grandmother’s flower garden

January 19, 2015February 4, 2015

The Friendship Garden Quilt

Warning: this post is photo intensive!

Let me introduce you to The Friendship Garden Quilt!

It comes by its name honestly, because it started out life as a bee block!

I am part of a Flickr group quilting bee with 5 other ladies. We call ourselves We Bee Canadian. We each make 2 blocks for the month’s Queen Bee.

When it was my month to pick a block (a couple of years ago!), I asked everyone to please make me two bow tie blocks using garden-themed fabric.

Because we were all pretty much beginners, nobody’s 1/4″ seams were very good and the blocks didn’t square up very well. There were an awful lot of mismatched seams.

Then I had an idea!

I decided to cover some of the wonky seams with English paper pieced rosettes. Perfect! Before you knew it, I had hand-appliqued a flower in every single blank square, wonky or not!

Because a garden should be an absolute riot of colour, don’t you agree?

I used a bed sheet on the back. I think it would qualify as a vintage sheet. I remember having sheets like this on my bed in the 70s.

The quilt is hand quilted in circles.

I don’t think I’ll try to do hand quilting through a bed sheet again. I actually bent needles and had to use pliers to pull the needle through the layers. Ouch!

Mr. C. did a marvelous job behind the scenes, don’t you think?

I used black for the binding to set off the colours. Oh, how I love this quilt! It is so cheerful and bright and sunny! A bit of summer in the depths of winter.

I hope it will be as loved in its new home as it is in mine 🙂

These photos were taken at the sweet little Notch Hill Community Hall and Church on the only sunny day in January.

Linking up with the binding blitz at Julie Quilts and Lets Bee Social at SewFreshQuilts.

October 3, 2014October 4, 2014

Update from the Sewing Room

I keep thinking of great bloggy things that I want to write about, and then I go off and do something else (like mow the lawn or hang out the laundry) and my ideas fly away like birds. Scattershot.

So instead I’ll catch you up on my sewing life.

I signed up to take a block of the month class at my LQS (that stands for local quilt shop for all you non-quilters who wonder what the heck I’m talking about.) It’s a applique class that will teach me all the cool things that I can do with my sewing machine beyond simply sewing. This is my first block. I added the bird and his tail is going to extend over into the sashing, which is why it looks unfinished. I HAVE to add my own creative mark, right? Right! It’s machine applique. I’ve never done machine applique before and I am still sitting on the fence with it. It looks very…manufactured (to me, anyway.) It’s a very different look from needle-turn-by-hand. I’m linking this new project up to the NewFO Challenge over at Cat Patches. The object of the challenge is to start a NewFO (new fabric object) every month, which can then become a UFO (unfinished fabric object), which is something I have no problem accomplishing, lol!

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And I also started a project from a book, which makes me eligible to link up with the Let’s Book It party over at Vrooman’s Quilts. The object here is to make a project from a book that you actually already own. What a concept! I have an entire shelf (okay, two shelves) of quilt books full of things that I want to make someday. So I have started an applique project from a book that I’ve had for years, called My Whimsical Quilt Garden by Becky Goldsmith Linda Jenkins. It uses needle-turn applique. Here is my first block, which is NOT finished yet.

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PLUS, I made the Ring Toss quilt (blogged here) from my Project Linus book. So I am doubly eligible for the Let’s Book It party!

AND, my Grandmother’s Flower Garden quilt is featured this week as part of the Tuesday Archives over at Val’s Quilting Studio! It’s really cool to see my quilt featured on someone else’s website! Go check it out!

And on the dress front…