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

Slow Sunday Stitching

 Last week, after I finished gridding the area of my linen for The Fox, I got straight away into stitching the fox and his surroundings. The little cabin is almost done and the Fox itself is started. I love the texture in his tail and am looking forward to starting that section. It’s a damp and rainy weekend, so after I post this to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching, I’m going to find something to watch/listen to and then do a lot more stitching.

What we’re working on

 We have more quilts finished and going out to people who need them from our Prayers and Squares group. The greatest demand seems to be for quilts for men. Somehow, each time we get one finished it goes right out. We can’t seem to keep up with them. So for the moment, the focus is on getting more men’s quilts made. This one was finished and out within a week after being finished. We have a panel with six sections in it, each showing an animal that calls the Muskoka region home, so I’ve designed up some quilts that will use them and go together fairly quickly. This is one, which will be done quilt as you go style, which is why the borders are still separate. The side border has these wolves framed with a tree bark like fabric.The same borders repeat on the other side of the panel, but I don’t have the space to lay them out. And then there will be three quilts that will have the animal panel as the centre and then borders going around them to make them bigger. This one is just started.It will have the blocks with the wolves in them as the next border and then perhaps some stars.

This very pretty floral quilt may be going out this week as well, based on a three yard quilt pattern. It will be  a choice between this one and another also pink and floral.  

We remain a very busy group. I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers

Slow Sunday Stitching

 Except that it isn’t Sunday, but Monday when I’m writing this. According to Kathy’s link party, I have 2 more hours in which I can link up, so it isn’t a total waste. I got so involved yesterday in my actual stitching that I didn’t get a moment to write about it. It is very exciting. The reindeer is done and on top of that I was on a roll, so I get the gridding done for the next section, which is the fox. And past that, I even got the flosses sorted and organized for what I need for the fox. I can get started on the stitching for the Fox tonight. I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching. 

The other exciting thing this past week was being able to visit with my friend Gail, aka The Cozy Quilter. We haven’t seen each other in person in over 3 years, so that was a great day. FaceTime visits are great, but they can’t compete with in person. They were visiting a cottage up here for a week so we spent the afternoon together at that cottage. We were able to sit out on the dock for a while and just chat. And of course we had to do a photo op with their grand puppy.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 A finish is in sight. Perhaps this week will see the reindeer stitchery finished. All that is left is the grass and snow under the reindeer and some more scattered snowflakes. So close...... Then I can start the gridding for the next creature that will live beside the reindeer. So many things to enjoy about these patterns... the cute little log cabin, the wonderful texture in the creature’s fur, the beautiful swooping antlers..... 

I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching and then perhaps put on the Olympics and do some more stitching.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 My reindeer now has partial back legs. And the log cabin in the background has walls and a partial roof. This is so much fun to stitch, but I think I’ve said that before. Depending on how much stitching time I get, this could be done in the next couple of weeks. Certainly before the end of August. And then I can start on the one that goes beside this one on the fabric, which is The Fox and then beside that will be The Swans. The next set of three after those will go on a different linen that has yet to be determined. But that’s a good while away yet.

In the meantime, I will continue with the reindeer and link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

Slow Sunday Stitching

 My reindeer now is on its way to having two full sets of legs, as most self respecting reindeers would agree is absolutely necessary. Maybe by next week the legs will be done, or at least the front hind leg. 

I still love it and enjoy working on it, which is a good thing. I’d hate to lose interest and end up having a cross stitch UFO pile start to add up. It’s bad enough having quilters attention deficit disorder without adding cross stitching to it.

Nothing much else to say at the moment, so I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching and call this post done.

Slow Sunday Stitching

 My Reindeer is growing. He sprouted a full set of front legs this past week and his mid section is coming along nicely. 

I suspect there is a counting error in his mid section on the right hand side somewhere, but rather than rip it out I am going to try stitching over the mistakes with the correct colour. I think the correct one will be darker so I’m hoping in the overall scheme of things that the mistake won’t show. I’ll call it a design and shading choice if it does. I’ll know one way or the other by this time next week. 

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

What We’re Working On

 Last week at Prayers and Squares we finished a couple of quilts and their backings and got them layered. I brought them home and they are now both quilted too. I haven’t got pictures of them quilted. They both still need bindings applied. That task will be done by another of the ladies. Both of the finishes are of the outdoor theme variety. The one with the birds already has a recipient in mind. The log cabin /woodland animals might end up as a fundraiser. We’ll have to decide about that later.

I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers

Slow Sunday Stitching

 This reindeer is such a pleasure to stitch. I’m so glad I gave in to the impulse and ordered the patterns and thread and fabrics. It’s going fairly quickly too, for a slow project that is. I like being able to see progress from one week to the next. And the new magnifying glasses are helping, both with seeing the stitches and with seeing the chart, a double bonus. I also have the chart available in a knitting app on my iPad where I can zoom in on the chart and see it better. Since it’s a paper chart rather than a download, I had to scan it into my computer, but that was an easy task. And it also acts as a backup should the unthinkable happen and I lose the chart. I’m thinking maybe I might start on the tree, just to have a bit of a break from all the browns. It will be easier counting too for a bit.

I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching and then I’ll decide what to stitch next.

What We’re Working On

 It’s been a while since I did an update post for our Prayers and Squares group. We hadn’t had any finishes and I hadn’t managed to get any photos. But that has changed a bit. We are into our fund raising season and we have 2 quilts that are finished and have raffle tickets on them. First is a Toronto Maple Leafs quilt. And second is a scrappy triangle sampler quilt. 

Janet finished off the hexagon stars. The hexagons were donated to us. There were enough to do about 2/3 of the quilt and then we raided our stashes to find fabrics that complemented those that we already had. And lastly there is a log cabin quilt with some woodland animals in it. This is the fourth quilt that this fabric has shown up in. This one finishes that particular fabric.

I’ll link up to Mid Week Makers

Slow Sunday Stitching

 I’m not sure how much stitching I’ll get done today. We are puppy sitting for the weekend.

She is a very cute and very active 8 month old cocker spaniel poodle mix, which means stitching quietly probably won’t happen unless she is sleeping, something she doesn’t seem to do a lot of. She loves cuddles and lap surfing and she wants to say hello to everyone. But I have made good progress on my reindeer up until this point this week. And I did order the increased magnification glasses which helps considerably when working on this project. I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching

Slow Sunday Stitching.

 I’m starting to be able to see the smaller thread count easier so the stitching on my Reindeer is going a bit easier. I think the bigger magnification glasses would help, so I am going to order some. In the meantime, the reindeer’s antlers and head are done and I’ve started on his neck. I haven’t much else to say today. It’s been so wet and stormy lately that there hasn’t been opportunities to do anything other than stay indoors and sew and stitch.  I’ll link up to Kathy’s Slow Sunday Stitching and then do some more stitching.