Bethany and Mark's quilt - Pat Sloan workshop

Earlier this year I participated in an online workshop with Pat Sloan on the internet. We had to choose fabrics from our stash that we wanted to use up; basically 2 1/2" strips and 10" squares. We posted pictures on a flicker site and everyone helped with suggestions on what would work for the project. Pat gave suggestions for colours as we did not know which block we were going to do. A few days before the start, she posted the pattern and we got organized to start sewing on the weekend. I started on Friday morning around 11:00 a.m. and by Saturday afternoon had the whole top together. I decided to use red because we were invited to a wedding in April and red was the bride's favourite colour. Since the groom has a great sense of humour, I thought I could add some fun novelty fabrics. I thought I had taken photos of the completely finished quilt, but I can't find them anywhere on my computer. I will add them later if I find them!

Here are a few photos of the various fabrics that are in the quilt (those 'octopus' looking shapes are actually funky chickens :-):

Spider webs, music notes, blackbirds, names of flowers....

I found a great Jinny Beyer black with a small gold dot for the border and binding. Other than that, everything else was out of my stash:

All the blocks ready to sew together into a star:

I quilted it on my Bernina 830 using an all over meandering pattern. The backing fabric is a really cool tree stump fabric that I found in a clearance bin:

Here you can see the awesome variegated YLI thread that had all the colours in it, including a purple, which is in the basket and hearts fabric:

Hopefully, I'll find the pictures of the completed quilt and post them later.

Kit gets new pyjamas

On Wednesday, I received a really fun package in the mail from my sister in Victoria, BC. She has a number of American Girl dolls from the Pleasant Co. and I have Kit, who represents the 1930's. Years ago, I gave my sister a piece of 30's print and Thea made a pair of pyjamas for Kit. Here she is proudly modeling her brand new pj's. Hmmmm..wonder if my Mom is up to knitting a pair of little slippers for Kit? :-)

Thea also took home some of the fabric from the three sister's quilts that I made for all us sisters last summer when Thea visited. She made a little pillow of the leftovers to match my quilt. I still need to stuff it. She also tossed in a little needle book, a lovely blue fat quarter (I'll make a DJ block from this!) and the sweetest little set of sewing themed cookie cutters complete with black and gold sugar to decorate the sewing machine. How fun is that!! Here is a closeup of the cookie cutters and the tape measure ribbon used for the bow:

Here are the shapes in the set. The 'moon' shaped piece is the insert for the basket handle :-). I will have to make some of these for a quilt guild potluck. Too much fun.


My sister works at Creating Occasions in Victoria, BC where they sell these cookie cutters and does some of the displays there. She is just getting into making child and doll aprons. Her displays are so fun. This photo shows one of her Winnie the Pooh displays in the shop. Her American Doll, Kirsten is on the right and her old teddy bear she received from our grandparents in Holland when she was a child is on the left:

Don't you just want to join the tea party here?

A 12 year old UFO FINISHED!!

Yes, you read that correctly :-). I started this quilt 12 years ago. The blocks are my demo's for a sampler block of the month quilt that I started teaching 12 years ago to some new students. I had two classes going so made two of ten different star blocks. I chose a fabric with antique sewing items as my focus fabric. The intent was to make a quilt for my own double bed. However, this was in the days of still having teenagers home and the blocks were set aside. I took them along when DH went back to school to get his B Ed degree in Hamilton in 2004. I did get the black sashings sewn on at that time. However, we were not sure where we would be living after this and wanted to get a queen sized bed if we had room. So, the quilt was put away again. We finally did get moved last year and in the fall found the queen sized bed. In February, a friend and I got together to work on our bed quilts to spur each other on to finally complete our quilts! I did not want to quilt this large quilt myself on my domestic machine so I had it quilted by Tim Bobier of the Marsh Store. He did an awesome job of the quilting! Here is the quilt on the bed:

Closeups of some of the blocks and the lovely quilting (you can see the focus fabric in the center of the left block):

Unfortunately, the variegated thread colours don't show up on the photo since I have to resize the pictures for blogger. The thread has pastel colours matching the focus fabric perfectly. It is one of the King Tut threads.




I didn't have enough of the black border fabric to make the quilt large enough and that would have been very dark as well. A few years ago, I found the exact fabric in the cream background in a sale bin and bought a couple of metres. It worked well to make the border large enough:

In order to make the quilt large enough for the new queen sized bed, I added a scrappy border of 2 1/2" squares using all the fabrics in the blocks.

The backing of the quilt:


Now I can finally make the curtains for the room and decide on pictures for the walls!