Christmas Gifts

Pin It Now! Good Morning!

I though I would post some quick pictures of what I have been working on lately for Christmas in July :)

Christmas Napkins!
I will be posting a tutorial for this in the next week or so (hopefully! depends on how crazy work is :S)
I am doing up several sets of christmas napkins to give out as gifts and also a set for myself. I have been making sets of either 8 or 12 as those will work for most families :)

You can see my stack before it's "garland" was sewn :)

I think I prefer it with the 3 tiers versus the 2, but it shows there is options!

This set will be for my Mom and Dad, my mom and I actually learned to make these at a quilting class we were at and she picked the fabrics but never did them. So I stole the fabric and made them for her :) Also shows that you can make them look pretty folded either side.

Love the green peeking through. Almost looks like it snowed on the napkin trees!!

Japanese Flower Garden

So possibly worst lighting ever but I am in a bit of a rush and could only take a quick picture. And my kitty Kalesh was not co-operating. Although I think he thought he was helping! I was able to pick up my Japanese Flower Garden the other day and just started sewing a couple pieces together so it feels like I am making some progress. The brown flower and the green flower are attached along with the black connectors. I am hoping to keep working on it over the next little while when I can as I would be super happy to have the top finished by the new year. 

Random gratuitous picture of my cute kitty Nox who fell asleep beside me while I did some hand sewing 

Omigosh!
Well I didn't win any ribbons at Stampede, although that might be due to putting it in the wrong category!! Ooopps! They did not explain the categories and in my ignorance I assumed since I had it quilted on a longarm I should have to enter it in the long arm category. Should have realized they meant custom long arm quilting and entered it into the machine piecing category. Oh well! Live and learn right?

But it was fantastic seeing it hung up there in the stampede hall along with so many other amazing quilts. And I can officially say I entered it into the 100th Calgary Stampede :)

They had the quilts super high up so no one could touch them. It also meant you could not see a large amount of detailing unfortunately.

New Books!

So I have picked up some new books in the last couple weeks and figured I would share them with you :) 

This is an amazing book with some stunning piecing fun scrappy patterns  http://www.laundrybasketquilts.com/Shop/shopindex.htm

Stunning english paper piecing that makes me want to finish my Japanese Flower Garden and start on itty bitty hexagons!  http://www.connectingthreads.com/Books/Quilts_from_Grandmothers_Garden__D45654.HTML

This book has some incredible modern quilt patterns and I really suggest flipping through it! http://www.connectingthreads.com/books/Quilts_from_the_House_of_Tula_Pink__D45564.html

This is just to leave you with a lovely pic I took the other day on the way to quilting. Just look at those clouds! So pretty :)

Hope you all have a wonderful day full of stitching!

Happy Stitching!

Kallie

Hexagons and the start of Dear Jane!

Pin It Now! Good morning to you from the absolute frigidness of Calgary! We are currently at -27 with a feels like of -33. And our `high`for today? -22. Needless to say, its a quilting day. So I figured I would take some pictures last night to show my progress on my Japanese Flower Garden as I have been trucking along on it.

I have also started on my Dear Jane Quilt!

Here are my fabrics so far:

I plan on doing a muted rainbow jane quilt. My husband did not want super bright colours and my LQS has tons of gorgeous fat 8th bundles. So I am going to use those bundles for the quilt as there is 1 meter in each bundle. I still need to get purple, red and teal (sounds horrid but its going to look amazing!) and some more white bundles -they have white on white prints.

Here is my first block. Started with an easy one!

A6

The second one I did up last night was

A8

I have been hand piecing them using a Stem Stitch as the running stitch was just not working for me! Plus I do not have to worry about back stitching as much in the middle of the seam as I am basically doing that already. It has definitely given me fantastic seams with absolutely no puckering though!! Today I think I will be attempting to complete B13, A1 and B1.

Wish me luck!!

Happy Stitching!

Getting Back in the Quilting Groove

Pin It Now! Well I think that after 3 weeks of almost no quilting I must get back into my quilting groove.

I had been trying to get at least 15 minutes minimum of quilting done each day and was doing very well! I brought hand piecing and embroidery with me to work to do during breaks and would stitch while watching tv or listening to music. The funny thing is that I feel so much better each day when I get some stitching done even if it's only a tiny bit. All those tiny bits do add up!

Hmm maybe I should actually mention some of what I am working on!

I do have several projects on the go (like any good quilter!!), my two main ones being a redwork lap quilt from the book Redwork *Winter Twitterings* by Pearl Louise Krush. This is my first attempt at redwork and I am loving it!! I am done 10 out of 12 red work panels and almost all of the block piecing. Just need to start putting it together!! The picture below is from the pattern. I am doing mine in black with gold stars,white on white, and a cute pointsetta print fabric with red floss for the embroidery. Will post pictures of my work in a couple days.

My second large project on the go is a hand pieced Grandmothers Flower Garden using english paper piecing with 1 1/2" hexagon templates. I am using all japanese inspired fabrics all of which have gold accenting with gold/cream background fabric. The pictures below are 2 of my 25 flowers.I currently have 3 fully pieced flowers with the outer gold/cream border, and 4 pieced flowers without the border. Each flower will have black with gold star print connectors which I will post pictures of in afew days. Sorry for the bad pictures they were taken in a hotel room on my husband and my's drive from Ontario to Calgary.

Goodness this is getting to be a long post!! I do believe I shall call it a night here, throw on a movie and get some work done on my 11th embroidery panel for my winter twitterings quilt.

I will try and take some more photos tomorrow of the fabric and my embroidery to post for winter twitterings and some more of my gorgeous hexies (which are entirely too addicting!!)

Happy Stitching!

Kallie