Revealing the Past

It has been such a long time since I contributed to my blog. But I hope the next few entries will make up for the time away. I was working on projects that have jumped all around. Here is the late summer as it had unfolded.
Had to go to the Pictou Agricultural Fair to see all there is to see.

We got to work and insulated my studio. Now we have got the pine plank floor down and in the spring we will board up the walls and peak.

More tomorrow.

Keeping up appearances

Well here are my final choices for the quilting of the blocks and borders. 

I wanted to stay as close to the nautical theme as I could and so a compass rose gave me the most straight lines for this novice quilter. 

The quilting pattern on the right is once again mainly straight lines and star shapes, but quilting advice was to incorporate curves or circles into triangle and squarish blocks. So following that advice and still hoping to stay away from having to quilt curves, this block was chosen.The quilting pattern below is a sister to the one on the right, chosen for the reason of star shape, curves in a square and hopefully simplicity in quilting.

These stars will then fill in the block borders. I have one more block to include...this is the secondary top and bottom border. As you can see I will just reduce the size of the compass rose and use it here. I was trying to keep the variety of designs simple, but each block is so different that I felt the same quilting designs would not work.

I could not find templates for quilting and that is why I chose the above designs. I really didn't want to spend a lot of time cutting plastic templates and got the expert advice from Dales Fabric department in Amherst Nova Scotia. Thank you Doreen. She recommended this new product Transdoodle. It reminds me of the paper we used to us to transfer sewing darts on our dress patterns. At first I was reluctant to buy what may have been a no good gimmick. But Doreen opened the tube and we tried it out. It works beautifully and I can transfer each block as I proceed in my quilting. In theory all of this reads fairly well. But as I am finding out, time will tell.

The quilt is all basted together and it took me 5 hours. My darling dearest is down with a bad summer cold so I listened to In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan for the whole 5 hours. Very good company he was too!

Being in the Present

Well, I was just getting myself into the present moment as a practice, while weeding an annual flower bed at work, just breathing in and centering myself to the task ahead. Ahhh, peace. Then this lovely gift appeared within the greenery. I swear, if I had not been practicing mindfulness and being careful, I would not have seen her there amount the plants. She stayed there all the time I was working on the bed. (Again cautiously). But all ability to focus on my breath had been replaced with Dragonfly quilts in beautiful colour on a white background, some snails, frogs, plants, fish, yeah all of the healthy Eden stuff.

This is for you world. We very are glad to garden organically.

On the nautical quilt....still trying to choose which quilting design to use in the blocks. I am going through the Readers Digest 1000 Quilting Designs and so far have picked out about 25 motifs. I make a vow today that I will have the quilting patterns picked by July 9th, the beginning of my summer holiday. This means I will have time to start quilting. Wish me luck.

Coming clean about the process

Sewww, for the last while I have been working on "The Nautical" quilt. This is how I pieced it together the first time. I really had not noticed that the four rows and columns weren't really truly balanced. The rhythm is just off. But it looks nice and lively.

Sewwww now I have flipped the top two rows. I can see how it is more calm and steady. I would not have been aware of the issue if I had not looked at the pictures I took.

All I have left to add to the quilt top is a bit of light blue along the sides and do a row similar to the blue and yellow on the bottom row to the top. Then I have to decide in what manner to quilt the top. I think, since this is my 3rd attempt at quilting and my first full sized quilt, I will do something like echo or stitch in the ditch for the blocks and some chain link type of motif in the sash.

Any suggestions?

I guess if you put it out there, it will appear.

Well, wonders never cease. I titled my blog Studio Dreamin' because my dream was to one day have a studio of my own. I wanted my own place to be me, have friends drop by, and surround myself with creative elements. All of this inspired by the beautiful and generously instructional blogs I have been following on the world wide web. An especially loud shout out to Happy Zombie and Quiltsalott.

Two weeks ago I got my studio! Trust me, it was a large and unexpected gift from my darlin' dearest. Here are the photos.

Hmmm. I see the leaves have sprouted out on the trees too. So now I must get down to the serious work ahead. Quilting, knitting, sewing, spinning and weaving. Who will weed the garden?

Coming together slowly

I woke up very early this morning finding myself with time and energy to blog. I like it!

The new quilt is coming together slowly. I have much to learn but I accept the small mistakes on the path of learning. When copying the measurements for the blocks I made a mistake on the Grandmothers Favorite. It was supposed to be the same size as the other two, ten inches square, but because of the mistake it is about nine inches square. It took some time and compromise toward imperfection, but it turned out all right. Now I have to add some border strips and start the quilting.

Whoa, what happened to the time?

I'll tell you what happened to the time. I lost one of my wood double pointed that I was using for my endpaper fingerless gloves and COULD NOT work with anything but bamboo or wood. But I had to wait 2 weeks before any of the knitting shops had 2.75mm back in stock. Picked them up yesterday and got back at it.

In the meantime I was working some more on my first grown up size quilt. Here is the laboratory. Like all good labs, there is much research going on in the form of working around boo boos.