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!