When will I ever learn???

Never!!!

One more time: I should not cook while quilting...

15 min of scraping this pot, phew...

A First For Me

Mistakes happen. After years of quilting, the mistakes seem to be getting sillier and sillier. Like when you're preparing 27 feeting of binding and don't check that you're attaching a totally new strip to the end of the binding strip. This happened to me with the *first two* strips I sewed together. Lovely loop I created here. Totally useless, unfortunately.

Out comes the seam ripper ;)

Tic Tac Toe

A couple of boys I know were visiting here recently. They spent some time playing TicTacToe on paper, and I remembered how tedious it is to always redraw the lines for the game. Then I saw a tutorial for take along games via Sew Mama Sew and thought: Great idea for a christmas gift!

I adapted the idea to my own liking, of course, since these boys are not into checkers (as far as I know).

 I started with 2 pieces of background fabric (about 8" square). Then machine-appliqued white stripes (about 7"x0.5") in the TicTacToe pattern onto one piece. Placed the 2 pieces face to face, sewed around them, turned them inside out and fortified the edge with a seam (about 1/8" from the edge). I "quilted" (there's no batting inside, but hey) around the white stripes (about 1/4" from the stripes) to keep the 2 layers of background fabric together.

The game pieces are simple flanelette circles, sewn together by machine (the edges are raw, but I zigzagged near the edge to minimize fraying). I used a thread spool to trace the circles.

Rather than making extra draw-string bags for the game pieces and the game-board, I decided to minimize parts (that could be lost) and made the gameboard itself into the game "box".

All the game pieces are stacked in the middle, then the board is folded up along the natural fold lines of the white stripes.

Out of a 2" strip, I made a tube with a loop at one end and attached this tube (ironed flat) with a button to the back of the game board. I matched the tube length to fit once around the folded up game board and voila, the whole game becomes a neat package that can be chucked into a backpack to go to the pool or for a car journey etc.

I've been told the gift was a hit on Christmas morning and the boys tried it out right away. That's the best kind of "thanks" once could wish for!

Similar to visiting friends and finding a gifted quilt being well-used, with some signs of wear and tear, right?

City Art

As seen in Hannover, Germany, on 11.3.2012

Variations of these, as well as other things (including a big clock at a central meeting place) covered in knitted creations can be seen all over time. Is it some kind of movement I'm not aware of? Like Acts of Random Knitting?

Try Leslie's Fudge Balls!

Did any of you see Leslie's recipe for Fudge Balls the other day? I copied it down and finally had time to make them - they turned out perfectly! I didn't believe they'd stay round while baking, but they did! Awesome! I made sure they turned out okay by tasting 3, ehm, 5 balls. And one more before bed, in case they changed since coming out of the oven. Oh, and a couple this morning, cause you never know...


Make these, they're awesome!

Oh, and this is a quilting blog, so I'll include a quilt, too :) I was actually super productive on Saturday, doing something with quilts that have been waiting forever to be... well, made into quilts. I'll just show you one today, since you're probably already drooling allover your keyboard from the Fudge Balls.

When I made the brown Chicks and Elephants quilt,
I had planned to make a copy with off-white sashing. I ended up not doing that but had some pieces cut, which I turned into this on Saturday:

I had thought about adding another white border, but was happy with the current look, and the size is my usual baby quilt size (30"x40").

Oh, gotta go, I see some fudge balls in front of me :)

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????

Poppies

I saw this beautiful fabric on the The Fabric Shopper recently, called Poppy by Laura Gunn for Michael Miller - my mother loves Poppies, so I decided to buy some of it and make her a quilt.

I saw the post on Wednesday, contacted Fabric Flair that same day to figure out a custom order - Christie was great and stuffed 8 yards of fabric into a regular envelope to Canada for me, yay for saving on shipping! On Thursday, I paid the order and it went out Friday - the next Wednesday it was in my mailbox, wohoo! I wish all my online orders would go that smoothly!

I don't know what pattern to use yet, but the fabric is here and there'll be some focal piece with the poppy print on it as I don't want to chop that all up ;) I also don't remember if I ever gave my mother this blog address, so hopefully she doesn't read about it now :)


Whatever it'll be, it's going to be fantastic (can you tell I'm excited about this fabric??)! And I even have Shout colour catchers now, so no more surprises in the wash, though I doubt that these fabrics would run, I love Michael Miller fabrics...

Holy cow, I'm giddy - I've been like this all day. That giddiness also made me spent a fortune on a fused-glass bowl, but it was just so so beautiful.... here's a photo of it:


Sometimes a gal just has to treat herself, and the fabric is technically for my mother :)

Happy Halloween!

We have a great farmers market in town - it's held every Saturday, and yesterday I saw the most amazing and cute cup cakes with eyes! I bought one of each kind with eyes - they're adorable!

So let me introduce you to the Mummy:


The Blue Monster:

And the Spider:

Look at his cool legs!

I can't decide which one's my favourite, the mummy (so cute behind all its bandages) or the monster :) I saw the monster first and thought it was the grouchy garbage can dude from Sesame Street - that shows how much I'm into halloween, right??? *Grins*

On the way home from the market, I was thinking I might just keep the cup cakes and look at them forever (so cute!), but I figured the cup cakes might grow mold. Then I thought I could just keep the tops with the decorations and let them get hard for eternal gazing at the cuteness - the cup cakes themselves would be quite happy to reside in my stomach.

However, I made that plan without considering the Blue Monster!

Look, he ate both his buddies within minutes of me taking the group photo! Gasp! I guess he didn't like liquorice - he left the spider legs behind...

So no display of cute monsters in the next few months...

Now, before I go and wipe some icing off my chin (how did that get there, anyway????), I need to announce that Prince Edward Island, Canada, yes the far north (*smile*) has had its first snow of the winter yesterday! I took pictures to prove it!

See those white specks against the blue house??? Yep, that's snow, take my word for it! *So* exciting!


It turned into a gentle hail (does that exist??? It looked like hail but it drifted instead of falling and hitting things at high speed) not 5 min later (and then sunshine 10 min after that), but I'm pretty pumped about winter right now anyway.


Yeah, I know - that'll last just until the 2nd good snow storm and the 3rd morning of scraping my car...

... but hey, the days are getting pretty cozy starting around 5pm! Candle light just warms the heart, doesn't it?