Monday, April 23, 2012

Another week gone by and I still haven’t gotten very far with my quilting. This weekend on Saturday went up to a trailer we have a bit south of us. In Quebec trailer parks are used like summer homes, only open during the summer. Ours will officially open the weekend of May 11th, but you can go into the park on the weekends before it opens, but no electricity or running water. We don’t have a generator so it isn’t the best idea, and this weekend was rainy and cold, so we only stayed up there for an hour or two, then hubby and I both came down with a cold on Sunday. I love the trailer it’s a place to get away to, like camping, there is an add on at the front of the trailer, this pic was taken last summer, I had to crochet this blanket to go onto the couch.
I'm still working on my Hexagon quilt.  I am taking a little break as I want to make a table runnner for the small table we have at the trailer, I want to do it in Hexagons, and finish it, as I want to get an idea of how I will finish the quilt.  this table runner is made from a jelly roll I bought at Walmart of yellow and blacks.  Some of theses colors also are in the lagre quilt.  the trailer's add on is not finished in the inside.  After we had it built its 12 x 23 roughly I couoldn't decide how to finish the inside, no matter what you did you would always see the trailer wall, and aI didn't want it to be like a house.  So I bought grey and black sheets and hung them up around the walls.  I have a grey/black sheet left over and I think I will use this for the back to the runner and the trim.  Here is a pic of the runner i'm working on when finished it will be 5 hexagons by 24 hexagons.  The picture of it is taken at my desk at work, I always bring something to work on during my lunch hours.  Just ignore my computers I'm a computer geek in my none quilting life.

Monday, April 16, 2012

I hate being sick

I had so much planned to do this week I love my sewing. I was able to try and machine quilt a quilt this weekend. I don't think I like it at all, but then the quilt I was trying was one of the first ones that I made so the squares probably didn’t fit perfectly to begin with then buy the time I used the machine on it…well let us just say I’m not happy with it. Then came Monday, either I have the flu or a leg infection. Monday afternoon I had the chills was running a high temperature and ached all over. I started taking antibiotics in case it was an infection. From Monday to Friday I don’t think I even picked up a needle for 5 minutes. This weekend the trailer was open. Ok well not quite open, let me explain. We own a trailer in the country around 1 ½ hrs from Montreal, that we use during the Summer. The trailer park doesn’t officially open till the May 11th weekend, but you can get the last 3 weekends of April and the first weekend in May as an early bird special, except you don’t have water or electricity. We decided to take it this year. Went up there on Saturday for the day opened the trailer and raked up the leaves. Came back Saturday late afternoon as my brother and sister-in-law were coming out for dinner. We then went back up on Sunday, I didn’t take any of my sewing with me. I’m still trying to keep working on the hexagon quilt.

Wednesday, April 4, 2012



Last night I finished 3 cathedral window pin cushions from
the tutorial at http://www.modabakeshop.com/2012/03/cathedral-window-pincushion.html
Which I had sewed this weekend. I like the pincushions but would like to try one leaving the square a little bigger for the turn over and not folding the cushin as many times as they do. I hate the quality of pictures I have, but unfortunately there is not much natural light yet as it is only the geginning of April and am at work most of the day light hours. Will try and take some better one this weekend. I am trying to find a balance on working on
the hexagon quilt and other projects too so that I don’t get bored and give up
on the hexagon quilt. I am determined to finish it. Right now I have 8 of the
diamonds sewn together and have another 5 finished waiting to be sewn. I’ve calculated that the quilt will need to be 8 x 5 diamonds as each diamond is 12 x 19 which will give a finished size of 84 x 95, and then if I want it larger I can add some more black hexagons around the outside. So I need 35 diamonds at 49 hexagons for each diamond which means I need 1715 hexagons with extra hexagons added on the outside to make the edges even.
I also tried the paper piecing pattern to see if I like paper piecing.



Which I found at http://www.quilterscache.com/StartQuiltingPages/startquiltingthree.html

I like paper piecing, but after having done one square I realized that I needed to print out more copies of it, if I wanted to make more squares.
I like the idea of paper piecing as that you are sure the squares are
going to be exact, but it will take longer to sew. I want to try the tumbling blocks using the paper piecing technique, but the only paper templates that I have found are the English paper piecing ones or the paper piecing ones in a triangular
one. I worked on a paper template today that will give me a template that does one square and also on the template is one for hand piecing or I can use it as the diamond to machine sew the block. I’ll try then tonight or tomorrow and see what they look like. Did some work on the hexagon quilt last night, I sewed 4 of the 5 diamonds together.
I keep looking at the patterns for sunbonnet Sue and am interested in applique also hubby has 4 pair of jeans that he doesn’t wear anymore, so can use them as the base. I would like to make a baby blanket with sunbonnet Sue and Sam on it and use denim as the base fabric. Haven’t decided what I will work on tonight but this weekend as it is a 4 day weekend, I promised myself that I would machine sew two quilts that have been pinned for months now.

Monday, April 2, 2012

hexagons hexagon... more hexagons



Its' almost Easter, and I started
quilting last May.
I don't know much about quilting,
all I have learned has been through the net or reading in a book. Here in
Quebec quilting doesn't seem to be popular, you would think with 8 months of
cold weather we would be interested in quilts.
There are only 2 quilting stores near me , the one that is 30 minutes
away only offers courses in French and the other one doesn’t offer courses. I
have developed a love for quilting in this past year, it is like creating this
connection to my ancestors. I can remember my grandmother quilting when I was
younger, and a treasured wedding gift was a hand made quilt from my aunt. I was
off work from August 1,2011 till
February 1,2010 during this time I decided I was going to bond with
my sewing machine, so I bought some cheap cotton and decided that there would
be a lot of sewing in a quilt , so set out to create a quilt. Now I started out with a ruler and a pencil
and pair of scissors, it was very time consuming to draw on the fabric the
squares and then cut them out with scissors then sew them all together. After a few months my machine and I came to
an understanding If I changed its needle regularly and used good thread it would
sew the seams I wanted sewn. Now that I
am back at work I wanted something I could take to work with me to work on
during lunch, one day I was surfing the net and found something called paper
piecing, which used 1 inch paper hexagons that you covered and sewed together
to make a hexagon quilt. I found a paper template for a 1 inch hexagon on the
net and printed out tons of the hexagons.
I’ve been working on this quilt now for a month or so, and have
convinced myself that I will finish it.
Here it is as of today, but I have 5 more “diamond” shapes ready to add.