Sunday Stash

Well, I’m certainly a sucker for a sale ! The local fabric shop and by local I mean the one that is only 35 miles down the highway, sent out temptation flyers about a half price fabric sale. Of course there was something that was desperately needed in town that day ( well, not really, I had just been 2 days before). I just went into look, ha ha. These two caught my eye:

They are from a Red Rooster collection called “Gaslight”.

I decided to look around a bit more, sort of as a learning experience to not choose fabrics all from one collection. These seemed about right:

left to right: Oasis by Paintbrush Studio, Suede by P&B Textiles, Henry Glass print & far right is a Benartex print. I am not seeing the proper colour on my screen but in person these blues have a touch of teal in them and really go nicely with the main print. I think the second from the right is a christmas print but I don’t think anyone will notice.

That fabric shop gets alot of Henry Glass fabric in – does anyone know if that’s any relation to Alison Glass? Actually, maybe not… why would she go with Art Gallery if it was ??

Then I needed some lights, so I went with light green:

I like the top print quite a bit, it’s the right tint and the print will add interest/scale contrast but the fabric itself isn’t very good quality. It has a weird feel to it – almost like it is full of sizing, it has a fairly good weave to it just not a supple hand like good quilting cotton. Taking that all into consideration I restrained myself to .5 meter of that and also bought a similar colour in a better quality quilting cotton. When making the final fabric selection I’ll just use one of the greens, not both.

 

That brown peeking out is from Denyse Schmidt’s Hadley collection which I already had in my stash. I also have a good tone-on-tone cream and a solid light blue ( Kona Blueberry ) that matches perfectly with the main prints but I forgot to include them in the pictures.

There they are, all together. I’ve been thinking about making a table topper for a friend but haven’t got much of a plan. I could do this again, the bigger one. But I would like to try something new. I’d appreciate any suggestions with links to good tutorials. The comment place is up at the top near the date.

Thanks so much for stopping by. Hope you are having a good weekend.

linking up with Mollie Sparkles for Sunday Stash.

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Busy as a …

You got it, Bee ! They are every where, even in my house. I was surprised to find this guy crawling around in my son’s lunch tote when I went to load it up the other morning.

When I took him outside to release him he was quite disorientated. It gave me time to run in and get my camera to show you how big he is. The size of a dandelion flower !

Anyways, that also reminded me that I hadn’t shown you these trivets/potholders that I paper pieced awhile back.

It’s a free pattern by Amy of badskirt, you can find it here.

I wanted to put a border around them to make them a little bigger and did a quick pictorial on how I did it:

Easy peasy and no Y seams !

I put a layer of batting and a layer of insulbrite so that is why they look kind of puckered but they’re more puffy that puckered in person.

We finished seeding last night !! I’m sure there are a few potholes ( places that were too wet to get into earlier ) that my husband may go back and seed. But for the most part, the crop is in. Now comes ‘spraying’, which goes on and on…

I have seen on the news that Texas is getting waaay too much rain. We could sure take some of that moisture off their hands, it’s getting quite dry here. Oh yeah, and we had a touch of frost last night, jeeze !

Send some rain our way, if you can spare some, we’d bee happy about it 😉

I’d love it if you left a comment, it’s up at the top by the date.

Have a great weekend. Linking up with Amanda @ CrazyMomQuilts.

The faster I go, the behinder I get

I’ve been pretty busy helping out with the seeding operation going on at our farm during these past few weeks. I have been trying to squeeze a little sewing in here and there, though. This crib sized quilt has been basted and ready for quilting since last November ! I decided to quilt it in a meander/stipple and set about doing just that knowing that I would probably only be able to do it in short sessions. The quilting went fairly well and soon I was trimming and squaring up the quilt, ready to sew on the binding and that’s when I noticed this incorporated onto back…

and this

I keep a collection of small scraps of fabric to the right of my machine to use as ‘spiders’ when I am starting to piece. I use these because my Bernna cannot be deprogramed from taking the securing stitches at the start of sewing – how annoying. You would think that a machine specifically made for quilters wouldn’t do that. Anyways, that’s how the little bits got sewn to the back of my quilt – they were picked up and sewn onto the back as I moved the quilt around FMQ’ing. I really should have cleared off my space before starting… but the faster I go, the behinder I get ! Has this ever happened to you ? Anyways, here it is:

    and the back             

My daughter helped me with a quick photo shoot out on the railroad tracks. We were short on time and unfortunately the light wasn’t very good. This is the only full shot of the front I have so I guess it will have to do.

                             

The fabric is called Cruiser Boulevard you know, transportation/traffic theme ??? Photos on the railroad tracks beside Saskatchewan’s second busiest highway was supposed to go with the theme of the fabric. The funny thing about living in the middle of nowhere is that you have so much space to work with, well, things tend to get lost in the landscape ! So, what you probably can’t see from these photos, well maybe the one with the quilt in the tree, is that the layout of the blocks echoes some of the design elements in the fabric. I was so happy to stumble upon Jera’s free quilt pattern and realize that it was perfect for this bundle of fat quarters. Jera has lots of other great free patterns on her site as well.

Edited to add: There has been some concern in the comment section about the location of my second photo shoot. Thank – you for your concern but please, let me assure you, I am not a reckless person. We can see up the tracks 2 miles and down the tracks at least 4 miles. The train engineer is required to blast his horn at every crossing which is every 1 mile. These tracks are only for freight trains and the traffic is light and not too speedy. So we can hear and see any train coming well in advance. I mentioned that “we were short on time”, because of other commitments, not that there was a train coming. All of my ‘children’ are in their 20’s and if I ever get a dumb idea, they are the first to let me know !

I love to hear from you, please leave a comment. The comment link is up at the top of the post by the date. Linking up with Amanda for Finish it up Friday @ CrazyMomQuilts

The Farmer’s Wife

No, not the sampler quilt… me, I’m a farmer’s wife.

One of my regular reader’s, Allison, asked that I post occasionally about what we are doing here on our farm. So, since we began seeding yesterday I thought it would be a good time to start. In the weeks leading up to actually getting onto the land many long days are spent making cropping plans, getting equipment ready, buying seed, taking seed to get cleaned, ect. Some of this is very slow methodical work and doesn’t make for good blog posts !

One of the first spring tasks in good land husbandry is harrowing. This is done to close up the fissures caused by freezing, thawing and snow run off. The tines also break up the straw and distribute it across the land and helps prevent moisture loss. In this case my son is also applying micro nutrients. These harrows are 82 feet wide.

You can click on any of these pictures and make them bigger

We always begin our planting with peas. These are a field pea as opposed to the garden variety pea. These are mostly ground into flour and exported. This is done with our airseeder and the picture below shows my husband calibrating the drill. This has to be done each time you switch to a different seed and insures that the seeds are placed in the ground with proper depth and distance from each other.

The seed and fertilizer are loaded into the separate tanks. There are a series of openings that the material falls into and then a powerful fan shoots them down the tubes and into the openers and places the seed and fertilizer into the ground.

 here I am standing on the upper platform to give you a view into the rear tank and the seed peas. The drill is 61 feet wide.

This final shot is a look across the field back into our yard.The lilac bushes are just starting to leaf out and the larger trees with in the yard are as well. Those structures you see are the grain drying system, grain bins for storage and the quonset for equipment storage.

Thanks for stopping by !

Sunday Stash for May

Hello, it’s been a tough week and I’m glad that tomorrow brings a new week with lots of positive potential. Speaking of positive potential; what do you think I should do with these ?

Mad About Patchwork had some really good sales last month and I picked up all this Hadley by Denyse Schmidt for a song. Well, o.k., if any of you heard me sing you would probably beg me to stop so lets just say that the fabric was a great bargain ! I have to say that this fabric collection is really special when you see it in person, I am so happy with these new additions. Here’s a close up of one of my favourites, the way it’s been printed it looks like a shadow effect happening:

I don’t have a Hadley plan but hopefully I have bought enough that I can make a quilt and maybe some smaller items too. This is the way I usually purchase fabric and it certainly has it drawbacks. How ’bout you ? Do you find a pattern and then buy the fabric or the other way around ?

I also bought a few half yards of linen mochi dot in putty, charcoal and turquoise. The texture on this is wonderful and I think it will make a nice contrast to the bottom of some zipper bags I want to sew… someday. Probably when there is snow on the ground again ! These last ones I actually do have a plan for. The project doesn’t have to be done until august so I should have enough time 😉

The turquoise dots are from Bonnie and Camille’s Daysail collection and the purple ones are from Biology by Sarah Watson. Kind of funny that the project is for a chemistry major !

Thanks for having a look, please leave a comment, the clickie thing is up at the top by the date. linking up with the fearless leader of the Glitterati, Mollie Sparkles .

Experimental Sewing & what to do when SGHW

I recently bought the specialty ruler Hex n More. The ruler comes with a small booklet that includes strip cutting instructions and very basic piecing instructions. I was disappointed no starter project was included with the ruler. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t have any problem with paying people for their ingenuity but her patterns are not available for digital download and this makes it very difficult for someone (like me) that lives in the middle-of-nowhere to get her hands on a pattern and get using the ruler !

Hence, the experimental sewing. I tried the hexagon and triangle combination and this is what I came up with:

I did enjoy using the ruler because it makes the cutting of the fabric quite quick and accurate. The resulting pieces sew together easily.

But then what to do with it ??? I fooled around cutting and sewing and re-arranging until I had used up most of these scraps I had delegated to “experimental” sewing. Of course I then felt obligated to come up with a use for the results that was not a potholder !

Ta Da…

a journal cover !

I was so pleased that I decided the above SWHW ( something went horribly wrong ) project could benefit from being transformed into a journal cover as well. If I do say so myself; a very slick way of getting rid of the fact I somehow lost my points in the coral coloured round of this nested churn dash block !

I hope to re-visit the nested churn dash pattern at some point and will stay a little more focused on accurate cutting and piecing, apparently it’s quite important 😉

If you have any SWHW projects that could use a reassignment, I used Rachel at Stitched in Color’s tutorial for the journal cover.

Thanks for dropping in. I’d love to hear any comments you may have, the thing to click on is up at the top by the date.

Have a lovely weekend !

linking up with Crazy Mom Quilts Finish it Up Friday.