Spring Hexagon Flowers

Posted on March 2, 2010 by Quiltobsession

It felt like spring on Monday. So I decided to make a few of hexagon flowers in the spring colours. As I stitch using hexagons that have been printed with Inklingo templates right on to the back of the fabric, I can put together 4 of these flowers in about 2 hours. No basting, no whip stitching. Just a plain running stitch and lots of continuous stitching when it comes to joining the outer ring to the centres. These are made using 1″ hexagons.

This is how the back looks — which is another reason I like this method. It’s easy to distribute the bulk of the seams by pressing like this:

I know I’m tempting fate by writing this, but it truly does feel as though spring is starting. The air had a different feel to it on Monday. Even though it’s nowhere near warm, the real chilly bite in the air seems to have gone. We’re even going to have highs this week that may see us reach 6 or 7 Celsius. One of our neighbours swears that we cannot say we’re out of the woods as far as winter goes until March 17. Usually I listen to her, but not this year. This year I’m putting on the rose-coloured glasses and saying spring is here. And oh, how I hope I’m right! Even the cats seem to be showing a bit of spring fever and lots of activity.

The voting is now open for the Golden Quilter Awards. If you go to Insights from SewCalGal here, you can vote for your favourite nominees in the categories of Best Designer, Best Teacher/Instructor, Best Author, Best Quilt Store (Physical), Best Quilt Store (Online), Best Long Arm Quilter, Most Innovative New Product (physical item), Most Innovative New Product (software) and Most Influential Person in the World of Quilting To date, aka “Lifetime Achievement.”

The boys were very much in lounge mode today, as they were getting over the past 17 days of Olympic activity. I think Smudge’s pose almost qualifies as one of the “where is his head” photos.

Our ISP is having issues once again. While some e-mails are getting through, others aren’t. As of midnight Monday, all e-mails that I have received have been answered. If I haven’t answered an e-mail from you, it means that it hasn’t arrived in my inbox. With any luck, this gets cleared up quickly!

Rainbow Beginnings

Posted on April 22, 2009 by Quiltobsession

The rainbow for the Sky Quilt is starting with greens. The first 3 greens are together now. Next come the yellows. This is wonderful fun– lots and lots of lovely continuous stitching. I’m using the diamonds from the Inklingo 6″ LeMoyne Star collection and have a feeling my rainbow is going to end up rather large. It will be the centre of the quilt with the 4 corners taken up by the various sun blocks (see below).

The other fabrics that will be added to the rainbow are shown in the order they will appear.

These are the four blocks that will be in the corners of the Sky Quilt. Some of the fabrics in the various sun blocks will also be in the rainbow.

While I was printing all sorts of shapes, I decided to print about 600 more of the .25″ hexagons. There are approximately 180 of the little hexagons in this tin now. To give you an idea of size, the tin measures around 3.75″ by 2.25″. I will be making hexagon diamonds with these and when there are enough will put together a doll’s quilt.

This is one of my favourite photos of Lester, perched on the loveseat.

I’ve told the story before about Smudge’s rather odd drinking habits. This picture tells the story. It was snapped just seconds after he had lifted his face out of the water bowl. If you click on it to see the large size photo, you will see he’s soaking wet. This is Smudge’s preferred way to drink water. Makes for rather a lot of paper towel mop-ups, but is endlessly entertaining.

One more day of rather cool temperatures and then we hit the warmth. The forecast is for temperatures in the mid 20’s Celsius on Friday and Saturday. I can’t wait!!

Quilting Over Stitchery??

Posted on January 30, 2009 by Quiltobsession

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.