Wentworth County Quiltworks

In some random Sunday Googling, I came across the following poems that I thought I'd share.  The author is unknown to both of them.   I can relate to this one oh so well!

My Wife, the Quilter 

Well, it's already Sunday.
I think I'm about to wilt.
I cursed, I raved, I ranted--
The MAID has learned to quilt!!

This one makes me think of the poem "The Plan of the Master Weaver."

I Think God is a Quilter

After sewing furiously for a week to get this sampler done, on Saturday I sewed the last stitches in my border. 

I bought the fabric for this quilt about a year ago:  I knew I wanted to make another sampler after my first one, and I knew I wanted it to be pink and brown.  What I didn't know was when I'd do it or what blocks I'd use.

I'd originally bought brown fabric for the border because I didn't originally plan on using brown in my blocks.  So, off to the fabric store I went on Saturday afternoon in search of dusty rose fabric to use for my backing.

With the brown in the blocks, when I laid it out I decided that using brown in the border too would have been too dark.  So my pink backing became pink border fabric and the brown became binding and backing along with the leftover pink fabric and scraps from the front.

I'm excited about how this quilt top turned out.  It has so many seams that I refuse to tackle quilting it by machine and I don't think I'd want to tackle quilting it by hand either.  I'll drop it off at my LQS this week.

Thanks to the three ladies who hosted the Summer Sampler Series quilt along:  Katie at Swim, Bike, Quilt!, Faith at Fresh Lemons Quilts and Lee at Freshly Pieced.  This quilt top has definitely been a skill-builder and your tutorials were clear, which was a big, big help!  (Learning to paper-piece opens up new possibilities, but I still think I'll use it as a last resort....)

I've linked up to Canoe Ridge Creations and SewHappyGeek's linky parties today!  I've also linked to Quiltstory's Fabric Tuesday.

Meet my best friend for today:  this is how I spent a good portion of my Civic Holiday Monday.

I'm in the home stretch with my kaleidoscope quilt; I'm doing the binding.  I plugged along and got the machine quilting done on Saturday.  I hoped to have a finish with this quilt yesterday - I just had to make the binding and attach it.  How hard could it be?

Theoretically, a walk in the park because it's not the first time I've done binding.  I cut the binding, made it, pressed it and attached it to the front yesterday.......and noticed, when I was done, that I hadn't moved it in far enough onto the quilt top and there were significant patches where the binding hadn't caught the quilt top at all.

Rats!  And my mitred corners were perfect, too!

So, I went to sleep last night thinking about the best way to fix it:  rip it out and start again by re-pinning it, or just cut it off and start from square one.  I decided to rip out a side at a time and re-pin it.  But, since I moved the binding in about a quarter of an inch, the binding is about an inch too long now.  That'll be easy enough to shorten since I didn't join the binding on the diagonal, but just butted the ends together.

That'll be tomorrow's job....

Anyway, although I lost a day, the binding is now pinned in the right spot and I'm ready to sew it on again.  Usually I hand sew it onto the back, but I'm gonna go for broke and machine it front and back this time, which'll be a first.

I mean, what's the worst that can happen?   Why, more frogging, of course (rip-it, rip-it)!

Making a Bible quilt

As a born-again Christian, one project that I want to do is a quilt of Bible blocks.  I've looked at books and looked at websites and the first question that came to my mind was"what colours should I use?"

Then a light went on:  why, colours that are mentioned in the Bible, ofcourse!

I’ve looked at two main passages in scripture that mention colour:  one in Exodus and one in Revelation.  A list of colours includes amber/gold/yellow, blue/indigo, brass/copper/rust, brown, crimson/scarlet, grey, green, purple/violet, red/vermilion, white and black.  I don't like black or bright red particularly, and it's hard to find grey fabric, so those colours are the least likely to be used.  I love the combinations of blue and yellow and purpleand yellow and green matches those colours nicely.  Depending on the block design, of course, red may have a place if it's used sparingly.  White is often used as a background print.

The fun part of planning is knowing that my plans will likely change more than once before something concrete is decided upon!  I enjoy the flexibility that quilting offers most of the time - just not when things I thought would look good together turn out to look really, really bad. 

I now have a design wall, so those sorts of problems should be able to be kept to a minimum.

Before I can buy the fabric I'll have to decide on exactly what blocks I want to make, how big the quilt will be and how I want to do the layout.

The resources I’ll use as I begin to pick my blocks include Quilted Devotions by Lisa Cogar and The Quilters Album of Patchwork Patterns by Jinny Beyer.

There are websites that have a number of blocks geared towards various levels of quilting experience as well. 

Please follow along with future posts as I journal the process involved in making this Bible block quilt from the planning stages through completion.

With a week to go until Elizabeth posts cutting instructions, I've finally found my fabric!  Not that it was too far lost, but it wasn't where I first thought it was!

I came across the Kaleidoscope block in my online travels quite a number of months ago and instantly fell in love with it.  I bought a few yards of fabric when Walmart was selling off all of theirs and I earmarked it specifically for a future kaleidoscope project, not knowing when that might be.

A couple of weeks ago, Lee at Freshly Pieced asked Elizabeth at Don't Call Me Betsy to host  WIP Wednesday and when I went to post my linky over there, my eyes lit up!  A kaleidoscope quilt along!  Starting at the end of June!  Yayy!  Now what did I do with that fabric...?

Here it is!

I'll mix and match from it and see what I come up with!  I've decided I'll do a baby quilt and that'll bump my yellow and purple Baby Nine Patch back to the end of the project line for now.  Here are my fabric requirements:

• 12 fat quarters of printed fabric
• 1 yd coordinating solid plus additional yardage for borders if desired
• 3/8 yd for binding
• 3 yds for backing

The green, yellow and purple in the bottom left corner of the above photo are the choices I'll use for my coordinating solid.  I'll see which one matches best when I start cutting my prints.  I'll likely not bother with borders for a change.  Or so I say now!  I'll do the binding out of the same fabric as my backing and therein lies the mystery.  Do I have three yards in my stash that will work for backing?  Or do I have an excuse to visit Fabricland?  Time will tell.....

The idea is to be done this quilt by the beginning of August, so it'll provide an opportunity for me to practice my machine quilting.  I'm hoping it'll go fairly smoothly because of all the straight lines.

A week to go and I'm ready to start my first ever online quilt along and I've finally posted about it, after some, uh, slight procrastination.  How about that?

Now, about this Farmer's Wife Sampler quilt along......(my resistance is wearing down!)