Another Funny Blog Thing

I did another funny blog thing that I got from another quilting blog that I read Nancy's Quilts. Her blog is great you should check it out.

You Are Teal Green

You are a one of a kind, original person. There's no one even close to being like you. Expressive and creative, you have a knack for making the impossible possible. While you are a bit offbeat, you don't scare people away with your quirks. Your warm personality nicely counteracts and strange habits you may have.

What Color Green Are You?

I think that it sounds pretty nice to me :) I love doing silly blog things; they make me smile :)

More on the Fair

Here is a picture of the wedding quilt that our friends so nicely sent back to us with the first place ribbon on it. It took the first for machine quilted article. That was the only category for machine quilted quilts under 72" x 90" that I could enter it in.

I should explain a little more about the Carp Fair I think based on the comments LOL! It takes place in a town called Carp here in Ontario. I've included some links in case you want more information. It's probably the largest Fair based quilt competition in the area. Well, at least it is the largest that I know about :) This fair is part of the Ontario Assosciation of Agricultural Societies (OAAS) so the Best Quilt in Show for both the Hand Quilted Quilt and Machine Quilted Quilt go on to compete at the provincial level in February 2007. I am really excited about this!! I still can hardly believe that my quilt is going to compete at the provincial level. You can see a picture of last years winner for Machine Quilted Quilt here. Isn't it great!? I think that we may travel down for the competition.
This is a picture of my 90" x 108" handquilted "Welsh Beauty" wholecloth quilt that took a second place. It is a preprinted panel by Benartex. My quilt is the one on the bottom. I call this quilt, lovingly, "A Comedy of Errors" because just about everything that could have gone wrong with it did. I have split red wine on it, bled on it, had the kids dirty hands on it and I cut a hole in it. I appliqued a patch over the hole so it was vitually invisible but some of the stains I just couldn't get completely out. Then just when I was about to finally finish the quilt and I was rolling on my 3 rail Hinterburg frame I realised that I didn't have quite enough of the wide backing fabric to go all the way to the top. I was short by only 6". Maybe the clerk thought that I was going to rack the quilt the other way and I didn't; I'm not really sure. Since I purchased the fabric 5 years ago I couldn't really complain:) Luckily I had some extra backing fabric on one of the sides of the quilt that I was saving for the hanging sleeve. So, I had to take the unfinished quilt off the frame, cut the extra backing fabric off the side of the quilt, sew the extra fabric onto the top and reload the quilt onto the frame to finish the quilting. I had to use a different fabric for the hanging sleeve but that's okay. So anyways, I was pretty pleased with the second place ribbon for my stained and damaged quilt :) So the moral of this story is always double check your backing fabric amounts and lay the top on the backing fabric to make sure that there is enough :) By the time that the backing fabric episode happened I just had to laugh because it really was just another thing that went wrong with this quilt :)

If you have anymore questions or comments please feel free to post them here and I will try to answer them.

I won!!

I won!! I am so excited! This quilt won the first in the Carp Fair for Machine quilted quilt. Plus it won Best in Show for Machine Quilted Quilt and Reserve Grand Champion for the show!! It goes on now to the provincial level to compete.
(Update: I was wrong!! Sorry! Can you tell I've never really competed before :) It now goes to compete at the district level this weekend then if it wins there it goes to the provincial level. A woman phoned yesterday and just told me so off it went yesterday. I'll find out on Sunday or Monday if I take anything.)
I can hardly believe it. I've posted previously on how I constructed this quilt. You can see the process here. I really can't believe that a machine quilted quilt took Reserve Grand Champion at a fair. It just goes to show how the world is slowly changing and accepting machine quilting more and more; because, I really don't remember another machine quilted quilt at this fair taking one of the champions. Please somebody correct me if I am wrong :)

I also won 5 other firsts, including a first for the quilt that my friends sent back to me, two seconds and one third place prize. I really am just so amazed by this that I don't know what to think.

The Lazy Girl Designs bag, the Gracie Bag, that I entered won a first prize and it is going to be sent to Toronto in February to the Ontario Association of Agricultural Societies Convention to be on display in the Craft Room to be an example of what a really good bag looks like.

The embroidery I did on my Pfaff embroidery machine and it is a free design from Ann the Gran web site.

This is the better picture of the bag rather than the blurry photo I had up before.

Harry Potter Scraps

Thank you guys for your nice comments about the Harry Potter quilts that I made for my two boys. They do really love them. I can just picture them at university with those quilts on their beds LOL :)

This is a picture of the quilt that I made from some of the scraps from the Harry Potter quilts. The block is called Arkansas Crossroads. You can see a variation of the pattern that I used here. Mine is a little bit different, in that it uses half-square triangles instead of the stitch and flip method, so I will see if I can find it for you. The blocks are 12 1/2" unfinished and it is set 4 by 4.

The border is a piano-key border with cornerstones. I used up a lot of scraps but I still have even more if you can believe it :) There are some projects that I just seem to completely over-buy in fabric. At least I am getting better now in my fabric purchasing and I am using up a lot of scraps in various projects and in preemie quilts.

Harry Potter Quilting

Well I have a confession to make :) I am a huge Harry Potter fan! So if you are not you may not want to read this post. I love the books and the movies and my boys love them too. I made them both Harry Potter quilts a few years ago for Christmas that have been on their beds since then. This is a photo of one of them. The quilts are quilted in YLI "Glow Bug" glow-in-the-dark thread for the magic coming out of the wand. This is a very thick thread and I found that I had to use a 90/14 Topstitch needle to accommodate the thickness of the thread. The rest of the loops and stars are regular cotton thread. The borders are quilted in Superior "Glitter" metallic thread to look like the golden snitch flying. I couldn't take a really clear picture of that, sorry.

I just found this web site called Sew Hooked where she has some original Harry Potter paper piecing patterns on her site. Best of all these patterns are free! You need to click on the title to get the pattern. I would have loved to have these when I was making the boys' quilts. Now I have not tested any of her patterns but they certainly look wonderful.

Fair Entries

This is one of the quilts that I am going to enter into the fair this coming weekend. We gave it to two of our friends for their wedding present late last fall and they were nice enough to send it back to me for the fair.

Thanks Guys!

the pattern is from a McCalls magazine from I think last August. Sorry I can't even look that up since I gave the magazine away :)

The quilt involoved a lot of template work which I hadn't done before so I learned how to do that

I should also mention that this was quilted on a regular domestic sewing machine and not on any type of a long-arm. I don't have any type of long-arm system but I can see something like that in the futer maybe :)

Here is a close-up of one of the split Lemoyne Star blocks. I had never done one of those before and I have never had so many points coming together in one spot before. I really enjoyed the challenge though and found that I don't actually mind doing in-set peices.
The Lemoyne stars and the Ohio stars are both quilted in gold metallic thread in an interlocking swirl pattern.

I hope that you enjoy the close-ups of the machine quilting. I quilted the background in navy blue rayon thread. I tried to emulate the style of Caryl Bryer Fallert who is an amzing machine quilter. You can see her web site here. It is really worth a look. She does her own hand-dyed fabrics and uses them in her amazing art quits.



This is a picture of the back of the quilt so that you can see the machine quilting a little bit better. I really enjoyed quilting this quilt. While I was quilting it I felt so free and relaxed and I really enjoyed the whole process. This type of unmarked free-form quilting is very nice to do.

You really need to click on the pictures to see the quilting at all :(





Here is the border treatment. It is quilted in a paisley feather type pattern and echoed once to give it dimension.


I hope that you can see it :)

This piece will be entered in the category "Article of Machine Quilting" since there isn't a category for machine quilted quilts under 72" x 90". It's too bad but I think that it deserves to be entered.

What do you guys think? Again, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to post them here and I will try to answer them :)

Getting ready for a fair

Well lately I have been trying to decide what quilts and quilted pieces I am going to enter into one of our local fairs. It is hard to decide which peices best fit which category and are also some of my better work. I am going to enter a few pieces this year and we'll see how it goes. I'll post a picture tomorrow of a quilt that I had friends send me back so that I could enter it. I am also going to enter my Halloween jacket under "long sleeve decorated sweat shirt." What do you think?

I've been reading about all the people who did a no new fabric in August challenge. Congrats to all the poeple who managed to do it! Well, I actually did buy fabric in August but if the challenge had of been for June or July I would have won LOL! As you know I have been trying to use up my stash so I really haven't been purchasing any new fabric lately. During our trip to those great quilt stores in Alberta though I definately purchased some fabric :)

A Very late Christmas gift :)

This is a Christmas gift that I actually had finished before Christmas but only just gave to two of my friends. I made it out of a "Big Block Kit" (12 1/4 meter cuts); but, instead of just doing all large blocks I did a 4-patch 1-patch design for some extra jazz. Very simple and very quick but I think that they always turn out nicely. I've done a few like this and they are always well loved :) The fabric line is the Three Sisters Christmas line from Moda.

It is quilted in a large feathered wreath type of design using rayon thread.

Well i guess that it is good that they will have the quilt for this Christmas :)

Sandy's Halloween Quilt

Here is a picture of the quilt that I have been machine quilting. It is my friend Sandy's quilt guild tinners quilt. Isn't it great!? I posted pictures earlier of Marion's block ( in the middle) to show here photo printing work; but now you can see it in the quilt.

I quilted it on my domestic sewing machine using nylon monofilament thread and various metallic threads. I wanted to draw attention to the work of the individual quilters more than the quilting so there is a lot of outline work and in the ditch work. however, there are a lot of nice metallic cobwebs in the blocks too :)

This is a close-up of the spider-web quilting that I did in the border. I used a nice holoshimmer metallic thread and free-hand quilted the spider webs.

This is also a picture of the block that I did for the quilt. It is the same block that I made for my pumpkin crazy son that didn't have happy enough pumpkins. Sandy really liked it and wanted one for her quilt so I was happy to accomidate :) It is a free embroidrery design from Ann the Gran's site and it stitches out really nicely.

I think that the quilt is really great. Sandy is going to put lots of crystals in the web in the border. Once she does that I will get a better picture of the quilt for you to see. If you have any comments for Sandy please feel free to post them here and I will pass them on :)

I should also add that I was getting a ton of spam in my comments section so I have to put some protection on the comments section. I have to do the word identification thing and so far this has eliminated the spam. I hope that this doesn't prevent any of you from commenting since I really enjoy your comments.