Foolish? Just Plain Crazy? ...or Amazing?

This past November, Cathy B joined our quilt classes and jumped right in with a table runner. She caught on quickly and completed several smaller projects. She fell in love with the log cabin class that some of my students were taking. She went shopping and picked up some lovely black and white fabrics. She decided that she would jump right in and make a king sized quilt for her own bed!!! Not only that, she decided to design it herself and incorporate two different blocks into the design. First she did the traditional log cabin layout:


Next she did some blocks with light squares in the center and some with dark:


She went home and drew out a layout with exactly what she had in mind and once the blocks were all completed (learning many lessons along the way and using her best friend...the stitch ripper) we laid the blocks out on the design wall and added triangles on the top and bottom:

Rather than taking the easy way and adding some plain borders, she persevered and made piano key borders from the leftover strips and added corner stones in the four corners:

Next came the huge job of pinning the quilt!

Cathy is tying this quilt with white and black narrow ribbon so that she can do it all herself.

Here she is busy putting in the ties into her quilt (btw, she's not angry here....just has a clip in her mouth lol):

The amazing thing is that Cathy has just had her 4th round of chemo for cancer! She has been going through treatments for 5 years. She is an amazing inspiration with her determination and upbeat attitude to life and we are all proud of her for this awesome accomplishment. She often wondered if she was foolish or just plain crazy to take on such a huge task, but we all agree that she is one amazing lady. Way to go Cathy....it took me 12 years to finish my bed quilt :-).

Robyn and Mike's Spinning Four patch

It's been awhile since I did a blog post! I haven't finished much in the last month, but did work on a lot of projects. I did finally finish a quilt for a wedding we attended on May 28th :-). That's what happens when I miss my deadline...no more pressure to get it done on time LOL. Actually, that was the same week we had two huge quilt shows in the area and I had several ladies sleeping over to attend the shows. So, I do have a good excuse.

I bought a lovely piece of fabric at Hyggeligt's sale bin awhile ago thinking it might be good for a Spinning Four Patch block. It did work, but it's not as dramatic as some of the other fabrics I've used. Here are a few of the blocks:



I tried to set the blocks with two different colours, but nothing seemed to work until I found this solid brown. I used wider sashings than usual and this helped to make the blocks float.


I had the perfect green in my stash for the border (it has little beige flecks in it) and had enough brown left for the binding:

I quilted leaves and funky flowers in the sashing and feathers in the border with a King Tut variegated thread:

The finished quilt: