Charlene's Baby Quilt

I am getting to like the look of modern quilts more and more. Their simplicity leaves lots of space for fun quilting to show. In this case, once I saw the giraffe in the fabric in the centre square, I knew it needed to be quilted with the Animal Crackers pantograph. The lions and elephants and giraffes in the quilting design help keep the lonely giraffe in the centre company.

Christine's Garden Sampler

This is the third of Christine's quilts, a garden themed sampler. It looks rather Thimbleberry to me, but I'm not sure if that is the pattern source or not. With sampler quilts, it's always a hard choice to make between custom quilting every element in the quilt, or to do an all over design to tie it together. In this case, we decided on an over all large free hand swirl. The centre house, instead of receiving swirls, was outlined and stitched in the ditch, just to set it apart from the rest of the quilt.

Christine's Stacked Bricks

This is the second of Christine's quilts. I'm not sure what the official name of the pattern is, but I'm calling it Stacked Bricks. She's used more of that wonderful neutral colour palette in this one. I quilted it with a free hand loop de loop design.

Christine's Organic Pinwheels

This is the first of three quilts that  Christine brought me way back at the beginning of May. As usual, I'm behind on getting these documented. Each one of her quilts was unique so I think each one deserves its own post.
This quilt used some organic cottons from Birch Fabrics. I love the colour combination, a lovely gender neutral palette.
I quilted it using wavy cross hatching, called to the smallest square.

Sunday Stash and Stitching on Monday

I was having so  much fun, and was getting so much stitching done yesterday, that I didn't have time to write about it. I have four more stars for the centres done. 
There are four more outer pentagon rounds done. Here they are, paired up with the centres I think each will have, plus two more centres that need rings to go with them.

And earlier this week, I finished three more of the small rosettes. And here's everything pinned up to the design wall. I'm not sure if this is their final placement or not. I have to start making some decisions about outer star point colours for these rosettes, which means deciding where they are going to be in the final placement and that is getting hard to do.
None of these rosettes are finished, which means I can't subtract them from the stash used column yet.  And I haven't been working on anything else that I can subtract yet, either. However, I had 9 more yards of fabric come in this past week.

Used this week:                         0 yards
Used this year:                         48.9 yards
Added this week:                      9 yards
Added this year:                      75.75 yards
Net stash added:                       26.85 yards

I'm going to link up to my usual places, Judy's Fabric Report, and since it's Monday, Judy's Design Wall Monday, Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching and Angie's WIPs Be Gone.
I've made a decision about the outer star points on one of the rosettes, so I think I'll go get started on that now.

On my Needles, July 31, 2015

It has been ages since I did a post about knitting. Mostly because it's been ages since I did any knitting. However, while we were on vacation, I decided I needed something different to do, rather than continuing to work on La Passacaglia. I'd finished off the last of the large rosettes on it, and didn't really want to start the new small ones until I got it all up on the design wall and checked for colour balance. So, I'd packed some wool, and I'd packed some knitting needles, and decided to start on a project that I'd seen Judy make Pamuya, a lovely shawl. I've never made a shawl before, and never used a shawl, either. But I really liked that sampler stitch quality of Judy's finished project.  It sat in my Favourites on Ravelry ever since I saw it, while I dithered about whether to make it, or not. I finally purchased that pattern, and also one for a Cowl called That Nice Stitch, and took both with us on vacation. What finally made the decision was discovering that I hadn't brought the crochet hook I needed to do a provisional cast on for the cowl. I am really enjoying knitting this. There's enough  sameness about it to make the knitting easy, while the different stitches make it interesting to work on. I have two balls of this yarn, which should be plenty to get this done. When it gets done, well that's something else altogether. Although, there are some more long car rides coming up in the month of August, so it just might get done then. In the meantime, I'll enjoy the process. I'm linking up to Judy's On the Needles.

Back to Work

Not that quilting is work, but after three weeks vacation, it takes a while to figure out where I am, and what I'm doing. Yesterday was spent mostly doing phone calls and catch up things. After that, I came up to the studio to check in on which customer quilt was up next. Turns out, it's the last of a group of three quilts for a small guild in the St. Thomas area. They make quilts for chemotherapy patients, and they had so many tops waiting to be quilted, that they decided to hire three of them out.
This last one required the purchase and download of a new pantograph from Digitech Designs. The last part of yesterday afternoon was spent drawing it up. I love looking through that web site at all the different designs. It can be quite the time gobbler.
This is the design we decided on. It's called Nutz and Boltz.

It's going on this quilt with the fun tools fabrics. I have one pass of the design done, so this is a bit of a sneak peak.

The rest of yesterday afternoon was spent knitting while waiting for 2 1/2 hours to see my doctor. Our pharmacy didn't like the way one of my prescriptions was written, and they wanted clarification. To be fair to them, I wasn't taking the medication as ordered, so it did need to be reordered. However, the snag came when I called the doctors office and found out that he's going on vacation next week. That meant I had to go in to see him at the after hours clinic which started at 4:30. I arrived at 3:45, knowing how long the waits are, and didn't get out until 6:30. I got a lot of knitting done in that time period. I can't imagine sitting there for that length of time with nothing to do.
Today was a run to the bank and to the drug store day. Now, I'm free to work on this quilt. I'm hoping to keep going today until it is done. A customer is dropping off a rush quilt this evening, and I also want to get started on writing up the instructions for a free sampler that I'm doing for the guild's blog starting in September. So, lots to do and if I'm going to get it done,  I'd better get at it.

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