Resolution time!

Happy New Year!  Cue the noisemakers, confetti and all that silly stuff. I hope you had a fantastic holiday, saw all your family and friends, and really enjoyed the season. Here is a picture from our holiday, a view from about 10 minutes from my home, it is taken in Ottawa overlooking to river and into Quebec;

A new year is here and that is fantastic! This is the time of year for resolutions, goals, fresh starts and for quilters... new Block- Of - The - Month clubs! Yippee! To start of the year I have joined Amy Gibson's Sugar Block Club again and I cannot wait to get started. Today I went to the fabric shop (with my 3 and half year old in tow) and chose the fabrics we will use for the year. I picked 6 different fabrics ranging in values and complexity of print. I steered clear of absolute solids though, and this was new because normally I use a couple prints and mix with solids, but not this time. My neutral fabrics look solid from far away, but are actually small prints. This is what I chose:

As I said earlier this is the time for resolutions, and unlike most people, I tend to stick to my resolutions. Last year I decided I wanted to be a better mom, a more involved mom. I really felt at the end of the year that I accomplished that. I feel very close to my daughter :). I also achieved some of my quilting goals! I learned paper piecing this year and tried many other techniques I am proud of. I joined a guild, I made quilty friends and I presented my work for the very first time to the guild. 

This being said it is time for this years resolutions! This year I have some specific goals for myself, on a personal level;

1. Cook  more meals, avoid getting stuck in kitchen ruts. This includes homemade snacks for my daughter, rather than things like goldfish crackers, maybe a homemade oatmeal muffin instead. 

2. Help my husband more! This includes everything from making sure his office shirts are ready to kissing him goodbye at the door. (Making his lunch wouldn't hurt either) 

3. Take time to reflect and live in the moment, not look forward so much. Eat, pray, love sort of thing. 

These are all personal goals... now for the good stuff! The quilting goal! This year is the year of.... ACCURACY! No more rushing, no more jamming it through the machine. I have a beautiful sewing space that is well lit, well organized and decorated with some fun things. My work needs to reflect that I like to take my time in that room and not rush. I am very proud of all the techniques I learned (or invented in the case of my light up quilt..see above) and I challenge everyone to learn one thing this year they swore they would never try.


Happy 2014!

Baby its cold outside.

I quilted this quilt based on the 12 inch blocks, ignoring the rest of the peicing and just did a large motif in each of the 12 inch blocks. I really love the look of this and would do it again. 

I used the bamboo batting! I told you I would and I did! I actually really enjoyed the bamboo batting for the middle of quilt. It was soft, incredibly warm and not bulky at all. I would say everything is positive about bamboo batting except for one small thing. The bamboo batting clung really tightly to the quilt top and bottom. That was great, but if I have one quilting flaw it would be the fact that I struggle getting my quilt backs flat and tight when basting and I tend to have a couple small pleats in the back. Maybe this will be my quilting resolution this New Years. Overall, I would recommend the cotton/bamboo blend batting, if you can afford it (or if you find a great deal like I did!).

The quilt I made for a certian Great-Grandmaman. It has the bamboo batting inside. The whole quilt was paper peiced. Free motion quilted.

Christmas is nearing and today I baked 8 dozen cookies. That sounds like a lot of cookies for a family of merely 3 people and a large cat who is not allowed cookies. I am dividing them in half, some for Christmas Eve with my fantastic French Canadian in-laws, and the other half for us. My house smells of ginger and cinnamon!

My daughter sewed these litte stocking decorations with her Grandmaman
She even used her buttons from her large collection.

Sewing last year at this time was simply crazy. I had so many projects not in completion that I was intending to gift that I would sew until 2am, then go to work the next morning. I can proudly say that this year..... I ....am.... DONE! VOILA! I want to dance it makes me so happy. I am so excited that I can enjoy what Christmas is really about... family, our Christianity, tradtiton, and not have to stress over the material things like presents and lists of people and gift cards.


This year my Christmas gifts included 5 or 6 full quilts, place mats, table runners, pj's, the whole lot. I even finished my 3 year old daughters Christmas dress in plenty of time. This year the dress happened like this. "Chloe? Where are  you?" I said at the cutting table of a small fabric store near our home. "Right here Mom...and look... I found fabric that is PURPLE AND GOLD AND SPARKLY!!! AHHH" Replied my darling daughter. At least it was on sale? It is actually pretty cute and when she brings me these things, (like a large bolt of fabric almost as big as her, when she carried it, you couldn't even find her!) I tend to take it as a small challenge... sort of like one of those TV game shows where you get these ingredients or these decorations and they send you on some crazy mission.

With all this said and done, tomorrow my darling daughter is at 'double school' meaning she goes for the morning and afternoon on special Fridays (getting ready for full day kindergarten next year!!). So you know what I am going to do? I am going to make a tree skirt out of the leftover purple and gold and sparkly fabric! We are cutting the tree down this weekend and we are going with a purple and gold theme this year. I try to embrace whatever my daughter is into. This year was the year of purple.

With the new year coming I am very excited to start some new BOM (Block of the Month clubs). Of course the first one will be Amy Gibsons, she has promised us a new challenge of improving ourselves along the way, small challenges type of thing. Should be a lot of fun. Now it is time to sit back, enjoy a peppermint mocha, choose a cookie from the 8 dozen on my counter and start cleaning the scrap-filled sewing room.

Bamboo? Who knew!

Christmas is still coming. Not everything is done by December first, we are very close but just not quite there!

This week I finished my wall hanging for Christmas, very creatively named by my husband... "Christmas"... he is so creative. I made this wall hanging by taking a rectangle of plain backing, taking about half a meter of red Christmas print fabric, and basically jumbling around until a tree formed!

I drew a raw triangle on the back of the red fabric then just cut out blobs that filled out most of the triangle. I then attached Heat n Bond fusible lite to the red fabric. Apply that to your plain rectangle of backing fabric, applique around the shapes and voila! 

I finished it off with some free motion swirls and a string of battery powered LED mini lights! I layed out the lights on the back of the quilt, marked with a pin where every light landed and sewed a buttonhole there where I could pop the light through. 

This was fun and I promised myself (and my husband hoped) that this would be my last trip to the fabric store this week before Christmas. I needed some material for a border, some backing, thread and maybe some batting (depending on sales). I worked at said fabric store last year so I knew Dec sales are good. 

I found all the fabric I needed and turned around to see a big red sign and some little stickers on some fancy looking rolls of batting. I grabbed the tag, flipped it over and read "bamboo batting, needle punched, 13$/m. This stuck me hard. Normally this batting costs around 28$ per metre (remember Canadian measurements!). I decided right then and there I would try it! This quilt is for my husbands grandmother for Christmas and if anyone deserves fancy batting, she does. I have never ever used this before so it will be a very big learning experience. 

http://www.wildfibres.co.uk   (raw bamboo 'wool')

I am very excited about using this eco-friendly, supposably luxurious, batting. I will keep you posted on how this goes!

This leads me to the last topic today... My husband always asks me "What do you need at the fabric store today?" I always answer with my list and he will inquire about my projects and offer help or suggestions. He is a pretty supportive guy. Also, he is kind of a pushy guy and always says with a smile "Will you show this to the guild?" I normally answer with "doubtful...maybe...I don't know!". LOL. Anyways, it kind of sparked this blog post. If I had not had gone to the fabric store this week, I would have never seen the bamboo batting, I would never have thought of trying it, I would never have had the conversation with the sales lady. Quilting is very much about the community, and it has really become one of the best parts of my life, it has truly become and art that I am proud of.