Another day

... another snow storm!



Supposedly all 10 Canadian provinces had snowfall on the same day, even the city of Vancouver, BC (they of course have snow in the Rocky Mountains of BC, but normally it just rains in Vancouver in the winter - their record is something like 43 days of rain in a row - I couldn't do it... even if parts of the province are called Sunshine Coast). Some of the territories (farther north) had blue skies at the same time, but -35 degrees; maybe it was too cold to snow there?

In miscellaneous news: As I replied to some of your comments, I found something other than my laptop to fit into the "too-small" sleeve I made. Having this pretty cover around my statistics book somehow makes me feel better about statistics. And that's a good thing, because my head is already buzzing with the analysis of some data sets for work!


Remember my blue and aqua quilt?


It's being packed up this afternoon to start a long journey all the way to Australia, where one of my friends finally smartened up and had a baby so that I can start giving my many baby quilts away :) She lives far enough south of Queensland that floods aren't a problem, luckily. Not sure what the point of a quilt in the summer is, but hey, it must get cold there sometime ;)

And lastly, I thought I'd share my Disaster Quilt misery with you. This latest disaster happened back in December, but I've been oppressing all thought about it since then...
Well, the disaster itself happened even earlier. Here's the full story:
I had my triple Irish chain quilt top center finished since early 2009 or something horrendously long ago like that. I finally gathered my will to add borders, but didn't want just blah-solid borders and also didn't want to add more than two strips per body. Strange determination, but there you have it.


So I came up with this fancy 45 degree angle corner pieces on the outside border (the purple in the above photo; the green is the main border). I had a few problems with my calculations - or is that "lack of calculations"... here's a hint - do not eyeball the length of strips when you're attaching them with diagonal seams! After piecing and adding and adding some more, and then adding another strange contrasting fabric in the middle of the border because everything was too short, I finally got it right, or so I thought!

I put the quilt away for a while to recover from all my measuring head aches, then took it back out before Christmas to see if I couldn't baste this quilt to at least meet some of my 2010 goals (remember my sidebar?). Well, I had it all spread out on the batting, ready to sandwich, when I took a step back to admire my handiwork and saw this:


Good thing there are no small children Miss Manners around my place :) Corner on the right is how it's supposed to look. Corner on the left side, not so much. I could have cried! I guess I must have been working late at night once again, to make such a mistake. Argh! This quilt has been disastrous from the start (apart from picking the fabrics, that was super easy...) - all my fault and laziness of course, but frustrating nonetheless!

On some "good" day in the future, I will sit down and fix this corner, then baste the quilt and do some extra large meandering all over the quilt to be done with it with minimum effort! No more fanciness on this quilt!!!

So, do I get snickering and "silly you"s or does anyone out there have a load of sympathy they'd like to send my way????

Red & Aqua Finished

Whoops, don't think I showed you the finished Red & Aqua quilt yet!

Here it is, borders and binding on, labelled, finito!


Quilting in the ditch made the quares stand out nicely:


You can see the quilting on the back, as well:


I tried a new way of labelling: no hand-sewing involved at all, I just sewed it on as a loose label with the binding. I also put the washing instructions on the label as symbols now, so whoever gets the quilt won't forget how to wash it!


I keep thinking that the quilting is boring on this quilt, but the lack of dense quiltihng makes it really fluffy. I am considering quilting some motif in some of the patches, but haven't decided yet...

What do you think? Leave it as is or add some more quilting? I was thinking maybe the frog with the crown from the backing, quilted in 3 or 4 blocks on the front?

Progress On Red & Aqua And SITD Musings

Okay, so I decided on a suitable backing for the red and aqua quilt - happened to have something in darker shades of red and aqua, i.e. dark red and dark dark blue:

That was all basted together in a jiffy...


... and because I went for some very straight forward stitch-in-the-ditch quilting, that was done in no time, as well. Now the quilt is waiting for binding and it's complete.

I'm happy with the borders I chose - more subtle hues of the red and aqua, because the intensity of the quilt colours was getting to me.

That's also why I chose "in the ditch" quilting - whatever thread colour I would have chosen, it would have shown up big time on half the squares, and I didn't want to make this quilt any more busy than it was already.

Some Musings On Ditch-Stitching

I've come across some blogs by accomplished quilters in the past year, who seem to have a strong aversion to stitching in the ditch, poo-pooing that method at every chance they get. I've noticed that I started to shy away from SITD (maybe not an official abbreviation, but it is such a mouthful). Really, there's no reason to do that! I think SITD can have a great effect on a quilt, magically popping shapes out of the quilt without any apparent quilting on the front. Also, SITD is really quite tricky - the tiniest deviation from your line will show up big time when you either hit the bulky part of the seam or veer away from it - much different from a little off-line quilting during stippling for example, where everything is a bit off-line.

So, I've decided not to listen to the SITD bashers, use it when this quilting methods works well with the overall quilt and try my hardest to get better at my steady hand and keeping to the line!

Jumping On Bandwagon #1 (Red & Aqua)

I felt like making a quilt, a simple quilt. I happened to have blue and red fabric sitting next to each other on a shelf and thought, hmm, wasn't there a "red and aqua" craze going on in the quilt world in 2009? Might as well give that a try.



So I cut out 4.5" squares, played with the layout and pieced them together. It was definitely quick!


It looks pretty bright right now, so I'll see if I can tune it down a bit with a border. I love the rich colours though!