11 - 11 - 2012 - Remembrance Day

Picture is by Emma Greenslade from here

Remember

Best,

Leanne

p.s. on Monday I will share my adventures with the Weekender Bag.

The thing about Bees

When you participate in an on-line quilting bee, eventually it will be your month to be the queen bee and you get to ask everyone to make you blocks.

The thing about that is that you need to plan a quilt. So you need to decide what block you want. And then you need to decide what fabrics to send. And cut them, package them and mail them off. For me, that is not as easy as it sounds, and I hum and haw and change my mind several times.



November is my month in the Always Bee Learning bee. This is a really talented group of quilters who have set up this bee specifically to be challenged with new techniques and ideas, and they are all up for most anything. Those of you who have visited here before will not be surprised to learn that I decided to ask them to do some improv blocks.

I decided it was time to use some of my favourite fabrics. I decided to cut big chunks of two fabrics for each person because I wanted there to be enough fabric in the package for people to play and make mistakes without worry about running short. I have picked asterisk and plus blocks of any size - I think that the different size and kinds of blocks will add interest to the quilt.



I made a flickr gallery of some quilts made with these kind of blocks here, the quilts are always so interesting.

Tonight I took one of the bundles and played. These blocks are really fun to make. There are no rules, just start with a square or rectangle, cut it, add a strip of any size, press, cut again, add again. You can stop at a plus or carry on to make an asterisk.



Tomorrow, if the snow stops - it has been a bit of a storm today - I will address all the envelops and mail all those bundles. I am already late in making all these decisions and sending the fabric out - luckily the group does not mind. Now I can't wait to see the blocks that come back, and I am glad to be done with all this planning and deciding.

I am going to link this post to the Thursday Think Tank, which is being guest hosted this week by Sandi at Piecemeal Quilts who will be sharing ideas for Thanksgiving etiquette. By the way, I get to be one of the guest hosts for the holiday season of the Thursday Think Tank - my day is November 29 and I will be sharing some ideas for gifts for tweens, teens and twenties.


You can link up any post this week which contains some creative thinking, and also check out the ideas  everyone else shares too.

Best,

Leanne

Travellin' Pic Stitch Blog Hop - Welcome

Welcome to my stop on the Travellin' Pic Stitch Blog Hop, which was organized by Katy from the Littlest Thistle and Laura from Quokka Quilts. If you have been following along the blog hop you will have heard about many beautiful places from other bloggers who then search out  the palette in their pictures to inspire some English Paper Piecing. 

A few days ago, I went searching through my holiday photos and found this one, from a perfect afternoon on a beach in Hawaii. I considered showing you all of my Hawaii pictures - it is one of the most beautiful places on the planet - but I have decided to focus on quilting part of the hop today.

Of course, not one to leave well enough alone, I then cropped the picture to arrive at the colour palette I liked best. By the way, I used the palette builder at playcrafts, which is easy and fun to use.

This weekend I got to work on the EPP part. Not wanting to dwell on the idyllic beach while waking up to snow at my home, I instead went to the fabric cupboard.  

I like solids and I see so little EPP using them, so that is what I pulled. 

Not content to reinterpret the mossy green (4 from the left) to teal, I decided to also add a lighter aqua, because I really like that colour, don't you? I firmly believe that we should be the boss of our palettes, and make these small improvements if they are needed.

Here you can see my EPP supplies. I am making a hexie blob. 

 

After taking that photo of those supplies today, I had to stop and immediately make a few more, these hexies are really a lot of fun once you get the hang of them. So this last picture was taken after dark, but you get the idea. I think that this blob will turn into a sort of improv hexie pillow - I am calling this a hexie improv block.

This post is part of the Travellin' Pic Stitch Blog Hop.  From 1st October - 30th November we are hopping all over the world EPP-ing in some fantastic locations.  Check out the full list here and be sure to check out the other participants.

On 30th November it's over to you to link up for a chance to win these fabulous prizes! You just need to find a picture, determine its palette and make an EPP block too.

Thank you to our generous sponsors: Paperpieces.com, FabricwormPink Castle Fabrics ,  Marmalade Fabrics, the Fat Quarter Shop, WantItNeedItQuilt, and Aurifil.

Full details for competition entry can be found here. Tomorrow you can pick put the hop with Allegory at {sew} Allegorical.

Best,

Leanne

Farewell October

Looking back at my mosaic, I can see that I mostly worked on swaps, bees, a challenge and the Mod Pop QAL last month.

I did manage to make progress on the Finish-A-Long as the Mouthy Stitches Bag is my first finish off my list and the Liberty Squares quilt is moving along. But if I am going to really get anywhere on that crazy list I will need to step up the pace a bit. And it is time to figure out if there will be holiday sewing or knitting too. Oh, and a couple or three blog hops to get ready for.

By the way, my Mouthy Stitches Bag and key fob have arrived safely in Australia and my internet friend Susan at Patchwork n Play was happy to get them, so that is another swap successfully all done.

November is going to be busy, but as the long dark nights arrive hopefully too will come the urge to make nice warm quilty things. If only I can get rid of this stupid cold quickly.

If you head over to Lynne's Fresh Sewing Day linkup you can see what everyone else did as they enjoyed the autumn/spring this year.

Best,

Leanne

Garden

Let me introduce you to Garden. She is a 12" square wall quilt. On the front there are appliquéd bits of green solids - I am not sure what kind - and Kona white. She is densely quilted with an ivory white Superior Threads King Tut thread.

I made the stem motifs on small pieces of white before I was sure how this little quilt would emerge. So I then arranged them and pieced in the rest. In hindsight I could have arranged it all on a single white background but that was not my process.



In fact, this quilt was really hard to make for me. It is part of a challenge in a group called Four-in-Art set up by my internet friend Elizabeth who blogs at the Occasional Piece - Quilt! When she mused about the group I joined but when the group adopted "art" in their name, well then suddenly it became hard as I quilt, I don't do capital A art. But I am giving it a go anyway.

The challenge was to make a 12" square quilt inspired by the theme Queen Anne's Lace. I have a lot of Queen Anne's Lace in my garden on the coast and enjoyed it all summer.



But as a quilt, well, I just put it all off until it was due - and the due date would be today. The challenge group does not share as they go and for me that is perhaps even more challenging as I like the energy and feedback from my internet friends as I move through the quilting process. This week I was sitting on my bed thinking and looked up at atmosphere. which is hanging on my wall.



When I made atmosphere. I planned to play more with the concept of less is more and with negative space in small quilts, all inspired by Yoshiko Jinzenji, who wrote Quilting Line + Color. So I looked again at the photos I had taken of my flowers.

And then I got to work. And finished yesterday.



There is an evening photo before I washed this quilt. I always like to remind everyone how much texture is added when you wash a mini quilt. Since I planned the texture, I washed and dried her in a nice warm dryer.



Here is her back, although the next picture is a better rendition of the wonderful olive colour of the Essex linen I used. The white piece is a serendipitous event. It somehow got added in the process and I did not notice it until it was fully quilted in. Somehow it was added totally smoothly without any applique or attention and stayed that way through all the turning while quilting.



The back is my favourite side.



You can check out the little quilts of the rest of  Four-in-Art group: Elizabeth, who blogs at Occasional Piece - Quilt! has shared her quilt and also Betty's who does not yet blog, and Rachel who blogs at Life of Riley will be sharing her quilt too.

And because this story had some thinking in it, I am linking to the Thursday Think Tank at Making Rebecca Lynn. 

Best,

Leanne