What We’re Working On

 Last week I mentioned that we have had quite a few quilts go out from our Prayers and Squares group and that it would take  a couple of weeks to show them all. I have the rest of them here for today. There is a very special heart quilt where the colours and the heart theme were requested by the recipient. Four of us worked on it and we were able to get all the piecing done in a single day. That same day saw us make the back and get it layered for quilting. There’s a very bright blue and yellow quilt, sent to a young teenager undergoing treatment for cancer. Her favourite colour is yellow. And then a very bright and happy quilt going to a man whose wife passed away after a lengthy illness. In addition to those finished quilts there are a couple that are in the making stage. I love making samplers and have one in the works. The last block was released today, so I may get the last block sewn up today. There is something so satisfying about sewing a single block. They are usually able to be finished in a single sitting and give a wonderful feeling of accomplishment. We have a lot of batting scraps sitting in a large tote at the church. I am considering doing this sampler as a quilt as you go in order to use some of them up. I also have plans for doing some Christmas baking on my to do list for today as well, so it’s kinda up in the air if I get to that sampler. But there’s always the time that the baking is in the oven.  Anyhow, that’s it for today.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 My cross stitching has been put on hold for the past week. I need a new pair of mittens and found
this book last year. I actually started a pair last year and never finished them. When I picked it back up this year I decided I didn’t like what I done, so I ripped it all out and started over. However, now that I have them this far, they are way too long for my hands, so I need to rip back a bit and finish them off differently than the pattern says. Maybe...... I’ll put them in time out while I decide what to do. I really don’t want to rip back, but I know I won’t wear them if they are too big.  Anyhow..... I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching and then probably bite the bullet as the saying goes and get to frogging. 

What we’re working on

 We’ve had quite a few quilts go out in the last month. I think I’ll do a couple of posts to record them here. A lovely quilt in earth tones,  and another lovely one in blues. And then there is a second one, also in blues for a special request. This one is also getting a border of the darker blue. And then there was this quilt, made out of large hexagons.

So far, our tally for quilts for the year given out is 49. And December isn’t finished yet. That’s quite an accomplishment for a group of 7-10 ladies. I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers

Slow Sunday Stitching

 I’ve been absent from the blogging world for a bit. The monitor screen on my computer died and it too a while to get the problem diagnosed and then even longer to get a solution implemented. But it’s all good now and I’m back in blogging mode again. 

Just before the computer problem, I finished my Swans for the winter series of At Home In The Woods. Here are all three side by side. 

I did finally decide to order a frame for it but it hasn’t arrived yet. 

I have since started on the spring series and the first one is a Jackrabbit. He’s very cute. I love the texture in his fur. I think it is that texture in all the animals that drew me to this series. Anyhow, it’s almost time ti leave for church, so I’ll post this and link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

Slow Sunday Stitching

I had hoped to finish up the Swans stitchery this past week, but that didn’t happen. There are 1 1/2 trees left to do and one small bit is the evergreen branches and it will be done. Hopefully this next week will do it and then it will be on to gridding the fabric for the next set of 3. Once I get this done I’ll un-hoop it, press it and get a really good picture. And then I can also measure it and see if I can order a frame for it online. There was a comment left last week about checking the thrift shops for frames, which is a great idea. I would likely have to modify any frame I found there to fit this piece though, and I don’t have the tools or expertise to do that, unfortunately.

I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching and maybe finish this up today.

Slow Sunday Stitching.

 The Swans stitchery is close, so close to being finished. The swans themselves actually are done. All that is left is the background stitching, finishing the greenery and pine cones at the top and some more snow flakes, also in the top half. I am soon going to need to measure this and figure out how to frame it. I do the mounting on foam core board and stretching myself, so all I need to do is get a frame. However, that is the hard part. There is a framing place here in town, but it is terribly expensive. I have found a Canadian order frames online place, but I’ve never used them before so I’m hesitant about how that will work. I’m half thinking of ordering a frame for one of my hymn pieces just to see how it works. If it turns out all right I’ll order one for this. None of that though is likely to happen before Christmas, so I’ve time to figure it out. 

I’m linking to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

What We’re Working On

 We have, as usual, many projects on the go at our Prayers and Squares group. Janet finished off a lovely 3 yards quilt. There is a finished Rick Rack Nines, a Bonnie Hunter design from one of her books. Sorry about the scrunched up picture. The quilt ended up bigger than I expected and I don’t have enough floor space to completely lay it out.

And because we’ve been making so many quilts, we’ve been busting through our stash at the church which meant going fabric shopping. There is a lovely quilt shop about an hour away in the little town of Minden called Remember Me Quilts and More. Marg and I made a trip down there for some much needed stash enhancement. We picked up some red fat quarters, just because it is impossible to have too many reds and we had very few. We picked up fabrics for a quilt for a specific person, in greens and creams as requested. And then we picked up a lot of backings and backgrounds. We are hoping to get working on some quilts to use up an overflowing bin of 2 1/2 inch strips that will need backgrounds and constant fabrics to calm to calm them down. Hopefully this will keep us going for most of the winter.

I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers

What we’re working on

 We’ve managed to get quite a few tops to the layering and ready for quilting stage. The Greens quilt is  done and has been delivered to its recipient. Such a fun and easy quilt to do.Then there is a Bricks and Stepping Stones quilt, from Bonnie Hunter’s free patterns tab on her blog. And a lovely quarter log cabin variation using a fun birds print in the large corners. And lastly, a finished music themed quilt which is going to a gentleman in a nursing home who loves music and the old hymns.
 In process is another Bonnie Hunter quilt called Rick Rack Nines from one of her books.I’ve ben making nine patches as leader/enders for quite a while. I have enough now to make a small version of her design. It’s almost half finished. I think it will finish somewhere around the 50x70 inches range, perfect for a lap quilt. Some of the fabrics in it go back to my very early days of quilting 20 to 25 years ago or more. It’s fun to re-visit them.

I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 My plan of last week, to alternate stitching on the swans and the greenery is working. I’ve gotten a lot done and both areas are progressing. The dark green is hard to see in the photo.Another couple of weeks should finish this one. Then I can start the spring series. I already have all the supplies I need for it. I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 The Swans both have their necks and heads and both have their faces. Which makes for great progress on them this past week. I also finished the cabin, except for filling in the window panes. There is a lot of foliage to be done at the top so I think I’m going to alternate - do a thread length on the swans and then a thread length on the foliage. That way neither seems overwhelming towards the end of the piece.

I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching and then find something to watch/listen to while I do more stitching.

What we’re working on

I only have one project to show today. There are others on the go, but I didn’t get pictures last week. This one is one I started a couple of weeks ago and brought home to work on.  The request is for a gentleman who loves music and loved to sing the old hymns at church. So we ordered some music themed fabric for this one and then found a panel with some of the words to hymns that worked perfectly for the centres of these blocks. It’s going to be a bit bigger than our usual lap quilts, but we had to work with the block size for those hymn squares. It will have a blue border around the outside to finish it off. I hope to get it done tomorrow. I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers

Slow Sunday Stitching

 The Swans are growing. One of them almost has the complete body outlined. It’s a lot of fun watching these animals come to life with each stitch added. I would have had all the outlining done last night, except that I discovered an error that involved some ripping. And of course once that happened, the wind went right of my proverbial sails and I quit for the evening. I’m thankful that I do pre-gridding for these stitcheries. That’s what caught the error.  So today I’ll pick up where I left off and keep going. 

I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

What we’re working on.

 No surprise to say we have more quilts on the go at our Prayers and Squares group. We had one finish, this lovely aqua and pink stacked coins quilt. It is Beverly’s first ever quilt finish so we all gave her a big “woohoo”! Susan has been making the same quilt, except in greens. It has a recipient in mind already who requested outdoorsy happy greens.  We also finished a quilt that is going to be gifted to our interim Pastor. He stepped in and has been preaching weekly since Easter, in spite of also having a full time job as a hospital chaplain. We are ever so grateful to him and his family. He loves music, singing and playing the guitar. This pattern was perfect for him.  Our regular Pastor had a fairly severe car accident back in March and has been off recovering. He’s due back the week after Thanksgiving. 

Here at home I’ve been working on some paper pieced blocks. It is a block of the month put out by Carol Doak on her facebook group page.Unfortunately, the block in the top right is one inch too small. I goofed when I printed it. I’m not sure if I’m going to try and fudge it to fit or if I will make a new one.  I’m not 100 percent happy with the colours in it so I will likely do another one. I’m also working on using up some 2 inch scrap strips and squares and am in the process of making Bonnie Hunter’s Rick Rack Nines pattern. I don’t have a picture of them. They are currently in a bag waiting to go to P&S tomorrow to choose a setting fabric. And that’s all that’s new at the moment.

I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 I’ve gotten a good start on the Swans in my Cottage Garden series of A Year in the Woods. My seasons are kinda off though. I just realized that perhaps I should have started with the autumn ones.... oh well. But then again, come winter I’ll be working on spring and summer themed designs, so maybe that’s a good thing. It will be enough to see winter outside let alone inside too. Living in the woods in the lovely Muskoka area of Ontario, it seems an appropriate themed stitchery to work on. The colours are glorious right now, even though it is a stormy rainy Sunday. But the roads are lined with the most glorious colours of leaves. I am hoping that there will be a nice day in the coming week where we can go for a drive down highway 60 into Algonquin Park and drink in the beauty. But in the meantime, I will work on my cross stitch.

I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

Slow Sunday Stitching

 I’m a little late today posting this because I really wanted to have a finished Fox section. And it is finished so I can now move on to gridding for the Swans. That’s a big woohoo and yippee for me!! I’ll keep this short and sweet and link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching and then get right into that gridding process.

What we’re working on

 We have 3 more quilt tops finished for our prayers and squares group. We had a bunch of fabric squares with birds on them donated to our group which got made up into large quarter log cabins. We have a bin of 3 1/2 inch strips full of all different colours and themes so I went digging for tans and golds and browns and greens and greys to make a controlled scrappy quilt. This one was done using Bonnie Hunter’s Bricks and Stepping Stones pattern. We are divided in opinion regarding if it needs borders or not. There are enough strips left in this bin to do quite a few more of this pattern if we wish. And the last one is the autumn scene panels which turned out quite wonderfully using fabrics our group already had in our group stash. This one already has a recipient in mind. The quilting is finished and the binding will hopefully get finished this week. If I remember before next week, I’ll get a photo of our wonderful sewing area in the church fellowship hall.

I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers and then I have to get back to the apples we picked last Saturday. There is apple butter in the line up, as well as dehydrated apples. The dehydrator has been going pretty much every day to keep up with all these apples. 

Slow Sunday Stitching

 Mr Fox this past week got his full body and 2/3rds of his tail. I should be able this week to make good time and get his tail finished and then the last couple of trees. Who knows, I might even get a start on doing the grids for the swans section. I discovered that I’m running low on the white thread that I will need to finish the swans, so I decided to go ahead and order that, plus the linen for the next 3 critters to be stitched. And then since I was on a roll, I decided to go through my  threads and see what I had and what needed to be ordered and get them at the same time. Sometimes I can be organized and efficient, especially when it comes to ordering fabrics and threads of any kind. (grin) Now housework and cooking and cleaning and all that nasty takes away from quilting and stitching stuff... there I’m not so organized. (also grin).

Anyhow, it’s a lovely day here in Muskoka. The trees are turning colour, about 20% now. Which means it’s much too nice of a day to be indoors. I’m going to link to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching and then head out onto the deck with my stitching.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 I’m a day late posting my weekly slow stitching report. I have a good reason for it, though. I was digging around looking for an old abandoned project from 2016. It’s a McKenna Ryan design called Aurora Ridge. Back in 2016 I bought the patterns and the fabric kits to make the blocks and started on making them right away. But then as often happens, other things interceded and the project got packed way and, if not forgotten, then certainly out of sight and out of mind. Fast forward to this year and it has pushed its way back into my consciousness, mostly because of the similarity between the subject matter of the quilt and the surroundings we live in here in Muskoka. The thing that has been holding me back on it is how to procede with finishing it without a long arm quilting machine. There is no way I could afford to have someone else do it, not could I afford to rent a machine to do it. The only other options were to either leave it unfinished or to figure out how to finish it here. Then the thought arrived that I could finish it as a quilt as you go on my domestic machine. I’ve been playing around a little bit with free motion on it and I think I have figured out what to do. Here’s hoping it works. In the meantime, I’ve been world building and playing with the fabrics and the blocks. I’d forgotten how much I enjoy these. There is one with an Aurora Borealis above a moose family. Then there is a cabin in the woods in front of a waterfall. I’ve just started putting this one together, doing the layers on a teflon pressing sheet. The fabrics that came with these patterns are just so beautiful. 

Anyhow, all that to say that I got distracted from writing a post yesterday. I have made great progress on my slow stitching of the Fox. His body is done and I’ve started the fill in for his tail. Another week or two of working on this in the evenings should do it. 

I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

What We’re Working On

 We’ve got more quilts coming down the line as we continue to meet weekly for Prayers and Squares. One went out this week to a recipient and another 2 are now finished tops. This one made from three panel squares is the one that was prayed over on Sunday and will be going to its new home this week. There are 3 animal squares left from the original panel, so they are going into the centre of 3 more quilts. One of them is now a finished top. And then we have a fun pink and aqua top that is also finished.Both this pink and aqua top and the animal panel top need layering. That will likely happen this week. 

 Here at home, I’ve dug into the bin of 3 1/2 inch strips for bricks and then dug up some odds and ends of white muslins and black prints to make four patches for a Bonnie Hunter pattern called Bricks and Stepping Stones. I don’t have photos for that one yet. By this time next week it should be at the stage for photos. And lastly, we are working on a top using these beautiful pictures in this panel. I’ll get a progress photo tomorrow on where that quilt top is at. For all of these quilts that use panels for the central theme, the Electric Quilt software is an invaluable tool for doing the designing. It makes layout and colour selections and which blocks work and which don’t so easy to figure out.

I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers

Slow Sunday Stitching

 Mr. Fox is starting to show his personality as this stitchery continues to progress. According to my calculations, he is 50% finished. There are 130 squares in the grid and I’ve counted almost 65 squares as finished. I’m thinking that, if I want to start the next set of 3 critters after I finish this, I’ll need to order the supplies when I start the swans. If all goes as quickly as it has so far, that should be in the next 2 or 3 weeks. 

I’ll link up now to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

On a totally different topic, we had a visitor to our front yard this morning. I was only able to get a picture of its tail end as it headed off into the trees after walking across our front yard.

This is the first time in my life I can ever say that I had a black bear in our front yard. Quite strange and surreal.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 I’ve spent lots of time this past week on my Fox for the A Year in the Woods series. I love his face and the emerging texture in his body. I think it is these details that pulled me into these stitcheries. And so far it looks as though the elements were designed to fit beside each other as it comes together. I’ll get a bit further and then perhaps next week take a picture of the fox and reindeer together. In the meantime, I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

What We’re working on

 We had another quilt go out this week, this time to a lady in hospital with worsening Multiple Sclerosis. She requested something “happy, perhaps something with flowers and pinks and purples”. Well, we just happened to have something that fit that exact description. Pat put this one together. I’ve been working on a couple of outdoorsy type quilts. One of them is almost done and will be gifted in the next couple of weeks.It needs a plain border around the outside to finish it and then binding. The other doesn’t have a recipient yet, but that can change very quickly. It is getting more of the square in square blocks around the last two edges.

And then I think it is going to get a couple of migrating geese borders to the top and bottom, plus some spacer borders to bring it up to a good size. These are fun to do. We recently purchased some more panels so be prepared to see some of those here once we start working on them.

I’ll link up to my usual Mid Week Makers