March already!  The snow is finally starting to melt.  I shouldn’t complain about it, I love living in a country where we have the four seasons Each season has its good points, it just seems winter lasts longer than the others.  I’ve been busy working on miniature quilts, I am really enjoying doing them.  When I started doing miniature quilts  I thought they would go much quicker than full size quilts do,  but they take a long time to make.  The miniatures I am making are mostly done with hand sewing, so I can carry it around with me and work on it when ever I get a few minutes.  The one I have been working on is one made of Hexagons.  I love the look of scrap quilts, and have been making this one with hexagons.  I wanted it to be big enough to be a bed quilt for my 18” doll. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This quilt did take me awhile to do, first I had to cut out the paper templates, then baste the material around the hexagons, then I needed to sew all the hexagons together.  I then added the orange border which has become my favorite material, I used it in the easystreet project and decided to border this quilt with it, I then finished the quilt by hand quilting it and adding the white binding.I really like the quilt and am thinking about doing a large quilt like it, but right now I am working on 2 other miniature quilts one using the starburst and one doing blocks. 

 

 

 

 

 

I love block quilts!! I think it was one of my favorites when I first started looking at quilts.  I will do a miniature quilt and might even make a baby quilt also using the blocks.  Both are paper pieced so I can carry them back and forth with me to work.   I work in a college, so instead of carrying a purse I carry a backpack.  I always have something in my backpack pack to work on.  I’m always afraid that I might be at work one day and the electricity will go out, and I’ll have to sit there with nothing to do. I even keep some hexies in my top drawer just in case. I want to work on the miniatures tonight, but sigh it’s my sister-in-law’s birthday this weekend an I’m knitting  her a decorative scarf and will have to work on that this week.

Monday morning. Another week I’m getting tired of winter.  This is what it looks like living in a city during the winter.

Walking the dogs is the one thing that gets us out during the winter. There are still fun things too, even tho we are getting snow everyday the weather is still on the warm side, so there are alot of snowball fights going on.  Just can't resist making that snowball when hubby is in range.

They are calling for snow for the next 2 weeks, not a lot just a scattering of flurries.

 

 

I look forward to the weekends because I get to sew then, during the work week I find by the time I get home had dinner, I don’t feel like getting out my sewing machine.  This weekend I managed to get this Dresden plate runner finished. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is the size of a runner but I made it with the intention of hanging it above my bed.   I also finished putting together the other Dresden plates, this will be a lap quilt when it is finished.

 

 

 

I collect dolls and love making things for them.  This is one of my favorite dolls she is 18 inches tall, I knitted her this nightie and she gets the lap quilt I made for her.  

 

 

 

My brother is making me a bed for her I can’t wait, so I’m starting a bedspread for her this will be flying geese randomly spaced through it and the rest will be white.  I cut out some squares for this gees last night, and some 2 ½” squares for another blanket I want to make.

I will look high and low under and over...

 

 

 

 

February 19^th already, the winter is coming to an end.  I have a hate love relationship with February, it is a short month ok one day less does count as a short month, but then there are no holidays in February. Most people have some of kind of holiday, but not here in Quebec we return after New Year’s and the next holiday is Easter, which is not till March 29^th this year.  It has been a long winter, I started a “new” job at the end of January, well I’m still doing the same thing I’ve done for the last 25 years answering to the same boss, but am getting paid more for it. I also had a leg infection for the last month or so, and its finally cleared up with antibiotics. So all in all I did not get a lot of sewing done.

 

 

 

  I did finish some things this weekend, I finally finished the mini quilt that was in the previous post, I also finished a purple mini quilt, and a cushion to go with it. 

 

 

 

I finished 3 cushions, ok well almost finished them,  I just need to stuff them. 

 

 

 

 

 

 I also finished sewing the Dresden plates I’m working on to the background blocks. Will sew them together this weekend or maybe will get a chance during the week to do it.  I’m doing some cross stitch bears on white cotton, ok its 90% cotton.  I bought the material at a second hand store in Ottawa when I was there a few weeks ago.  I’ve cut the material up and am doing the bears in cross stitch on them, when I’m finished enough bears or tired of doing cross stitch I’ll sew them together to make a baby blanket.    I Finally got to my favorite quilt store this Saturday.  It’s on the south shore, and Montreal being an island it means going across a bridge, which can be slow for any reason. Well Saturday was a nice day so we went over, I do love this store it’s not big but has some beautiful material and the ladies that work there are always so friendly.  It’s on an Indian reservation, so I get to look at all the Indian crafts when I am there. Also there is no tax, so I save 15% right off.  I picked up the orange that I need for the border to Bonnie Hunter’s Mystery quilt, some white cotton, because I seem never to have any white material on hand. I have been thinking of doing a wall hanging and maybe trying my hand at applique, so I picked up some blue that looks like water, some blue that looks like sky and some green for trees and a meter of this material that looks like birch trees.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I also want to make a mini quilt using the blocks that are in the purple mini quilt but doing the inner squares in different colors then the outer square in white.  I made the mini quilt using a paper piecing method that I found on the net.  Do you think I could find it again, well I am stubborn and after searching for a few hours, I decided I must of saved it, and of course http://www.quiltime.com/quilts_pdf/ddiamond.pdf I finally found it, the squares are printed at the bottom of this pdf. I now have something on my agenda for this weekend.

minatures .. what a joy

I decided that I wanted to try my hand a minature quilts.  I have a huge collection of dolls and figured they could use  some quilts.  I did a search on the net and found some interesting patterns for some minature quilts.  I decided to try this one

http://www.caroldoak.com/pdfs/NewMini.pdf

 

The squares are very small.  Here is a pic of them with a quarter in between.

I worked on it most of Saturday and just loved it.  It was like doing a minature puzzle.  While doing it I kept thinking I'm never throwing out even the smallest pice of material.  As you can tell it is using paper piecing, this is the first time I've used this technique and I really enjoyed it.   Here is the top finished. 

 

It measures 12" by 12".  I'm quilting it now and will take another pic of it then, probably with one of my dolls.  I bordered it with the orange that I had left over from the easystree quilt.  I think that the orange jhas become one of my favorite fabrics.

 

 

I love weekends

I love weekends I can do some seing.  Working from 8:00 to 4:00 week days doesn't give me much time during the week to get things done.  The problem usually is that i plan on doing more on weekends than there are hours to do them in.  This eeken I was able to accomplish some things.  The  first thing I wanted to do was to get a picture of where I've gotten to on the easy street quilt.  Now for most people this would be an easy job, but not for me.  We are in the middle of winter which means I leave for work in the morning and its dark out and when I get home at night it's dark.   To get the true colors of something you need natural light, which means outside.  Ok got up Saturday morning and it was snowing lightly.  No the best place would be on the clothes line in the back yard, but that would mean trudging through 3 feet of snow carrying the quilt top and clothes pins.  Now I had no motivation to do that, so the problem was going to be how to convince hubby to get the idea to do it for me and think it was his idea.  Well after showing him some of the blogs with what people did to get good pictures of their quilts, he came up with the brilliant idea to hang it on the clothes line and take pictures of it.  Now there is a smart man lol.  

Now the next thing I wanted to do was some work on these 2 1/2 inch squares in 5x5 squares in a baby blanket I've been working on. I was able to get 11 more squares done. Which made it a 3 x 5 (14" )square quilt.  Which is 42" by 70" quilt too big for a baby blanket and with the green borders it just doesn't look babyish so I think I'll add 5 more blocks and make it 4 by 5 which will be  56 by 70 which will make a lap quilt.  So next weekend if I don’t get side tracked.

 

Now the next thing I have been meaning to do which is boring but important is to backups computer. I have tons and tons of pictures and even patterns on my computer and all my favorites, if my  computer was to crash then it might take me days to get it all back, so just in case it only takes an hour at most to back it all up to my external hard drive, and now it's done.  Then I cleaned up a lot of pictures off my hard drive since I have them backed up.  This is one of the pictures I found on my hard drive.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As you can see I collect dolls and love knitting and crocheting.  This was one of my periods when I knitted Norweign sweaters, Hubby also has ONE.

This was a during a time when I decided some of the dolls needed nightgowns.  The dolls are 3 American Girl Dolls and the other 4 are Baby Face Dolls.  The Baby Face dolls ares some of my favorite dolls.  They are also sitting on my favorite afghan.  The afgan is a pattern I first did over 20 years ago and Its always been my favorite.  It's done in Tunisian crochet.  There are two afgans the other is folded on the right of the picture.

 

 

Easystreet Comming To An End

Ok still working on Bonnie's Easystreet.  I'd better post now, I didn't get as far as I wished but I keep on plugging aay.  This is the first Mystery challenge I have ever done.  I really enjoyed doing it and never thought I woould ever make a quilt with this many pieces.  Here it is so far...

 

 

 

 

 

The individual blocks

 

 

I hope I can get the top finished this weekend and then start thinking about a border.

Please check out all the quilts at Bonnie's site

http://quiltville.blogspot.ca/p/easy-street-mystery.html

 

 



 

Wednesday middle of the week is it 1/2 over or is there still 1/2 left?  I think this week  its 1/2 over for me.  The weather is suppose to be nice all week, and I'm getting closer to finishing Easystreet, last night was able to get a corner triangle done 2 border triangles, and was even able to sew to squares one corner triangle and one tap triangle together.  Which leaves me left to complete 3 corner triangles 6 B squares and 9 side triangles.  My goal is to have it all together by Sunday. Have to take the pup Amy to the vet tonight, she had an accident with her eye and has had stitches keeping one eye closed for about 10 days now.

I guess it will be a short post today as there is nothing else I have to say.  Have a good day.