Fabric Shopping

I did manage to do a bit of fabric shopping on our trip and stopped at three quilts shops on our drive home from Minneapolis.  (We flew from Minneapolis to Orlando).  The first one was Gruber's Quilt Shop in St. Cloud, I had been here before and it is one of my favorite shops. Then we stopped in Mayville, North Dakota and shopped at Sew Batik and Faye's Henhouse.  The picture above shows all my fabric purchases.

 For local guild members that are doing the Double Trouble Mystery Quilt that I am teaching, here is what I have picked for my two fabrics.

I found one quilt shop when we were in Florida and only bought fabrics to make Daniel pajama shorts.  I thought that would be a good way to remember our trip without filling up my suitcase with fabric. So I have been sewing just not back into quilting yet.

The reason I have not being quilting is I have decided to get an upgrade on my Millennium and get the new Bliss rail system, I ordered it today!!!  I was very lucky to have the opportunity to try Bliss on our trip.  I have some wonderful online quilting friends and Linda is one of them. She lives near Winnipeg invited me over to try her new Blissed Millennium. I was so excited to finally meet Linda as we have known each other for a few years from the APQS forum but had never meet.  She also invited Mary, another APQS forum member over so I got to meet two online friends and it was so much fun!  We talked nonstop for 2hours while the boys waited patiently upstairs :)   Thank you Linda for letting me try your machine and for a wonderful afternoon. The three of us will definitely have to get together the next time I am in Winnipeg, but without the kids!

Legoland

Legoland Florida just recently opened last fall and I was really glad we could take Daniel to a place that was special to him on this trip.  He loves Lego and it is the gift he asks for when his birthday and xmas roll around.  As you can see behind him there were no line ups!   The heat kept people away so we rarely had to wait more than five minutes for any rides, if we had to wait at all.

Legoland was built in the old Cypress Gardens so there was lots of shade and made for a beautiful setting for the park.

When I saw this sign below I thought what a perfect photo opportunity :)

It is hard to believe that a whole theme park could be created around one toy but I think Lego is one of the most brilliant toys ever invented.

We had to check out the Miniland displays a few times as there was so much to see.

Life sized animals all made from Lego.

Kids actually get to drive boats and cars....which can provide a lot of entertainment for the adults! 

Getting ready to hit the shops!

And of coarse a picture with a Lego Minifigure...that's not so mini.

Race Day

Number 24 Jeff Gordon has been Andrews favorite driver since he watched his first race when he was 9 years old.  Back then he asked me who my favorite driver was and I didn't know any of them so asked him to list a few names for me.  When he said Jimmie Johnson I asked what number is he, "48", what color is his car " blue and silver", I said he can be my favorite.  Well if you are familiar with Nascar you know how unpopular I am in this house :)   Jimmie Johnson won his first championship that year and went on to win a total of 5 in a row, very rarely done in any sport.  I also now know a lot more about Nascar than I ever thought possible but I think it is important to take interest in your kids interests.

I do not have many pictures of me or my 48 car as they were on Tim's camera which was stolen on our way home!  That was very upsetting and the only down side to our trip.  It was taken out of our checked luggage in baggage handling in Orlando so lost half our our trip pictures.

We got passes for the infield and the boys got to see the garage and inspection areas and spotted a few drivers and crew chiefs.

One other special moment in our trip was Andrew was able to meet up with a few of his online buddies as three were coming to the race.  He has found a great group of friends online with the same interests that he has and they talk online everyday.   I totally understand this as I have a wonderful group of online quilting friends as well that I would love to meet one day.

This was Friday's Nationwide Race which had about a third of the people than the Saturday Sprint Cup race, I don't like crowds so really enjoyed watching this race.  The race was at night under the lights and we watched a thunderstorm to the west and never got a drop of rain.

This next picture was taking at the Saturday race when there wasn't an empty seat.   There were 115,000 people at that race and I was impressed at how well they organized the buses to shuttle people back to the parking lots.

I did have one picture of me on my camera, just to prove I was there!  :)

It was 100'f during the day with very high humidity, but this Canadian girl survived.

Daytona Beach

We left for our summer vacation the day after the boys finished school (June 29) and flew down to Daytona Beach, Florida.   Yes we went to Florida in July....call me crazy but we had a reason.  My oldest son's favorite sport to watch is Nascar and it is not a very popular sport in Canada so he get teased at school as it seems the only acceptable sport to enjoy in this country is hockey.   We wanted to make this a special trip that they would both remember for life.  So we got tickets to two races at the Daytona International Speedway on July 6th and 7th and then for my youngest son we spent a day at the new Legoland located just south of Orlando.

We booked a hotel in Daytona Beach right on the ocean, here is the view from our balcony.

I had never swam in the ocean so this was a special treat for me as I love being in the water.  Tim and I would go for morning walks on the beach and then wake the boys and we would swim all morning.

Here is the view down the beach at low tide, I loved that the beach was not crowded as most of the buildings you see are condominiums.

I thought it was pretty cool that they allow cars to drive and park on the beach. 

Here are the boys enjoying the waves.

I have a lot of pictures to go through of the trip and will post a few of the race in my next post.

Closed for the Season :)

It's that time of year again when I close up my longarm business for the summer so I can spent more time with my family. Our summers are very short up here so I want to enjoy it as much as I can.  I won't be blogging as often as I usually do but I will have a few personal quilting project to share over the summer and maybe some fabric dyeing too.

I reached a great milestone with my business this month and that was to pay myself back for the purchase of my Millennium.  I had saved up to buy my Mille and I wanted to keep track of how long it would take to pay myself back.   I bought my longarm new 3 1/2 years ago and with exchange, duties and shipping it cost me $20,000.  On the APQS site it states that if you quilt 10 queen size quilts a month you can pay off your machine in one year. But that isn't exactly true....what about your expenses?  If your thinking of starting a longarm business I believe a more realistic goal would be 2 1/2 years to pay off your machine at 10 quilts per month.  It took me longer as I take 3 months off a year, have a large supply of threads, batting and pantos, and I really like to have time to work on my own projects so 10 quilts a month is my limit.  Another large expense is insurance!     For me to run my business and have clients come to my house, which was very important to me, I have to pay $600 a year on insurance.   So there are a lot of expense to consider when figuring out how long it takes to pay for a longarm machine.  I thought this might be interesting to those of you considering this as a business.

So to celebrate this milestone I thought I would get a tattoo!   LOL....no not for me... for my Mille :)

Urban Elementz sell this great tattoo decals and I thought it would be fun to decorate up my machine.

 I though I would end this post with some pictures I took while kayaking on our lake a few days ago as this is what I'll be doing instead of quilting the next two months!

Hope you have a great summer....or winter if your down under.... not that you can really call that a winter ;)

Crazy Curves

This is Sandra's Crazy Curves quilt that she made with batik fabrics and designed her own layout.  If you have followed my blog for awhile you may have noticed that batik fabrics and the Crazy Curve templates are very popular with the local quilters.  I have made two quilts using these templates, my Beach quilt and my Raindrops quilt.

I used the panto Tickle and you can see it nicely on the backing.

King Tut on the top and Bottom Line on the bottom.  King Tut can be tricky to work with but I find if it is matched up with Bottom Line it works great.  

At first I wasn't sure if the purple I chose for the backing was right but once I laid a strand of thread out on the backing it blended in beautifully so don't dismiss a color on a cone until you have auditioned a strand of it on the fabrics.

Whisper Quilt Done

Here is my Whisper quilt finished!!

The constructions of the semicircles went quickly, it was decided on the final colors that took the most time.   I am very excited to finally have a quilt that is made with only my hand dyed fabrics, even the binding and backing  (same color as the binding, forgot to take pictures!)

When I first finished the piecing I wasn't really happy with it as it just seemed so flat and boring.  But once I quilted it, WOW it just came to life and I love it!! It was an amazing transformation. Also as I was quilting it the brown and beige fabrics kept reminding me of chocolate ice cream and that was all I could think about when I was working on it!  So I treated myself to a bowl when I was done :)

Here is the before and after.

You may have notice that my free hand swirls are kinda wonky, we that is not on purpose. I am finding my Mille harder to move these days and discovered a few weeks ago that my rails and wheels are really wearing down and making the machine harder to move smoothly.  So I am considering an upgrade to the Bliss system that runs on ball bearings instead of wheels on the table rails.  I have a online quilting friend that has offered to let me try her machine with the Bliss system as she just upgraded and loves the new system.  We have a date booked to get together this summer and I am really looking forward to finally meeting her!!

So it is a good thing I take the summers off from quilting for others and I can do a bit of maintenance on my machine and get her running 100% again.   

This last picture taken in the shade shows the colors of the fabrics best.  Mmmmm ...every time I look at this quilt all I think about is Ice Cream!! I guess I'm going to have to rename this one " Ice Cream Swirl!"

I have one more client quilt to finish for the month but I have been waiting on a thread order. Hope it arrives on Monday as I have a busy week with the boys writing exams and finishing up school plus a day trip to the orthodontist that is out of town.

Reading Instructions!

It is very normal for me to change my mind when I'm planning a quilt, especially when it comes to picking the fabrics. Yesterday I decided to actually READ the quilting book I bought and discovered a new way at looking at fabric. I have a tendency to want to match and blend my color perfectly but that doesn't always work. So I want to work outside my comfort zone and mix fabrics that don't initially call to me but work well together and I think I have a better grasp of color values. For this project I needed to avoid extremely dark and light values in this quilt and created a light, medium and dark groupings to achieve the transparency look.

So I spent yesterday dyeing more fabrics and came up with the above mix. I needed more medium and dark values than what I had shown in the last post to make the quilt look more like the pattern picture, which is what I am hoping to achieve.  I am much happier with it now and will start cutting into it today, really I am!

 I'm sure I'll switch a few more fabrics around but I think I'm on the right track now.

 Here is all the extra fabric that I dyed but am not using, I guess this was a good way to build my stash!