st is approaching, and without a machine its a little hard to tackle my WIP list (its still in the shop), but I can do the hand binding on one quilt and get the binding ready for another so all is not lost!  Hopefully at the end of May I will have a bunch of quilts off my WIP list and maybe a new one or two added.  ;)

Thanks for stopping by - see you soon. 

Scrappy Trip - Complete!!!

Huzza!!  I may have been silent for over a month but I've actually been getting a lot of stuff accomplished which is kind of a shocker coming from me.

I finished my Scrappy Trip quilt a few weeks ago and I absolutely LOVE it!!!

I pieced the back with a few different fabrics and I love how the blue rectangle pops in the middle of all the pink and purples of the quilt.

Its sad that it took me four (4) months to complete this quilt and that is by far the fastest I have EVER started, pieced, sandwiched, quilted and did the binding on a quilt - ever?

Since moving my sewing room upstairs a few months ago,  I find I am getting into my sewing room more and more lately and am actually REALLY enjoying myself.  I love being able to create something from scratch and knowing that its either going to go to my kids, a friends baby, my Mom (I'll get the crazy cat quilt done eventually!).  We have a big recliner in the corner of the bonus room and I love how Miss S will come up and either read or play on the ipad or just hang out with me while I press or cut or when I'm sewing.   Once I give the sewing room/bonus room a good once over clean I'll share some pictures with you all.

Thanks so much for stopping by - See you soon!  

Shes Growing Up - And I'm holding on for dear life!

Spring is starting to slowly make its appearance around here lately, the other day it was +20C and the past two days we have had snow on the ground.  Thankfully the snow melts by lunch time and its almost nice enough for the kids to go out to play in the backyard or on their bikes/scooters.

Just after lunch a school friend of Miss S' came to the door and asked if she could come out and ride her bike with him.  Part of me wanted to shout 'NO you are my baby and I can't let you outside alone, without me - EVER! ' But then part of me knew that she is so desperate to have friends her age to play with.  So as hard as it was I said she could go outside and I have been camped out by the front door mostly watching this:

Its just the sidewalk/road in front of my house, but every minute or two I happen to see this:

A streak of purple jacket, pink helmet and a SUPER happy smile.  Shes having so much fun out there and while I'm not one of those parents that can let my 5 year old play outside 'unattended' for long, I definitely am hovering by every single window that looks out on the front I'm glad that she is out having fun with her friend. 

I have no idea who told her that she could grow up so fast - every once in a while it hits me that I have a 5 (FIVE) year old and I wonder where the past five and a half years have gone - they have flown by.  

I'm trying to find the little things lately, the little things that make me smile, the little things that I need to hold onto and remember because its the little things that get forgotten in the daily rush of life.  Its the awesomeness of Miss S coming in from riding her bike/scooter and wanting to snuggle with me on the couch before we have to pick up Miss L from preschool.   Life is good.  

Thanks for stopping by - see you soon.

Stitching Tuesday

Its Tuesday again - time for another installment of Stitching Tuesday! 

The girls have been loving their little doll quilts that I made for them.  I finished Miss S's Squirrel Quilt and Miss L seemed pretty hurt that I hadn't finished her quilt yet.  It took one night of machine embroidery and one night of hand binding and the quilt is done and Miss L couldn't be happier!

I started on yet another quilt today - just something easy, simple and the fabric makes me super happy - I'll share that with you soon!

Thanks for stopping by - see you soon!

First Ever Quilt Label

I started an Eye Spy quilt for my kids when I was pregnant with Mr. C - that was over 18 months ago!  My goodness does time ever go by quick.  I started back to work on this quilt a few months ago but then loathed the quilting I did on top and put it away for a few more months.  My girls saw it while I was organizing my sewing room on the weekend and they had a ton of fun playing eye spy with the quilt even though its not done.  That spurred me into action and in a few days I had the label done, the binding cut and partially hand sewn on.  One of these days I am going to seriously have to figure out the whole machine sewn binding, until then its hand binding for me!

I used a blanket stitch to add the label and since I didn't think of doing this until AFTER I had the full quilt sewn together you can see the blanket stitch on the front of the quilt.  You can see the blanket stitch on the front of the quilt but thankfully its on a really light eye spy square, it blends it rather well.  I wont do it that way again but it worked for this quilt.

I still have to finish 3/4 of the binding but its coming along nicely - hopefully I will have a 2013 finish soon that is bigger than a doll quilt!  ;)

Thanks for stopping by - see you soon!