Lucky!

Pin It Now! Word Verification
Before we get started I thought I should mention I have turned off word verification. I had no idea that it had been on and I do apologize because those things are a pain in the patootie! Those of you who refuse to comment because of them please feel free to comment now :) I love hearing from people!

Luckiness!
Been super busy at work lately but I have gotten a couple squishies in the mail in the last week or so that I will share with you until I can update with some more sewing :)

The Aurifil BOM stitcheries that I had been doing has a flicker page where we can post our finished projects and each month they pick one stitchery and that stitcher wins an aurifil prize pack! How lovely right!? Well I found out that I had won one of those lovely prize packs a short while ago for my March block pictured below:

Here is the lovely thread pack that I won. I am super excited to try it out as I have never used this thread before as I have not seen it in stores near me :)

I also won a giveaway hosted by Quilt Jane and Possum Blossom! I had mentioned this one earlier and showed pictures of what can be done with these lovely templates! I am so completely impressed this these templates and paper pieces. It is a very sturdy and visible acrylic and you can very easily see the size and name of the template. I would absolutely recommend you pick some of these up!!
Here is the link to Quilt Jane's shop where she has tons of lovely templates!
Quilt Jane

I also received these lovely die cut paper pieces from Possum Blossom Patchwork. These are very nice feeling. Sturdy but should be thin enough for those who baste through the paper. Plus they have sizes to match all the above templates and more!! How awesome is that!!! I can't wait to use them and am so thankful to have won them!!
Here is the website for Possum Blossom
Possum Blossom Patchwork

She also has the ability to have layer cakes diecut into the sizes you need so you don`t need to do any cutting, once you get it you can just start piecing!! So awesome!

Shopping
I also did a bit of shopping and picked up the 4 fat quarters below. The top red one is going to be for some hexagons in the Rubies, Diamonds quilt. Don't you just love the blue with gold butterflies and the leaf stencil?! Perfect for fall :)

Japanese Flower Garden
Still slowly working on my Japanese flower garden. Have one more full flower complete and 2 flower centers comple as well!

Eye Candy and Updates!

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It has been so lovely here lately and I have been getting a good amount of sewing done which is so rewarding :)

Japanese Flower Garden

So you can see below I have been making progress on my Japanese flower garden quilt. The one incomplete flower below is now done I just didn't want to take the picture again. I am done 11 flowers at this point each with 19   1-1/2" hexagons. One of the girls at work was saying I should make this into a table cloth instead, I am thinking about it but am not sure yet.

Curious kitty must investigate.

Christmas Wall Hanging

So I am just about done the first of three redwork pieces that I am going to turn into a wall hanging for my In-Laws for Christmas. So cute right!! 

A-Mazed
Do you remember when I talked about the pattern I was going to do for my brother for Christmas? I am using Parson Grey's Curious Nature to make it. Well, yesterday I started it :) Only have one block finished as I wanted to make sure there was no suprises when I cut/pieced. I find A Quilters Dream patterns have a lot of waste when cutting so I recalculated all the cutting and have much more usable fabric at the end of it. I hate wasting fabric.

The pattern I am using. Sorry for the blurry picture!

If you want to get a copy of the pattern or look at some of their other ones go to A Quilter's Dream at  www.aquiltersdream.com

Very Boyish right!? I love the fabric line. Hopefully my brother will enjoy it as well! 

Packages

 So excited that I was able to pick up 2 parcels at the post office today!! The first one below was 3 scrap bags and the cute pattern from Fig Tree Quilts http://store.figtreeandcompany.com/
Even thought I ended up having major post office issues the Figueroa's we so helpful and we eventually got everything resolved. So much cute scrap fabric. Not sure yet what I have planned for it but I was thinking a super scrappy quilt and just cut and sew. No pattern just sew it up randomly, should be interesting to see what happens!!

Of course the second I opened the fabric my kitties try to claim it as their own bed. 

Don't you love the cute little pattern!

I also ordered some stuff from Connecting Threads http://www.connectingthreads.com/Quilting.cfm

Cute little baby quilt kit for my girlfriend at work. It is fairly gender neutral since she is not finding out gender and she is happy with blues and greens for a girl as well. 

Got some more papers for my hexagons some batik yardage at the top and the bottom is a fall batik layer cake. And some wonder clips by clover. I am super excited to try them out so I guess I should get my butt in gear and get something quilted!! 

Better picture of the layer cakes. I also picked up 2 winter themed batik layer cakes. 

Such a yummy haul! I can't wait to get cutting into it!!

Well I am off to stitch some more and get some stuff done!

Hope you enjoyed the eye candy!!
Happy Stitching
Kallie

Projects, Projects, Projects

Pin It Now! Good Afternoon All!!
Lets talk about Projects today, how many do you have? I have been making lists of ones I have started, want to start and have the stuff for and want to start and don't have anything for. Let me say that it is quite a LARGE list haha!!

I find I am very easily suckered into projects :P I just love so many different styles and there are a ton of things I want to do. Does this happen with everyone else? One of the girls at my quilting group said a friend of hers did a list of WIP and she had 73!!!!! That is not a typo. I am not near that number yet but just going through and seeing what I have on my list is a little intimidating I must admit.

Here are my numbers!
14 WIP's- these range from big to small and I will be adding Christmas gifts on here as well plus some small  
crocheted gifts

5 Projects to Quilt- these are all small except for one double size quilt top

14 Projects on my "To Start" List- These are projects I have kind of started in the respect that I have either the fabrics already, it was a kit I bought, I already have plans for if it is going to someone, or a place to put it. And of course it also includes the ones I am dying to make and keep such as dresden plate and cathedral windows.

So how about you guys? What are your numbers? 

I would love to know! So leave a comment and we can see who has the most haha!




So onto updates!

I have decided not to give Farmers Market to my inlaws for christmas this year at least. I am not super happy with the quilt in general at the moment and don't want to keep going with it as a Christmas gift and decide I hate it and then have nothing to give. So I am going to keep going but need to decide how I want to change it. SO I needed a new gift idea and stumbled upon the free patterns from Red Brolly whom I love. They had three Christmas sampler stitching designs that I am going to make into a wall hanging and I am much happier about giving it as a gift :)
Here is what I got accomplished last night when I decided to do it:
(sorry about the lighting)

Here is the link to the patterns if you wish do complete them as well.
http://www.red-brolly.com/red-brolly/free-red-brolly-patterns.html

Red Brolly also has an amazing and gorgeous free quilt pattern for Christmas right now called the Wish Quilt. Bronwyn is releasing the next part every couple of days and they are so cute!! Here is a link to the first pattern and the layout plus lots of pretty pictures of the quilt so you can see what you are getting into!!

http://www.red-brolly.com/red-brolly/2012/07/here-it-is-the-wish-quilt-part-one.html

Hexagons!
I have been getting lots of stitching done on my Japanese Flower Garden as well 1 big flower is finished completely which brings my total of big flowers to 7 out of 25 with #8 being worked on as below. I also have 2 small flowers completed and 3 more basted as seen below! Progress is coming along slowly but surely.

Hope you are having a fantastic day!!!

Kallie

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

Hexagon Needle Book Semi-Tutorial

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Now last Monday I made the cutest little needle books ever. I loosly followed the tutorial from My Three Sons Knit . The link for her tutorial is at the bottom of the page. Just because I want you to see mine before you blog hop :)

I had been browsing walmart and found the neatest little clasps for about $2.50 for a 2 pack. 

After looking at the tutorial and getting some felted wool from my LQS I browsed through my fabric and got to work. I used my 1 1/2" hexagon template that I use for the Japanese flower garden quilt, fussy cut my fabric and used the same technique that is in my hexagon tutorial to make 2 hexagons for each needle book.

(you can find the Hexagon Tutorial here: http://aquiltingwewillgo.blogspot.com/search/label/Hexagon%20Tutorial ) 

The clasps I got from wally mart

I hand stitched this with a coordinating DMC floss to sew the  fabric hexies to the wool individual hexies. I then just went over my stiches to sew the whole book together. For my connecting hexies (you will understand once you go to the actual tutorial) I didn`t really measure them exactly. It`s just too fiddly so I kind of whinged it and it worked out well. 

Now I took a strip of left over wool, cut a slot in the end and put it on my clasp. This way I can have my thread attached and I just tied a knot in the end of this one. 

With this thread the hole in the spool was very large so I just cut slits in both end of my `thread holder`wool and attached them both on the clasp.  You can see here I also machine stitched this first one. I don`t like the look of it and when I have time I am going to take it out and hand stitch it. 

Here you can see the inside with a couple pins!

The nice thing about the clasp is that I can attach my scissors and thimble to it as well then onto a handle in my  travel sewing kit.

So definitely go check out My Three Sons Knit for her full tutorial!

http://mythreesonsknit.blogspot.com/2010/05/hexagon-needle-book-tutorial_1452.html

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!