In the Paper Again & a Donation Quilt

I was in two of our local newspapers again!  LOL  It is the same photo of me rug hooking in the Almonte paper and our Arnprior paper.  This photo was taken at the Almonte Fiberfest weekend before last.  I was really blushing when this was taken since I actually don't really like having my photo taken very much :-/  We had a great day just sitting and hooking and inspiring other people to hook.  It's fun to watch people try it and see how easy it is!!  People had to point out these pictures to me since I actually don't often flip through the paper!

I was asked, by a lady who takes some fitness classes from me, if I would donate something for their church auction.  Last year I made a Christmas wall hanging from a panel.  When I was asked this year if I could donate I immediately thought of this little baby quilt I made back in 2005 from a flannel panel and never did anything with!  It's has sat, forgotten, for 5 years.  My husband was cleaning up a stack of quilts from on top of the armour yesterday and he unearthed this little quilt.  I remember doing the quilt to put aside for a last minute gift ~ but I just never gave it away and so it has sat for 5 years.  I am thrilled to have the chance to send this on to someone who will wrap a baby in it.  It's flannel top and backing so it will be lovely and soft for a baby.  Hopefully they will make a few dollars on this little quilt.

As an aside I am suffering from that cold that is flying around right now ~ it is working it's way through our schools right now so of course I picked it up :-P  Sore throat, headache, nausea, sinus pain and itchy eyes and I feel soooo tired!  My youngest son stayed home with it from school today but he's already feeling better ~ so he's going back tomorrow!!  I managed to get a bit of piecing done on my current "leaders and enders" project since I wasn't very inspired to work on anything else ~  but ~ I felt like working on something.  I'll post a picture of that when I make a bit more progress.

Lettering is Hard!

Man lettering is hard to hook!  I finished the hooking on my little Pumpkin House rug today and I am fairly pleased with it since this is the first time that I have attempted lettering.  It's a lot more challenging than I thought it would be to keep the letters straight and even.  And, even though I tried, the second half of house seems to want to go up LOL!  I did rip it out once already so I might just decide to leave it like that.  Or maybe I'll just rip out the S and the E.  Hmmmm.......

Anyone have any tips for hooking lettering?  I think I would love to take a class on that.

I just finished steaming the rug and it looked so nice and flat on my ironing board that I thought that I would snap a shot of it to share.  I think this rug might actually make a nice chair seat.  I found the brown plaid in my stash of reclaimed wool ~ it started it's life as a skirt so it was the perfect weight and it even had little orange stripe running through it.  Brown and orange actually seems to be popular again so maybe I shouldn't have ripped it up :-D

I finished transferring two of my patterns to burlap ~ I actually ended up leaving the burlap over night after spraying it with water.  It worked ok.  My favorite method method for getting wrinkles out of backing, though, is to hang the backing on a pants hanger and hang it on the back of my bathroom door and let the steam from the shower slowly relax the burlap.  This method works if you have a good few weeks to let it happen ~ but of course ~ I wanted the wrinkles out right then and didn't want to wait LOL!  Oh well I got it done :-D

I'd love to hear from you so if you have any comments or questions please feel free to leave them here ~ and ~ I would love it if you would become a follower here since I just started doing that.

Transferring Patterns

I am working on transferring some patterns to backing today for rug hooking.  I'm hitting a bit of a stumbling block though since my burlap is so creased!  What do you guy do for this?  Do you steam it out?  Let it rest?  Put a damp towel on it??  I really don't know what to do here but I certainly can't trace the pattern onto such a creased backing - grrrrrrrr.  I hate it when I actually feel like transferring and something like this gets in my way.  I don't really like transferring so I have to strike while the iron is hot!  For now I've marked the outer limit of the design and sprayed some water on the worst of the creases and let it sit.

I love these two designs offered as free patterns in Rug Hooking Magazine.  They are Hallowween desgns and I just think that they are toooo cute!
The one on the left is "Mister Iggy" by Star Rug Company and the one on the right is "Jolly Halloween" by Spruce Ridge Studios.  I think that it is so nice of them to offer such amazing patterns as the pattern insert in the magazine.  They are both hooked in a #8 cut so they should hook up fairly quickly and be nice rewarding projects.  Needless to say I have traced these onto red dot tracing fabric and am now waiting on my backing to continue.  I hope that by tomorrow I will still want to continue with the, let's face it, boring parts of the hole rug hooking process.  I really like hooking ~ I just don't like the prep part.  I think this is why I don't applique as much as I would like to.  I really don't like the prep.  Silly I know, but, if someone did all the tracing and transferring I would be one happy hooker/appliquer. 

I also traced out a couple of Halloween stair kick patterns by, the now defunct, The Potted Pear company.  They were in a little booklet I purchased a while a go and I think I might get started on.  Hmmm so many projects so little time before Halloween!! 

So please leave any advice that you have about getting the kinks out of your backing easily and quickly please, or anything else that you would like to comment about,  I would love to hear from you!!

Rug Hooking at Fiberfest

This weekend was so busy and fun!  We had a teacher meet and great at my local quilt shop Sew Inspired.  I talked a bit about it in my last post.  And I participated in Fiberfest for the third year.  What a great time we had sitting, and rug hooking and talking about rug hooking!  Hopefully we hooked a few new hookers LOL.
You can see our display here.  Unfortunately I took this picture on Sunday after the event was finishing so it it a bit messier than it was on Saturday morning.  I think that considering that our local hooking group "Rugs on the Go" only has a handful of members that we put on a pretty good display!  A lot of the work is by our most prolific member and she hooks wonderful rugs.  We had one rug hooking vendor there, Loretta Moore, so I of course bought some wool ;)  We sent many, many interested people over to her booth since her kits are so wonderful for beginners.  Everything is pre-cut and pre-drawn so all that you need is the hook.

I managed to get quite a bit of hooking done on my little pumpkin house rug.  I just can't decide on the door now ~ should it be the orange colour?  Or the same colour as the chimneys?

I'm thinking about doing the first little boarder in the gray black of the rook and then maybe an orangey type plaid for the outer boarder.  Any thoughts?  I'm a bit lost with this rug ~ I have to confess.  I think I'd like to start another geometric after this one is completed.

As an aside ~ this is the first time that I have hooked on monk's cloth and I really like it!!  It is so soft and the weave is so even.  I can see myself using this backing again.

I'd love it if you became a follower of my blog or left me a comment so that I know that you are out there in blog-land somewhere ;)

Happy Creating all!

My Crazy Shortcut Quilt is Hanging in my LQS

Here it is!  I finally finished the binding on my Crazy Short Cut Quilt and it is now hanging in my LQS, over the Christmas fabric, to advertise my class!  We had to fold it over at the top since the quilt was so big.  It would have been hitting people in the head LOL!  I was taking part in a teacher "meet and greet" at the shop yesterday and brought in the finished quilt with me ~ it made a big splash to say the least and a few people signed up for the class after seeing this quilt. 

I was fortunately able to pull this quilt out of my stash ~ I have an extensive collection of Christmas fabrics and I loved using them on this quilt.  The sashing was a fabric that I had started cutting for another quilt and then discovered that I didn't have quite enough of to complete the quilt so I was so happy to use it here.

Here's the back of the quilt hanging proud in the shop.  I just absolutely love how the back showcases all of the wonderful blue batiks and winter prints.  The gold thread looks even better than I had hoped on the back of the quilt.  I even like the way that the folded over area, from the front, looks from the back to really reinforce how reversible this type of quilting is.

After seeing my quilt one woman signed up for the class and promptly picked out Christmas prints for the front and golds for the back!  I thought ~ wow what an amazing idea!  The gold backing is going to look amazing.

I am off to Almonte today for day two of Fiberfest 2010 where a few of us are demonstrating rug hooking!  It's so much fun to show people how easy and beautiful rug hooking is.  I just love talking about hooking and sitting there hooking for the afternoon.  It's always surprising how much you can get accomplished in a short period of time.  I'll post some pictures tomorrow of our booth. 

The Sampler is *Finally* Finished!!

Yes!  I finished hand turning the binding to the back on my sampler quilt today!!!  I have been working on this quilt since the very first year of our local quilt guild in 2001.  Some of the blocks were the "block of the month" patterns that our guild did that year and others were some that I picked.  You can see the quilt back in the first few of my blog posts in 2006!!    The poor thing sat on my hand quilting frame for well over 2 years without any progress being made on it until I finally decided to take it off the frame and bring it to the quilting bee that I belong to to be finished by the group.  I am so thrilled that this quilt is finally finished!!  This quilt has been in the works longer than I have been blogging and hanging over my head for so long it is a relief to finish it!

I finally decided to take down my hand quilting frame in February of this year ~ you can read about my decision to take down the frame here.   It was a hard decision to make ~ since I kind of felt like I was quitting or giving up.  Then I realized that I really I had given up a long time ago.  I don't really know why because I love this quilt,  I loved putting it together and the quilting journey and it deserved to be finished!  But at some point I just lost my drive to complete it.  Luckily the ladies that I quilt with came to my rescue!

I think that I am going to go and put this quilt on the bed now!

My Crazy Shortcut Quilt is Together!

Yay!!!  I spent a whole bunch of time yesterday working on my Christmas Crazy Shortcut Quilt and I got the body of it all together!!!  I am in love with the way that it is turning out.  You know when you picture something in your head and it works out just the way that you conceptualized it?  It certainly doesn't always happen but so far so good for this one!  I just have the binding, label and sleeve to do now.

I even love the way that the back looks ~ I made it so that it could be reversible with all the winter/Christmas blue batiks and prints.  I bought all of these years ago and never did anything with them so I was thrilled to think of something that I could use them for and still showcase them.  SO now we have a Christmas quilt on one side and a reversible winter quilt on the other.

You can see my hanging sleeve on the back there ~ I lifted this idea from a friend that took my class at Sew Inspired.  She took her scraps from her backing pieces and simply pieced them together for a really nice sleeve.  I thought that it was an amazing idea so I used it here!  What do you think?

I'll post more pictures once I get the binding on.  I think that I am going to hand turn this binding to the back.  With all f the thread problems I've had I think that hand sewing it to the back would be less of a head-ache than machining it on.

If you have any comments or feedback I would absolutely love to hear from you ~ so don't be shy ~ reply!!

My Welcome Mat

I thought that I would show a picture of my finished Welcome Mat.  It is sitting on my deacon's bench right inside of my sewing room door.  My plan was that if I put that on the bench we would all stop throwing our stuff there ;)  It actually works to an extent but my boys keep throwing their hats on the bench LOL!  The background sky is higgidy piggidy again as I just absolutely love this affect.  It look like heat waves or wind.  I kept the hooking very easy and used a #8 cut.  Nice and fast and very relaxing to do.  That was exactly what I wanted.


This is a little mat that was a kit!  It measures just 8" x 5" and is a #6 cut.  I haven't worked from a kit for a while so this was a nice little project.  I think that the snowman is looking very frightened of the cardinal don't you think LOL!!??  And, that's either the world's largest cardinal or the world's smallest snowman!   This will be given away as a Christmas gift so it is nice to have it all done and ready to go.  I just have to make a bent wire hanger for it.  A friend gave me some wire to do this but I just haven't done it quite yet.

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