Lovers Knot

 

This is Gail’s Lovers Knot quilt and it’s 100” x 112”!   I love the colors she picked as the soft green and pink are very complimentary.  I chose to quilt it with the Whirlygig panto since the green fabric has a subtle leaf print.  The batting is Dream Blend and the thread a medium green So Fine thread. It looked so good nestled in with the green in my yard!

Thank you so much for all the wonderful comments and emails about our new quilting pattern.   The first person who bought our pattern off our Etsy site was Gail and she said will be sending it to me to quilt!  :)

Alternate Routes….Our First Pattern!

I’m thrilled to be able to share my latest quilting venture which is a collaboration with my amazing friend Lori.   Alternate Routes is our first original quilt pattern and is now on sale in PDF form in our new ETSY shop here.  Alternate Routes  was a project we designed for our respective guilds and we knew that we needed to take this one step further.   So we spent the last month polishing and rewriting the pattern until we were satisfied with the final results.   This is an intermediate level pattern and hope that those who try it find our instructions to be clear and precise.   The best part about this pattern is that we include 20 different layout options but there are many more layouts to discover. 

It took us awhile to come up with a name for our new design business and when Lori suggested Highway 10 Designs I knew we had a winner.  You see Highway 10 is the one and only road I travel along (for 575km) when I go to visit Lori in Dauphin, it’s what connects us.  This also gave us focus for coming up with a name for our pattern and once we had the travel theme in our head Lori again came up with the perfect pattern name Alternate Routes, as this pattern offers so many layout options.  I just love it when things fall in place so well.

Here is Lori’s quilt and she used more modern fabrics and picked an off centered layout. You can see more of her pictures on her blog here.

Since the focus of the pattern is the piecing we both used panto designs for our quilting.   I used Whirlygig as it complimented the print in the batik fabrics.

I found a new location for taking pictures at the new cook shack at the local campground.  I was also trying to get a good picture on Highway 10 but that proved to me more difficult than I first thought.

And here is the one we chose for the cover.

A big thank  you goes out to Desley and Eileen for proof reading our pattern, we really appreciated the time you both spent helping us.   I think this is a start into a new venture for Lori and I as we are already talking about the next pattern!  :)

Quilts Made Modern

This is Yvonne’s quilt and it is made from a pattern in the book Quilts Made Modern by Weeks Ringle and Bill Kerr.   I love the quilts in their books as they do a wonderful job at creating a transparency look with the fabric choices.    Yvonne did a great job at picking her fabrics for this quilt, I just love how it looks.   We decided to use the Raindrops panto as the colors in the quilt shout water and sky.

I’m living in a bit of a mess right now as we are having our skylights taken out and then redoing our kitchen in July.  I’m very excited but there are so many decisions that need to be made!  I don’t have a lot of time to spent on the computer so my blog posts will be a less frequent than usual but I’ll post when I can!  Lori and I are still working on our special project that we will be sharing soon but our Type A personalities are what’s slowing us down. We want it to be perfect!

Just a Tease…

I’ve been working on a secret project this week and here is a sneak peek.  I’ll be able to share all the great news next week!  I’ve had a few people say it’s not like me to go so long without blogging which is true but this project involved more work than Lori and I expected.  So many details to work out before the big reveal.  I can hardly wait to share!!!

Grandma’s Stars Quilt Top

I was able to finish all my Grandma’s Star blocks at our guilds UFO day on Saturday and even made one extra as I change my layout plan when I got home.  My original plan was for a rectangular layout but that was too narrow so I decided to go with a square layout and add borders.    I used templates by Matilda’s Own to make these blocks and  you can only get them in Australia.   I think I’ll quilt this one in the summer and do some custom quilting on it for fun as I do not have anyone to give this too yet.

Spinwheels Quilt

 

This is Eileen’s quilt and the pattern is called Spinwheels from Tricia Cribbs book Turning Ten.    She use bright fabrics from her stash and a very cute white on white teddy bear print for the background.   The backing is Jade Cuddle, the batting is Dream Puff and the pantograph is called Popcorn.  This combination makes for a very soft cuddly quilt!

Grandma’s Star Block Update

I’ve been working on my Grandma’s Star blocks and have 7 complete so far. I’m really enjoying these blocks and the challenge of the ‘Y’ seams.  I have 6 more cut out and ready to piece and that will be my project at our guilds UFO day this Saturday.   I think I’ll make a baby quilt out of these blocks and alternates with rows of 3 blocks and 2 blocks and add a triangle fillers between the blocks.

Bento Box Quilt

 

This is Melba’s Bento Box quilt and she used animal print fabrics with a black background.  Now I’m not usually drawn to animal prints as I find them busy but pieced in this pattern they look really good.  I like that each print is surrounded by the black fabric and not touching the other prints.  Melba brought wool batting and we decided on Fascination for a simple panto design.  I found a tutorial at the Quilts of Love blog on how to make this block, Margaret did a great job on this tutorial and you can check it out here.

Juried Art Show Quilt

 

This winter our guild decided to make an art quilt to enter into the Northern Juried Art Show which was being held in Churchill, MB last week.  It didn’t win any prizes but that’s okay as it was fun to make.  We came up with the idea of “Eyes” as our theme and put them into the context of the feeling your being watched as you walk to the outhouse in the dark.   I’m not sure how many of you can relate to this idea but I sure can.  My parents had a cottage with no running water when I was young so trips to the outhouse, or ‘Biffy’ as we called it, were frequent and you never knew what was out there in the dark watching you!   So we called this quilt “ I Think I Can Wait ‘til Morning”.

Our guild members made scary animal eyes on a piece of Kona Black fabric that we handed out and they could use whatever technique they wanted to create their eyes.  We got back a wonderful range of eyes and then created a scene that included the outhouse in the background and two scary trees in the foreground.

I was asked to quilt it and as you can see by the pictures this was done back in March when the snow and ice where still around… and you thought there won’t be anymore ice pictures.  ;) 

I pebbled a path to the outhouse, added lots of extra quilted branches, added a spider web and spider and tall grasses along the bottom for more animals to hide in.

Mystic Creek

 
On the May long weekend we like to go watch the Sucker fish run in the creeks and this year we went to Mystic Creek.  I took this opportunity to bring my camera along and play with my shutter speed to play with the different effects you can capture with moving water.

It was harder to get clear pictures of the fish as they dart around so I took video instead. Here are two of the videos.

Hopscotch Quilt

This is Sheri’s Hopscotch quilt that she made for her man because he had started asking “ When are you going to make ME a quilt”.  He is very supportive of her quilting passion and I love hearing stories about guys asking for quilts!  Now I like to tease Sheri about her Hopscotch addiction and she said after making this one, which is 85” x112”, it will definitely be her last one as she has made many quilts with this pattern.

She asked for Dragonfly Pond for the panto as there are dragonflies on the fabric prints in one of the main fabrics.  The top is made with batiks and the backing was a soft beige flannel.  Quilters Dream Blend for the batting, So Fine Grey thread on top and Bottom Line beige on the backing.

Metal Quilt Blocks

I’m back from a great trip down to Dauphin to visit my friend Lori.  When I arrived I was greeted to the aroma of the 4 cakes just out of the oven, she is a great cook so this was a big treat for me as I hate cooking!  We took a trip down to Kickass Country Store and bought fabrics to finish 4 quilting projects.  We also went to an amazing greenhouse, one of the best I’ve ever seen, so picked up a few plants.  This two places will be on my ‘must do’ list when I go to visit next spring.  Also Lori hosted a small get together one evening with some of her local guild members so it was nice to meet her new quilting friends.   Believe it or not I didn’t take any pictures but Lori did so you can check out her blog post here.

Now to these Metal barn blocks, this is what I bought Lori for her birthday and I bought two for myself!   The company that makes them is called Classic Metal Company and they have a great selection of blocks to chose from.  When I first went to place my order on their website they didn’t take orders out of the United States. I was really disappointed but then just emailed the company and they were happy to mail them too me, they just didn’t have their website set up for out of country orders. That was a big relief so it’s good to ask if you encounter this problem.  I bought the Bear Paw and Mariners Compass in green to match my shack door.  I was going to put both on the outside of my shack but I really liked how the Compass looked in my sewing area in the house so that’s where it’s going to stay.