Dear Jane progress

 The London Friendship Quilt Guild started up a Dear Jane support club last week and I got a chance to work on some Dear Jane blocks again.  The first one was done awhile ago, but I finished the other 5 blocks since last Wednesday!  Prepping blocks ahead of time is the key.  I need to take some time to prepare some more blocks again.  We'll see if the momentum remains :-).

 

B 6 Wild Goose Chase

B 9 Tinker Toy

B 10 Jud's Trophy

B 11 Melissa's Cross

B 12 Starflower

C 11 Soldiers and Sailors Monument

 I'm working on filling in the missing blocks in order or rows now.  I almost have rows A & B complete.  I now have 73 blocks completed of the 169.

 

 

Placemats

Our local small guild committed to making two placemats a month for our local VON for meals on wheels recipients for Christmas.  I used up some cut offs from a quilt which I made for my niece in 2013.  There were a lot of cut offs so I made flying geese units and pinwheel blocks with them as leaders/enders for quite awhile.  I then assembled them into placemats using up leftover strips from the quilt as well as some solid green.  The backings were done with some fall fabrics.  I was happy to get those leftovers used for something useful.

 

 

An International Joint Project

 Ten years ago, I met my friend Els, from the Netherlands, in person after being internet friends via the Dear Jane quilt project for several years.  Our friendship has blossomed and we have been to visit one another quite a few times.  Els does beautiful applique and posted a picture of the quilt below on face book a couple years ago.  My daughter commented and tagged me on the post that she would like a quilt for her bed like that.  Not in a million years would that get finished!!  But, Els didn't have anyone in mind for this top and gifted it to Amanda!  Wow, what a great gift that was.  The next problem, however, was to make it big enough for their king sized bed.

The original quilt top was the size of a lap quilt or wallhanging.

Amanda and I went shopping and she found this lovely print at Hyggeligt in St. Mary's to use as border fabric and a focus for the colours to finish the quilt.

I removed the pink border and we started playing with ideas on how to enlarge the quilt.

Many ideas and diamonds later, this is the basic layout that emerged.  You will notice that there is no applique happening in those triangles between the pieced ones ☺!

Some closeups of the lovely quilting by Julie Cassidy

The backing shows the quilting quite nicely too

The finished quilt finally.

On the bed!  I used a wool batting for the quilt so it's nice and fluffy and warm in winter and cool in summer.

Wool Applique project

 On January 18, 2014, I joined a workshop given by the London Friendship Quilt Guild taught by Jill Buckley on wool applique and embroidery embellishment.  This was a really fun workshop.  I finished the top and all the embroidery and beading a long time ago, but every time I dug it out of my ufo bin of items to be quilted, I froze and couldn't decide how to quilt it.  A couple of weeks ago I had it in my hands again and made myself put the needle down and step on the pedal of my sewing machine and get it done!  It only took a few hours!   It really is true that you just need to start sewing and something will happen ☺!  So happy that it is finished finally.  I hope to hang it in my sewing room. 

(click on the photo to enlarge for a better view)

I quilted it on my Bernina 830 vintage machine

I found a few filler ideas in various machine quilting books.

The batik insert looked a little puffy when the dense quilting was finished in the black area so I hand quilted along some of the lines and added beads to the darker areas.

The finished wall hanging

The whole class with our projects (photo courtesy of Gail McHardy-Leitch).

 

Testing a handcrank machine

 I spent some time this summer testing out a lot of machines in the garage.  Here is a beauty of a Singer 28 machine which stitched like a dream.  I sewed up a comfort quilt block on it. 

the decals were in perfect shape

folded corner block

 

Curved Flying Geese Workshop

Another UFO finished!

This is how far I got at the workshop.  There were two more flying geese rows to attach.

 In November of 2014, I took a workshop at the London Friendship Quilt Guild taught by Susan Clark.  We were instructed to take some leftover quilt blocks along, some background fabric and scraps. The quilt blocks were leftover from this row quilt from 2011.   I took along some hand dyed fabrics that I bought at a quilt shop on Salt Spring Island while visiting my sister and some KF scraps.  This was a really fun workshop with a unique method of inserting these strips.  Of course, I didn't get to finishing it right away and then it became a daunting task.  During the pandemic, I joined the London Friendship Quilt Guild UFO group and got it finished.  Then I got to blogging it and never finished the blog post!  Summer hit and we were outside!  I just found this half started post in my drafts.  Better late than never ☺!

The finished wallhanging

I found a lovely Kaffe print in my stash for the backing

a great memory of my visit to Salt Spring Island and a lovely quilt workshop

 

Summer in the Garage

 I've been very negligent on my blog!  We have been working in the garage fixing up many sewing machines this summer.  The pandemic has given people time to rediscover sewing and many people have hauled sewing machines out of closets that have been sitting there for years so they could make their own face masks, etc.  We are now in the process of cleaning things up so that we can get both cars in the garage after Thanksgiving!

I did work on some UFO's and have finally had a little time to start sorting out my sewing room.  I'm hoping to blog about some finished items in the next few weeks.

This Kenmore sewing machine weighs a ton, but it purred once it was serviced.  A wonderful vintage machine that sewed through multiple layers of fabric and battings!  I enjoyed testing this one, but it is definitely not a portable ☺!

Here is the table where I test machines during the summer.  We had a great summer, but now it's time to clean it all up again.  Sewing machine repair and testing will now be moved to my sewing room again.