A Quilt for Eli

     I have a finish to share with you.  It's Eli's quilt.  The pattern is Preppy Pod, an Elizabeth Hartman pattern.  I love the happy whales on this quilt and the soft primary colours.

 

     I made the lap quilt size but I added the row of whales to the bottom of the quilt to make it a little longer.   It's a nice size for a toddler, 45 inches by 54 inches. It's  about the same size as the quilt I made for his older brother Gabriel. Gabriel's quilt was the Dog Gone Quilt designed by Lorna McMahon of Sew Fresh Quilts.  Gabriel is two and a bit now  and his parents are just starting to use his quilt with him.

      I used Elizabeth Hartman's fabrics along with some Cotton and Steel fabrics designed by Rashida Coleman.  Rashida Coleman is one of my favourite designers and I started my fabric choices with her Kujira and Star fabric.  It's the fabric in the largest whale and I also used it on the back.

     I kept the quilting simple with wavy horizontal lines going across the quilt.  I think they give the quilt a water like look. The quilting was finished last weekend.  Lately I have been machine sewing my bindings on the back and the front, but this time I chose to machine stitch to the front and hand sew on the back.

     I'm glad I made that choice.  It gave me a little more time to spend with the quilt.   Eli will be turning one at the end of May.  He will hardly be a baby any more and I think I will be missing having a baby around.  I thought about his babyness a lot as I stitched that binding on by hand.

     Finishing this quilt was my One Monthly Goal for April.  I've managed to reach my goals 4 months in a row.  Maybe I am getting a better handle on how much I can finish in a given month.  You know it's interesting.  I brought the quilt to work today to show it to my co workers and several people asked me how long it took to make it.  To be honest I have no idea.  I work on many projects at a time and I don't track my time on each one.  Also I take a lot  of breaks to do things like wash the dishes or change a load of laundry.  I do know however that it took way less time to pin baste the quilt and to quilt it, than I was imagining it would take.  Hopefully this experience will encourage me to get to that quilting stage a little more readily.

     Eli's quilt is also my first finish for the 2nd Quarter of the Finish Along for 2018.  You can find my original list here.
I'm linking this post up with the Thank Goodness it's Finished Friday linkup which is hosted this week at Celtic Thistle Stitches and with the OMG linkup hosted by Patti at Elm Street Quilts.

Postcard From Sweden Update

     Well I never thought for a minute that I would have to send out a notice cancelling my guilds Spring Bee Day.  That is until late Friday night when the severe weather warning for freezing rain was still standing. It came a bit later than expected but it came. I pretty much spent the whole weekend hiding out in the house.  Instead of working on guild projects I worked on my own projects.
    
 I'm happy to say that my Postcard from Sweden quilt top is finished. I finished it at 3:30 on Sunday afternoon. Let the photos begin!  I've given up on waiting for good weather to take the photos. There's no need to, really as Postcard does a lot to brighten up a grey day.

     I really love this quilt and as I've said before I found it such a great way to see how the different colours work together.  Dwight asked me who it was for.  For now I'm going to keep it to use as a colour reference.

     Here's a view from the other side.  The yellows pick up the light quite nicely in this view don't they.   There is a lot more red and pink and purple in this quilt than I would normally use.  I tend to be more of a blue and green girl and I welcomed the opportunity to work with these other colours. 

     I have to admit that I got a little sick of sewing all the half square triangles together during the current marathon of sewing so I took a break to sew a couple of blocks for community outreach ( I'll share those later) and I managed to make a small start on Rory's quilt (that is secret sewing for now) so all in all it was a very productive weekend.  I'll be joining the linkups at mmmquilts for the Postcard from Sweden quilt along, and at Sew Fresh Quilts for Let's Bee Social.

     Now I'm going back to waiting for Spring to Come.  Do you think it will....ever.

Second Quarter Goals

     Last quarter I managed to sew a fair bit but I only managed one finish.  I guess I was too busy working on new quilts.  Well it's time to set goals for the second quarter and we will see if I do better this time.  I'm carrying some projects forward and maybe I'll pull a few from the past.

1.  This is an older picture of the whale quilt.  I've got the quilt basted and ready for quilting.  It's my April goal so I expect to finish it before the end of the month.
     

2.   I need to get this quilt done soon as well.  Rory's mom may have given up on it but I'm hoping to put it in a blog hop in May so I've got to get a move on.

 3.  If I don't get quilt number two finished.  I'll have to make a pillow or something, with these as possible fabrics.

4.  I would still like to make this bag.

5.  And I'll add in the Postcard from Sweden Quilt just incase I feel inspired.

6.  I added this one on Sunday March 15th.  It's a donation quilt for Ronald McDonald House which Cyndy and I worked on as a round robin in a group.  We were hoping Wendy could quilt it for us but she thinks she'll be too busy.  So I guess it's on my list.

     It needs to be quilted by the second week in June.

     That's more than enough for me to work on.  I'm heading over to Felicity Quilts this time to join in the 2018 Quilt Along Quarter 2 linkup.

Lots of Sewing Happening Here

     I had another wonderful weekend of sewing.  I have a three day weekend although sometimes one of the days gets eaten up with other things.  I started my sewing on Friday.  My goal for the day was to get as much of Postcards from Sweden done as possible.  Here's where I was on Saturday morning.  About to attach rows 7 and 8 to the quilt top.

     I wasn't going to continue on Saturday but I was on such a roll I just kept on going.  I eventually had to stop because I got a pain in my right hip and butt from pressing down the foot pedal and a sore lower back from cutting ( I know I should have used the table risers).
     
   I switched to plan B.( this was actually plan A for Saturday but I put it on the back burner to keep working on Postcard).  I pieced the backing for Eli's Whale quilt and then ironed the backing and the quilt top and found the batting.  My new plan was to pin baste the quilt top before heading out to meditation at around 10:00am.

    After a good nights sleep I got up early with the cat and started working on the quilt.  I had to iron the batting because it was so creased. I am not a good estimator of how much time it takes to do things.  This is a really small quilt and I'm happy to say that I got all those pins through the layers in about an hour.  It was a wonderful hour.  It was very quiet in the house as Dwight had not gotten up yet and I got into a really nice rhythm with the pinning.

     I had lots of time to spare before leaving for meditation. I was going to work on the computer but Dwight was watching a soccer game on it so I spent some time fooling around with the ipad.  I recently discovered that I can take selfies with the ipad. I pushed the little icon by mistake one day. I know I am such a luddite.  It's hard to get them to look o.k. though.  Has anyone invented a selfie stick for an ipad yet?  Here's the best one.

     Those are rows 9,10 and 11 on the wall behind me.  You mostly get to see this because you can see how happy I am.  I'm not sure if its because I got lots of sewing done, or because the sun has been shining most days, or because I'm getting healthier.  

Linking up with Main Crush Monday at Cooking up Quilts.

Elm Street Quilts Post Card Exchange Blog Hop

      
      When Patty of Elm Street Quilts announced her postcard exchange I thought it would be a great project for me.  Online participation had been scant for me for a couple of years but  I figured one little postcard should be do able.  I liked the fact that we had to make a postcard only and didn't have to fuss over other things.

     This was my first postcard and the exercise was not without challenges, but I was up for them!  My partner Kim, gave the word Halloween as her prompt.  This was the first challenge.  I don't tend to make holiday projects, so I was going to have to stretch myself here.  Kim doesn't have a blog, and she was new to instagram so there weren't a lot of clues there on what she might like, other than a couple of posts with wool felt applique in them.  This was challenge number two.  I am not a fan of applique. 

     I needed to come up with something that would be true to me but that I thought she would like. I let it float around in my head for a while and then I remembered I had seen a pieced block on the internet at some point that would fit the bill.  I googled Halloween blocks and after a bit of sleuthing I was lead to this tutorial by Elizabeth Hartman.  I had thought it was cats but it turned out to be Barn Bats.  

     I picked some fabric that hinted at Halloween and set to piecing part of the block. I used the tutorial that Patty posted on her blog to make my postcard.

     The piecing and the quilting went together nicely but I had a bit of difficulty with the edging.  Edging a postcard is kind of like applique.  I put it in the mail well ahead of the deadline, and then  the hard part came, waiting.  It seemed to take forever to receive my postcard and even longer for Kim to receive her postcard. 

     Here's the postcard I received from Isabel.  It came all the way from New Zealand.  It was definitely worth the wait! My prompt was sunny, and I saw lots of postcards on instagram that could have fit the bill.  I think a lot of us were longing for the sun.

       I was expecting a yellow postcard but here it came all blue, my favourite colour and it meets the theme in it's title New Zealand first to see the sun.  How cool is that! You can see that Isabel loves applique and is a master at it.   I had a lot of fun participating in the postcard exchange and I would do it again.  I'm sure I'll be better at the edging the next time.  I might even try applique.

      Here are the bloggers participating in the hop.

Denise @ DottieDoodle

Isis @ Creation d'Isis 

Karen @ Run Sew Fun

Lynette @ What A Hoot Quilts

Laura @ LC's Cottage

Lisa @ Sunlight in Winter Quilts (thats me)

Marsha @ Quilter in Motion

Michelle @ Creative Blonde

Paige @ Quilted Blooms

Patty @ Elm Street Quilts

Sandra @ mmm! quilts

Susan @ California Fiber and Music

Valerie @ Val's Quilting Studio

Dione @ Clever Chameleon Quilting

     I'm looking forward to seeing their postcards.  Let's go check them out!

OMG for April

     It's time to come up with a goal for April's OMG and I have decided to focus once again on Eli's quilt.  It just needs to be quilted and bound.  

     Here's part of the top on the backing fabric.  I'm thinking I'll do some sort of wavelike action across the width of the quilt.  Likely with the walking foot.  I'm aiming to get this quilt pin basted tomorrow.  
     Today we have been plunged back into winter with snow falling and staying on the ground.  I'm focussing my sewing efforts on piecing my Postcard from Sweden quilt.  I didn't bother with the last link up because my progress was very minimal, but I am making up for it today.

A Mini Retreat

       On the weekend previous to the Easter weekend, my quilting buddies and I had a mini retreat.  We were back near Paris Ontario babysitting the dogs. We spent the weekend working on quilts for our Community Outreach program and we finished 4 quilt tops (more or less).  I'm going to share 3 of the finishes in this post and go into a little more detail on the fourth later.   It was a beautiful sunny day, but incredibly windy so it was really hard to set up quilts for photos.  Today is full of clouds where I live so it's nice to look at this sunshine.

     Here are two of the quilts.   We made these tops with a layer cake of Desert Blooms fabric, designed by Sherri and Chelsi of a Quilting Life.   The sashing is  a Free Spirit solid. I bought it as one of several possibilities to use for the sashing in my Quilters Planner Sew Along Quilt. I rejected it for that project but it looks great in these quilts doesn't it.  We based the design on a quilt we saw in a local quilt shop.

 The quilts are a little bit small to be used for community outreach quilts but  we managed to find some of this fabric on line at Fabric Spark and ordered two different prints to use as borders.  So the quilts will be similar, but different.

     Do you remember this quilt?

     The three of us put this quilt top together as part of Sandra of MMMQuilts FreeFall Quilt along last year.  We won a gift certificate from Fabric Please in the final link up and we used the gift certificate to purchase the Desert Blooms layer cake!

     The third top I will share with you was put together by Cyndy.  She had started this top at our last bee day but hadn't quite finished it.  

     The three of us have been trying to use up the batiks in our stash so we have pooled them together to use in the donation quilts.  Actually it started as me trying to use up the batiks in my stash but the two of them followed in my footsteps.

     I'll share the remaining quilt which was the one I worked on the most next week as there is a bit more of a back story to it.  I'll  be sharing this post at the link ups at Sew Fresh Quilts and at Slice of Pi Quilts.

     Last week Katrina and I brought 42 quilts to the Sexual Assault Domestic Violence unit bringing the number of quilts our guild has donated this  guild year so far to 97. Neat eh (thats so you know I'm Canadian.)

     I'm participating in the Elm Street Quilts Postcard Exchange blog hop on Saturday, so hopefully I'll see you here again.