Black Currant Jam... yum

Black Currant Jam.  Picked the currants and made the jam right away.  The two currant bushes produce exactly enough for one batch of jam which is just the right amount to hoard and enjoy sparingly throughout the year until Black Currant day comes again.  Four jars and a bit.  Vitamin C in a jar.  Lovely!

Design Floor on a rainy day...

Well!  I have been zooming along with this quilt!  I noticed Rachel at Stitched in Color talking about Gemstones and I just had to make it.  Amethyst and Peridot to be precise!  This is a quilt I am making for a dear friend and I think she is going to love it!

After many days of really warm sunny days, we had a rainy day today and that meant I could buzz away at the sewing machine all day.  And I did just that!

Other than that, I have messed around with my blog a wee bit.  I followed some great tips from Jenelle's Tech tips for bloggers.  I have now created pages with tutorials, and finishes.  So exciting!  Well, for me anyway.  Tee hee!

What's on your design wall?

Linking up with Judy's Design Wall Monday!

Vintage sheets anyone?

I convinced Husband I needed a thrift store fix today.  He made me a deal.  He would be my thrift store buddy if I would give him one hour of my time to help him trim the grass around our pond, trim the grass on the pond's three little islands and help him dredge the pond weeds a bit from the bottom.  I agreed in a heartbeat.  Hmmm.  Who got the better deal?

I snagged some great vintage sheets.  We even stopped at a garage sale.  I found a set of ... get this... vintage sheet napkins!  Ha!  Nicely hemmed, large dinner napkins.  I have not decided if I will use them as napkins or fabric.

My hand zeroed in on a sweet little Johnson Brothers egg cup.  99 cents! And I could not resist the package of Viceroy Fruit Jar rings.  The package is in perfect condition and it was in a bag of new canning jar rings for $1.99.  Total deal!

And this was the week for fabric.  I found several metres of really great quilting cotton.  I have not even remembered to take pictures of it all.  The blue print is really quite lovely and I think there is about 2.5 metres.  The roses on cream is decor weight and may just become a whole pile of Jane Market Bags.  Just maybe.

Oh... the pond.  Let's just say we both got extremely muddy and Husband had to take off his boots and go for quite the deep wading experience!  And the pond looks fabulous.

Happy weekend!  Linking up with Sophie's Flea Market Finds.

Just a pincushion

I made a pincushion this morning before I went off to have a lunch and whist date with my wonderful, simply fabulous, best-est buddies.  I have been using a thrown together pincushion that I made several years ago.  It fits the bill but I stuffed it with really lightweight floofy stuffing and the pincushion is light as a feather.  This results in several "issues."  Firstly the pins sink right into it and this makes it more difficult to pull the pins out of the cushion.  The other issue is that I often send the pincushion flying into space as I am quilting.  I needed a pincushion with a lot more heft.  So... enter this 6" by 6" number.  I made a simple little 16 patch block with lots of random brights and I even found some quilting text to border it with.  Snazzy!!!!  The back is Happy Butterfly by Sandi Henderson.  I quilting both the front and the back with some batting.  The back has heavy duty straight lines close together.  Then I crammed the cushion and I mean crammed it with all sorts of batting scraps and other random fabric scraps.  Did this work?  Well,  hmmm.  The cushion has fabulous weight now.  If I knock it around while quilting, it will be less likely to go flying across the room but I do find that the batting scraps are not the most pin friendly.  You have to stab the pin into the cushion quite vigorously.  I think if I were to do this again, I would use the batting scraps after and around a inner pillow of  crushed walnut shells.  Yep.  That is what I would do.  In fact I may still do that.  Happy weekend and hope you had a fabulous Friday the 13th!

Thursday in the sun!

Look what followed me home last week?  Eeek!  It is just so cute!  Heather Ross, of course!  Then I found some orange fabric.  I have very little orange fabric in the stash so needed to add to it.  Some Joel Dewberry did the trick along with an orange gingham that eludes me.  

So what is exciting today?  Well, I continued to work away on the Gemstones blocks.  I love the way they are shaping up.  I also signed up for my first ever SWAP!  Yippee!  The modern scrappy bits swap!  It has a timeline that works for me and it has scraps!  My favourite!!!!

I also noticed a fair amount of Facebook traffic on my blog today and noticed that Aurifil has both my Stash mini and my cross string quilts on their Facebook page!!!!  Big excitement!  

Off to quilt guild tonight!  Have a lovely evening!  

Work in progress Wednesday

1)  Well!  I finished my cross string blocks quilt.  Yippee!  Officially off the work in progress list and on the finished quilt list.  I was inspired by a quilt from the Spring Blogger's Quilt Festival and used a bunch of scraps to make this summer time quilt.  I really do like it.  I hung it up on the wood shed for this photo op.  The nice thing about the wood shed is that I can go inside and get a from the back quilt shot.  Fun!  So what can I say about this?  Quilted with Aurifil 50 wt in white.  I followed the diagonal white strips in the blocks and quilted straight lines 1/4" out from the seam lines.  Using my hera marker, I marked lines extending right out through the borders too.  So the quilting lines follow the diagonal clear across the quilt in both directions.

I used a few extra blocks on the back as well as a blue floral from my stash and a little bit of the green from the borders.  .  It works.

2)  I also finished my Stash Mini.  So that is off the list.  This is what summer holidays does for me!  Lots of finishes!

3)  And I am making steady progress on the Gemstones quilt in progress.

Can it be true?  Only one work in progress???  I will have to do something about that!

Linking up with work in progress Wednesday!

Webster the quilt dog, quality control.

A wee finish...

I finished my Stash Mini.  I used both old and new Flea Market Fancy.  Yep.  I used some original Flea Market Fancy.  Eep!  Even cutting such little bits was enough to cause flutters of anxiety.  But I did it!  I was a tad bewildered about how to quilt this puppy and I finally opted for lots of straight lines close together in Aurifil 50 wt in white.  My go to thread, I have to say.  I left the letters free of quilting and I also left the stash pile free.  So there.  Bound in a Nicey Jane stripe which is pretty precious too in my book.  The letters are made with Elizabeth Hartman's new pattern for Refrigerator Magnets Quilt Blocks.  Fun!!!!!

And it is now hung on the wall beside the great wall of fabric.  A fitting location.  And the confession is that when Husband hung it up for me, I realized that the bottom right corner was slightly crooked.  Drat!  This morning, I fixed it by undoing the binding and trimming and resewing the binding.  All better.

Linking up with Fabric Tuesday at Quilt Story.  And will link up with My Precious Quilt Along over at Kelby Sews.