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Butterfly Stars

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Not a lot of progress on Butterfly Stars this week, it seems. I’m now almost out of embroidered butterfly hexagons and need to make more stars so will spend a bit of time this weekend on that. This is where it stands right now.

As you can see, Smudge was determined to get in on this picture!


Wednesday night it was bitterly cold here with a wind chill close to -30C. Even though we had the heat turned right up, it was quite chilly in the apartment. I woke up in the middle of the night and piled quilts on top of the duvet again. That makes it very cozy and warm.

This weekend I hope to make the stars for Butterfly Stars and get at least another 12 or 16 butterfly hexagons ready. Whirling Arches blocks are calling to me too — I’d love to get another one of those blocks made and, of course, work on Red Delicious apple cores.

And yet another picture of Lester in his kitty bed.



Hexagons and More Hexagons

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Aside from the adventure making 9-patch blocks with the sewing machine on the weekend, I decided to work on the long rows of one-inch hexagons from the various swaps of that shape that have taken place through the Inklingo group. I have three and a half rows of hexagons left to make and then it will just be a matter of joining the rows together. Right now I’m thinking that it would be nice to find a stripe of all colours for the setting pieces around the perimeter once it’s together. I’ll be using half and quarter hexagons to get a straight edge.


I must have needed a hexagon fix, because I also played with these little beauties. These are half-inch hexagons that are from that Inklingo swap. I was going to make the Insanity quilt but have decided against it. I’m not sure where I’m going with these, but I have a vague idea in mind. Once I get more of these 4-hexagon units made and can start playing with layouts I’m hoping the idea becomes more clear. It will be very scrappy as there are all sorts of colours of hexagons from that swap — from browns and tans to shabby chic and everything in between.

Perhaps I will use some half-inch diamonds as connectors and have all these little 4-hexagon units floating on a sea of … well, who knows what colour!

Yet another picture of the boys together. I love the look of Smudge’s eyes in this picture.

Giddy at the Thought of Spring

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I completely got off track this weekend as far as stitching goes. Friday night I worked on Red Delicious apple cores, Saturday I did some stitching on the machine (!), the results of which I’ll show later in the week, but yesterday? Yesterday I played with the new Inklingo Lite collection of the shapes for a 12-inch Drunkard’s Path block.

Drunkard’s Path is one of my favourite blocks. More curved piecing!! I love playing with all the variations. I decided to use these fabrics in honour of spring and am going to call this quilt “Giddy at the Thought of Spring”. I’m undecided whether I will do all the blocks the same or use a variety. Here’s the first 12-inch block done, Whirling Arches. It will be another lap quilt.


What a glorious Sunday we had with temperatures near 4!! I know it was a teaser but we needed that after all those days on end of -20 wind chills. We go back to the -20 wind chills mid-week but at least we had that one day. I had windows open for a while and was even outside with a fall jacket rather than heavy winter one on. I have purposely avoided finding out what the groundhog results were today as it’s very sunny, so I suppose he saw his shadow. I don’t want to know!!

Lester and Smudge are sitting together more and more often. We got this shot of them last night. They don’t stay together very long, and they don’t really fit too well in the chair at once, but we get a huge kick out of them being together like this!


Quilting Over Stitchery??

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As I work on this little baby quilt I’m thinking about how to quilt it. Not having done a quilt with stitcheries in it before, I have no idea what’s the best thing to do. Does one quilt over the stitcheries, just do in the ditch stitching around the block? The hexagons with the butterflies are 4″ from tip to tip, top to bottom and 2″ to each side. As it is a baby quilt which will, I hope, get lots of use, I’d like to quilt it fairly heavily, most likely by machine, to ensure it stands up.

I cropped one of the pictures to show the stitchery hexagons a little bit better. There’s not much room to do any quilting in those blocks unless I do quilt over the stitching. Any advice is more than welcome on this!!


This is another piece I started ages ago using 1″ hexagons and equilateral triangles. As I find a new coloured fabric that I like with it, I add more rows of hexagons and triangles. Currently it’s about 22″. I’m not sure, but I think I may finish off the second blue with enough rounds to make stars in that fabric and then perhaps end it off with a soft yellow. It’s really wonderfully enjoyable mindless stitching, lots and lots of lovely continuous stitching that makes it go together incredibly fast.

I’m going to look through and see if I have a soft yellow that will work with this. I’m not sure about this yet, but I’m thinking this might be an appropriate baby quilt to have done and tucked away for next time.

We had a lot of snow on Wednesday, it snowed a bit more on Thursday and now they’re saying there’s another big storm on the way for Monday/Tuesday?? I cannot believe the amount of snow we’ve had this year already. All I can hope is that as it started early, it will end early and we’ll have spring starting sometime in March. I wonder what the groundhog is going to predict next week.

Yet another picture of the boys together. We see them do this so rarely that we practically fall over ourselves grabbing the camera!

Butterfly Stars

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I’m slowly making progress on the baby quilt. I realized that I need to make more pink and blue stars so progress on the top itself will be stalled for a few days while I stitch some more of those together. The rows actually go together rather quickly if I have all the pieces ready, so I’m hopeful I’ll have the little top done by sometime mid-February.


Lester looking very thoughtful.

Smudge has developed a new habit during this cold, cold winter. He’ll disappear and we’ll be looking all over for him, only to find that he has burrowed under the duvet on the bed. He’ll stay in there for hours!

Many Things

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If you’re looking for the winner of the kit for this in the Whirl Into Winter giveaway, go to this post. Thanks, Debi, for organizing this. It was fun and I discovered a lot of blogs I had never been to!


A huge thank you to Uberstitch who contacted me yesterday and is sending me another piece of this glorious red for the Red Delicious apple core quilt! I am oh, so grateful! I am really thrilled that I’ll be able to complete that apple core quilt with the one red fabric as the red apples.


I have a series of apple core quilts planned now. Along with the Red Delicious (the beginnings of which are shown below), there will be a Golden Delicious, a Granny Smith, a Pink Lady, an apple cart (all apple colours), an apple pie which will have a scalloped edge done in a beige/brown sort of print that will look something like a pie crust crimped at the edges and who knows what else. I am spending altogether too much time checking out apple colours at the fruit stand. Most of them will be wall hangings, but Red Delicious is definitely going to be a good-sized lap quilt.


I love this picture of Lester. If you look closely, you can see a drop of water on his chin. He had just been having a drink of water before he jumped up on the windowsill.

Help Needed!

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This is the red fabric I’m using for the Red Delicious apple core quilt.

In my normal fashion, I bought only a FQ of it. There’s no selvage on the FQ and so I have no information about it — the manufacturer, the name of the design, nothing. As my plan is to keep the red the one constant in the apple core quilt, I’d really like to find out any information I can about this fabric so that I can try to find a bit more of it. If you click on the photo, you’ll see the close-up and lots of detail.

I’d really appreciate any information about it that would help!

In the ongoing saga of DH’s run-in with the dental hygienist, yesterday morning he felt that the infection was still there and possibly getting worse. He spoke with his cardiologist, who also confirmed that there is no way the Cavitron should ever be used when he’s having his teeth cleaned, and the cardiologist recommended he see his GP again. That he did yesterday afternoon and is on yet another antibiotic for a further 7 days. I am really quite concerned that this infection is being so persistent, especially taking into consideration that he takes antibiotics an hour before he goes to the dentist and a few hours after. I’m wondering about the sterilization techniques they utilize on their instruments.

The shots of the two boys together on the window included this shot:

And this one — I think Lester was wanting the windowsill view to himself.

Update: A piece of this wonderful fabric has been found and will be on its way to me tomorrow. I am so impressed and so very thankful for the blogging community. And, in particular, thank you Uberstitch!

Apple Cores!!

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Last night I got about 30 pieces of fabric ready to print and this morning, as I had my coffee, I printed them all with the little apple core shapes from the new Inklingo collection. I’m making a small black and white with a few accents of red apple core quilt.

Curved piecing is something I absolutely love. So I was really excited when the apple core collection was released yesterday.

I printed one sheet with a darker ink colour than I would normally have chosen so that I could get this picture. With the matching points on the stitching line, putting these apple cores together is going to be pure joy; exactly the type of stitching I need this weekend — simple, mindless fun!! This will be my pick-up project when I just want to stitch something for the pure fun of it.



The snow has begun to fall, it’s quite chilly and I couldn’t be happier! Time to put a good movie on and settle in for some fabulous stitching.

There are worksheets in the new collection as well, so I’ve printed out the 25% size one and will use it to plan the placement of the red apple cores. Once I decide on the placement, I’ll know how many of long-half and short-half cores to print so that I can have a straight edge on the sides.

As usual, while I was printing, Lester was on the windowsill watching the printer. It is so funny to watch him watch it. Then he saw the little notifier icon from my e-mail program jumping up and down at the bottom of the screen and he almost had his nose on the screen. DH is thinking of getting a new Mac. If he does, I’m half tempted to put his older one on a level where Lester could get real close and see if he figures out moving the mouse actually does something.


Happy New Year!

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2008 was a pretty good year. There have been adventures for Daphne.

Reading time for the bears on the roof garden.

Time to play with black and white and all sorts of other coloured fabrics.


Cameras with which to take countless pictures of kitties


And most of all time to visit so many blogs and be inspired by all the amazingly creative talented quilters out there!

I wish you all a Happy and Healthy and Safe New Year.

Christmas Trees

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Remember these 3 little stacks of fabric pieces …

… that eventually turned into this little stack and a bit?


They turned into 3 of these little Christmas Tree wall hangings. I used a different white or cream background for each one and alternated the green and red peeper and border on one. I loved putting these together. This is the perfect Christmas tree for a household like ours, where there are big kitties with big paws who would destroy a tree in short order.


One of the three trees was for us and I’m going to decorate it with some tiny ornaments. I think each year I’ll add an ornament or decoration.

It was fun making the trees. Even more fun was making the pattern for them! That was my first attempt at writing a pattern. I learned a lot doing that and plan to write a few more patterns this year.

Smudge found the whole thing quite exhausting. Chasing Christmas wrapping paper is very demanding.

Lester looks like he was about to — hmm, yawn?