June Goal Done!

     By the time most of you see this post it will be Canada Day and that means a long weekend! Yay. Happy Canada Day everyone. I will be spending the day sewing with my two quilting friends. I spent the rest of the weekend on an overnight trip to the countryside with Dwight.   We went for a couple of walks in the woods stayed at a a lovely B and B in Flesherton.  Today we visited our friends for lunch at their cottage on Lake Huron.  We returned home this evening feeling quite refreshed, so a perfect time away.

     I finished my June goal on Friday but I haven't had time to write about it until now.  Here's my improv pieced table runner I made for my co worker Brenda.  I was intending to give this to her in January so it's a tad late.

          I'm happy with how it turned out and I'm sure that she will love it.  I started with the Charlie Harper chickadee fabric.    All the supporting fabrics where chosen from colours in the chickadee fabric.  Because Brenda has a lot of light colours in her house I decided to use the lighter blue fabric as the background.

     I love working in an improvisational manner, starting with a few fabrics and placing them together, watching the piece grow and making decisions as I go along. It's a slow process but I really enjoy it. This picture gives you an idea of how the project started and the fabrics I started with.

     You can see that a few other fabrics managed to sneak their way in as things went along. 

     I quilted straight lines with my walking foot using a light blue, 50 weight Aurifil thread. The quilting went well, or so I thought until I flipped the quilt over to see this.

      I know I'm not the first quilter to sew something to the back of their quilt and truth be told it's not the first time I've done this.  It did slow the finish down, but you can see that I managed to remove it and patch things up pretty well.

     I'm linking up with the One Monthly Goal June linkup, with TGIFF and with Bragg About your Beauties. This is my third finish for the second quarter of the  2019 Finish Along.  The original post is here.

Curated Quilts Star Challenge

     Today is the last day to link up a quilt for the Curated Quilts Star Challenge.  I'm happy to say that I just managed to sew the last stitches on my binding at 7:30 this morning, before I got ready to go to a sew in at Guild.  This is the second time I've entered a mini into the Curated Quilts link up.  I came up with my idea weeks ago and then forgot all about it until I read about Patti of Elm Street Quilts entry.  

     I went with a minimalist Friendship Star.  I sewed each of the arms of the star in an improvised manner.  Figuring out things as I went along.  I joined the arms of the star together with straight line quilting with the walking foot and quilted the inside and outside of the star with shadow quilting.  I am quite pleased with the result.  The quilt finishes at 13 3/4" square.  I used a light grey and a denim which where two of the colours for this challenge. 

     Here's a picture of the quilt on point because I think it looks kind of neat like this. I enjoy working on these challenges as they stretch my imagination and my abilities as a quilter.   I am quite pleased with the result.  I'm linking up with the Curated Quilts linkup.  There are a lot of other star entries there. It's quite inspiring.  I'm also linking up with Beth at Main Crush Monday.

A Friday Finish in June

     I have a special finish to share with you. This quilt, as simple as it is, represents my online quilting journey in a couple of ways.

     I guess I can say it started with Rachel Houser of Stitched in Color, but I'll get back to her later.  For now I'll say it started with Cheryl Brickey of Meadowmist Designs.  You see back in 2015 I was a pretty new and tentative quilt blogger. Quite unsure of myself and where I fit in.  Cheryl put out a call for pattern testers. Filled with a new bravery to try things, I offered to pattern test Grande Scrappy Tiles and participated in my first blog hop.

     I wanted to do a great job on my pattern testing and I chose my fabrics using a technique I learned from Rachel Hauser when I participated in her Penny Patch Quilt along.  See, I told you I would get back to her.  I think I did a great job on my colour and fabric choices and I love so many of the fabrics in this quilt.  I have not met Rachel but I believe she is also down to earth.  I have taken two of her online courses and I still have the great resources that came with those classes.

     I also wanted the quilt to finish nicely so I paid extra attention to my 1/4" seams.  I started to become a more accurate piecer.

      Grande Scrappy Tiles was the second quilt I chose to quilt on our mid arm, and the first of my own.  My goal for the quilting was to try out a bunch of different designs and to get comfortable using the machine.  It took several sessions at Wendy's place to finish the quilting and I I can say that I am much more comfortable with the machine. It's a pretty big quilt 72" by 72" and there are several issues with tension and stitch length but I know that these things will improve with practise.  This quilt marks the beginning of my journey with mid arm quilting and I am pleased with the result, warts and all.

          I love this quilt and I will be keeping it at my place. I'm thinking it will be a great quilt for our grand boys when they are a bit older and stay over at our place. At the moment we always go to their place when we babysit.  It's Friday so I will be linking my post  with TGIFF which is hosted this week by Leanne at Devoted Quilter,  and with Bragg About Your Beauties with Michelle of From Bolt to Beauty.  I wonder who else will be there.
    This is also my second finish for quarter 2 of the 2019 FAL so I'll be linking up there as well, a bit later in the month.  I wonder if I can squeeze another finish in....maybe a small one.

Goal for June

     Well I didn't manage to finish my OMG for May.  I got distracted by a couple of other things so I'm rolling the goal over to June.  I goal is to finish the Charlie Harper table runner/ pieced and quilted.  Here's how far I've gotten as of today.

     I'm working with an improv or intuitive process.  I'm just making decisions as I go along.  It's fun.

     So that's the OMG.  I'm also hoping to get those crosses done for the Modern Plus Sign quilt along quilt, and I'm binding a quilt right now.  Lots to do but again a busy month with my niece getting married and lots of other family things.
I'll link my post with Patti at Elm Street Quilts One Monthly Goal linkup.