Sunny Weekend

Well we're finally getting some decent weather! When we do, we like to be outside, of course. So this weekend I puttered around the yard - I'm not much of a gardener - Joe is the gardener in this house - but I do occasionally provide some slave labour of the weeding and watering variety. But when I've had enough of that, I plop my Princess self down on the deck. This weekend I was working on some hand quilting out on the deck!

Remember these guys?

Yup - the dancers - as yet unnamed - but I have a few ideas about that.

Anyway - I decided to try my hand at hand quilting (pun intended!). I had picked up a little quilting frame at the Red Deer quilt show.

This is it here. It seems to work pretty well. Of course as it's the only one I've used, I have nothing to compare it to. It's oak and the woman I bought it from said her husband made them in their garage. I thought it was appropriate to have a hand made oak quilting frame rather than a mass produced plastic one. Her son was demonstrating hand quilting technique, too - he looked to me to be about 10. I can't imagine my boys ever doing that!

Anyway - here are a couple of close up pix of my first hand quilting attempt. I'm actually pretty pleased with it. The stitches are a bit long - I'll have to work on shortening them up. But for these guys, I think the long stitches are actually OK. It is sort of in sync with the rustic look I'm going for.

I sustained a "quilting injury" - I managed to cut my finger when I was snipping a thread. Talk about being a spaz! I've never done THAT before in over 40 years of sewing! And I resorted to using a thimble today when my finger just got too sore. And I have a rather impressive looking blister on my index finger - same one I cut - so altogether, my fingers are a mess! I'll need a few days off now!

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Now here are the Navajo blocks that I have finished so far - four. I'm liking them better now. I thought at first they might be too dark, but it's growing on me. I had enough of the orange print for one side of triangles for six of nine blocks. I'll put the orange down two outside rows - it will be three by three. These blocks are very large - about 16 inches square.

The other thing to note is that all the pix in this post were taken outside in the sun - no flash - so the colours look more like they actually are.

Orange with red.

Red only.

So that's it for now.

I'm still working on getting the Heritage Park quilt show pix up - there are quite a few of them. Maybe by next weekend.

Have a great week in the meantime!