Blogging Regularly or Not

February 26, 2013
Happy Birthday, Ian - my nephew - not that he's reading this yet!  I'll follow up with him via email and at a birthday party for his mother this weekend!
I have to go out and find my camera in my sewing room and update this blog properly!  Now I know and can say that I'm going to be lost to this blog on the third week of each month from Sept. till June.  That's because on that week I have my quilt club meeting and my guild meeting - too much going on.  This week I presented the program to my guild, the Island Quilters Guild, on how to make the Treasure Bags for the Canadian Quilters Association (www.canadianquilter.com) annual quilt show in Penticton, B.C. and then on Thursday, I was on the 'lunch' committee for my club, the Happy Quilters. 
So...from now on, I'll have to prepare before this week or be 'lost in transition'. 

Weekend - Blocks and Quilting

February 9, 2013
No football on the weekends anymore (lost my Superbowl bet with my brother!  Same bottle of wine keeps on going back and forth), so I can sew and quilt
Still quilting (30 min. at a time) on the little labyrinth quilt - doing pebbles, so it's hard on the shoulders after a while, even with reminding myself to relax.

Also trying to finish a bunch of blocks ( members from my guild would probably recognize these).  You can guess what the finished block will look like and I'll show them when I finish.  Needless to say, there are a LOT of half-square triangles - 16 for each block and they are each 3" square when trimmed.  I came up with a way to deal with all the trimming time - boring as it is....I exercise while trimming.  Every time I trim a block, I have to hold in my tummy and tuck in my backside.  It seems to be working as a plan.  And I can feel that I'm actually exercising once in a while as well!
One other item on the list for the weekend is a new ebook cover.  I made one and didn't really like it, plus I hadn't added a pocket for the cables.   At a Fabricland sale I bought 2 'last sale' drapery panels that I'm using for a new laptop bag and ebook cover and other travel items - I'll be so co-ordinated!  I had to buy the one I saw because it had huge grommets along the top so it's perfect for a bag, so then I looked for a co-ordinating one for the lining.

The green is the fabric with the grommets and it is the lining for my ebook cover.  The other piece will be a pocket on the outside for the charger and USB cord.

Scrappy Four-patch blocks

February 1, 2013
It's been a busy week!  Last weekend - shovelled snow then Monday had to do it all over again.  Missed my friends on Monday because the last time we had snow like that, we build a snowman in the middle of the road - just a little surprise for the snowplow driver!  (a friend)
All that is to say that it's been a week of snow shoveling (Tuesday and Wednesday brought mild weather, but that just meant that the snow build up slowly slid off our steel roof, so that gave me the job of shoveling off the deck!) with sewing here and there.

Step 2 of our club's current mystery quilt was to make about 230 2 3/4" four-patch blocks.  Since I chose to make this quilt completely scrappy, I had cut up 460 coloured squares so that meant sewing each onto a white strip, then cutting, trimming and sewing together the pairs - much different than the efficient Fons and Porter method of making four-patch blocks that I usually use.