I do love a byline!

I was fortunate to be asked by the lovely editor, Heather at Quilter's Connection Magazine to write an article about the recent GMQG Retreat held in February 2015. Our retreat theme was based on the Japanese Festival of Broken Needles and this article gives you a inside and personal view of how and what our committee did with this theme. My article is in the Summer 2105 issue #24 and can be purchased directly from the website or found locally on the shelves of your local bookstore.

Quilter's Connection is a quilting magazine for the Canadian Quilter. Besides being able to subscribe to the magazine and receive 4 quarterly issues either digitally or in print, you can also sign up for a monthly e-newsletter, read the tip of the day, help yourself to free patterns and keep up with shows and exhibitions all across Canada! And there is a blog! 

Do yourself a favour and review this quality Canadian publication!

Sew Sister Blogathon Canada 2014 hits the Atlantic!

Welcome Blogathon readers!! This week Sew Sisters is celebrating Canadian quilters!

This week is the third Blogathon Canada sponsored by Sew Sisters, a brick and mortar quilt shop located in Toronto, Ontario. I have ordered fabric online from Sew Sisters and found them to be very prompt and efficient. I really enjoy how they wrap all fabric securely in plastic before they box it up to mail. It is great service because this is how Canada Post handles parcels being delivered to me: if it is raining or snowing, parcels are left it in the middle of my driveway and if the sun is shining, parcels are bent and folded and shoved into the mailbox..Fortunately fabric is forgiving!

There are two Maritime hosts today, and both happen to be Linda's! There is Nova Scotia's Linda at Scrapmaster and New Brunswick's Linda at Stitch Lines. Check both of Linda’s blogs out for lots more East Coast bloggers and be sure to comment on both their posts - Sew Sisters has generously provided some great prizes! Thanks Sew Sisters!!

I refer to myself as a "person of fibre"..I love it in its many forms and love working with it any way I can. I quilt, I paint fabric, I surface dye it, I have sewn lots and lots of clothing and household items over the years, I have built costumes for the stage, I can weave and felt, I knit, I can crochet. Breathing does become an issue around sheep (and horses, too, but that's irrelevant here) so I sold my spinning wheel early on in my weaving/spinning career.

As well, I am a sign painter. Hence the name of my blog, Sister of the brush. Sign painting tended to be a predominately male occupation for many years and when I studied at George Brown College (yes, there are legitimate sign writing courses...), we were told the secret to running a successful business was a supportive wife. A wife. No, they never said, supportive husband, spouse, partner, it was wife..Well, that left me and other females in our class high and dry, so it was there and then that we dubbed ourselves, Sisters of the Brush and swore to be our own support system!

I still love wielding a brush. And I incorporate paint and fabric all the time. Painting fabric is soooo much fun! I especially like low immersion dyeing, discharging, sun printing and soy batik and combinations of all techniques!

I am also a longarm quilter. I use pantographs to quilt edge to edge designs, but especially enjoy quilting my own designs.

Thanks for visiting and welcome as always to my regular audience! I appreciate you taking the time to see what I am up to, what I am currently ranting about or seeing what photos I am sharing. Please continue to comment and if you have any issues doing so, please email me. My address is available via my profile which can be found on my sidebar.

A Client Quilt of a Musical Theme

This quilt was such an absolute pleasure to work on.

The piecer, Elaine, is a very skilled seamstress and she did an wonderful job creating this beautiful top as a gift for her grandson on his graduation from high school. Music plays a prominent part in her grandson's life now and will continue to do so, and thanks to his grandmother, he will have this lovely themed quilt to keep him cosy as he begins university this fall.

Elaine told me she liked my swirls and leaves, so swirls and leaves it was! As I free styled over the musical instruments on her carefully pieced blocks, as well as on the pre-printed panels, I tried to create movement and what I imagined to be beautiful music flowing from the horns, pianos and stringed instruments.

I quilted this with a variegated Rainbow thread on the top and a honey gold Glide in the bobbin. I didn’t get a close up of her backing fabric, but it was music bar-lines with notes and treble clefs.

  

A quilt for Kate

This is the second of two quilts I pieced and quilted for friends of my daughter as thank you’s for kindness shown.

The new owner, Kate, chose greens and a simple layout for her top. I passed along some ideas for her to chose from and she liked the quilt she saw made from a quick sketch someone posted on pinterest with cutting dimensions and pressing instructions. The top sewed up quickly! Simone and I collected the selection of greens, I cut it all into 2.5 inch strips and then sewed randomly. Then I chopped these strips into the sizes of sections required and pieced 30 - 16 inch finished blocks. 

The before shot

The back is a lovely black cotton I picked up at Avonport Discount Fabrics last fall as we travelled back home from Yarmouth. It was our 28th wedding anniversary and remember being so grateful that my sweet and ever patient husband would wait while I fabric shopped and then not even ask about yet another bolt of fabric, let alone black fabric, that I was bundling into the hatchback!

I offered Kate something swirly or hearts as the stitch pattern and she chose hearts. Since I had just finished another quilt with hearts, it was an easy pattern to get back into it and I happily quilted away. I still have the binding to do which I will piece from the scraps left over and sew on next week.

I know Kate has just purchased her first home so I am hoping her new quilt will be a well loved addition.

All keyed up! A client quilt

Lately I have been robbing Peter to pay Paul, so to speak. Life has been a delicate balancing act and sometimes sleep just doesn’t come easy with all the file folders in my head filled to capacity and spilling out into my REM time. This morning I was awake far too early and after struggling to stay comfortable and not disturb my husband, I gave in and got up. Did I want to be up and moving before 4 am? No, not really, but sleep was evasive and I knew it was futile to fight. So, with visions of our fridge full of fruits and veggies, I began chopping and sauteing and blending. 

Soon I had a lovely pot of leek soup simmering. 

There was a pasta salad that got pulled together as well, along with my favorite way to start the day, smoothies. There is no set recipe for blender drinks in our house, but today I had a juicy grapefruit that was perfect for the mix and added some zip to our yummy concoctions.

What had been occupying some of my thoughts? Earlier I had received this top from Marie:

Her quilt was the result of a challenge she participated in at one of her guilds. A fellow member brought in a selection of Fons and Porter magazines and challenged the members to complete a project found within the pages. Marie chose to make this wonderful little cuddle quilt for a niece who just happens to be a composer.

The perfect backing!

Marie brought me a 35% higher loft poly batting and using a neutral thread on the bottom and a black thread on top, I quilted a variety of designs to suit the quilt.

I created piano keys in the borders, quilted some stippling in the piano and background, did some straight stitching in the borders and on the red music notes and tried to create a simple design on the keyboard that would reflect a classic style.

I also stitched around the pre-printed keyboard with a monofilament thread to hi-light the individual keys.

There was a bit of discussion about the binding that Marie would add. As with many projects, we sometimes run out of the exact piece we might use because we have bought our fabric with no particular project in mind. Although her first instinct was to sew on a red binding, I think she may go with a solid black.

A refreshing breath of spring air in a customer's quilt

It felt fitting to quilt this beautiful top as the snow fell and while I was wishing and hoping for spring to hurry up and arrive!

My friend, Maureen did a lovely job appliquéing and piecing the top for a customer and I was lucky enough to get to quilt it.

Originally we had discussed some pebbling or cross hatching in those flower centres but as I worked on it, I quickly realized it wasn’t required.

So I stayed with my meandering leaves and loops with bead board on the two outside borders.

I used an neutral shade of my favorite Glide thread for some added sheen. I am very happy with the result and more importantly, so is Maureen.

Day Two with Karen Sievert and Myrna Ficken

About twenty minutes into my class Tuesday morning I had my first ”AHA!” moment! We were taking the class "Feathers and Flourishes" with the amazingly talented, funny, funny Karen Sievert. Karen had just explained a method for quilting feathers and we were working on Gammill Visions. I stood at my machine, took a breath and quilted........feathers!! I think I shouted. And Karen, in her gloriously positive way, got just as excited as I did! lol Well, I took off after that and the piece I worked on in Karen’s class is one of my favorites, because of the comfort level I found so quickly. 

The morning flew by! It was a great feeling, a wonderful release to find the flow of stitching within and just quilt! Karen was an energetic presence racing from one student to another, exclaiming over work, passing out hugs and telling us hilarious stories that had us holding our stomachs. 

Tuesday afternoon saw us quilting on Innova longarms when we took “Feathers, Fun and Formal”, with Myrna Ficken, an APQS educator and dealer. Myrna has a fresh style with lots of angular designs and I have been a fan of her stitching for a while. She is a passionate teacher, wonderfully talented and I really enjoyed taking a class with her. Like Karen, she felt like an old friend that it was great to catch up with. 

Building on my stitching from the classes previous, I had a super productive afternoon as Myrna taught us how to create a variety of styles of feathers and also how to fold and curve feathers into boxes and corners and even pile them on top of one another! 

I think the greatest thing about taking back to back classes with different instructors was that I pulled things from each class and then built on them as I progressed through the week. Some designs I played with in Gina’s class got added to and refined in Karen’s. Then I played with them in Myrna’s class a bit more. By the time Friday rolled around, I had a swash of new designs I knew I would be integrating into my repertoire. The other interesting result of this week of classes and working on a variety of machines was that I am 100% sure I purchased the right machine for me when I bought my APQS Millennium. 

I think Lorette was thinking me a bit (well, probably a whole lot) crazy because at night I would lay my new samples on top of my bed at the hotel as a bedspread and sleep under them. By the time Friday came, I had almost a whole quilt..

Road to California 2014

We have been weighing our bags and carefully calculating what needs to be distributed where in order to get it all home..I have been on the road for 4(!!) weeks and as always, am amazed that the time has gone this quickly and that it is indeed time to again face the realities of the Canadian winter. We are heading into storms, blizzards actually, and have no idea how long this part of our journey will take and what planes will be able to land where..

This blog has been an interesting avenue for me. I have made connections; I have met new people, found old friends and made new ones. One of my newer quilting friends, someone I met through my blog, issued an invitation for me to join her at Road to California this year. After a bit of hesitation, I accepted her offer and because of Lorette and this wonderful opportunity, a whole new world within quilting has opened up to me. My hesitation came partially from an inability to making that big a commitment to my interests, but also partially because I had a nagging feeling that afterwards I would be a changed person. And I don’t know if I was quite ready to face up to and deal with that new person.

Road was amazing. The instructors were absolutely the best. The show quilts were stunning. The merchants mall was everything I needed it to be. The weather was hands down the perfect antidote to the cold and freezing I left behind and I was thrilled to be in bare legs! I met so many wonderful people and we talked quilts and quilting for hours. Lorette and I talked quilting by the hour!!

My hubby joined me after Lorette and I had spent 7 glorious days taking classes and for the last 3 weeks he and I have travelled the southern and central coasts of California in our rented camper van. It has been more than wonderful and we are sad the time has come to leave. But, it is time to head home and start processing all that new knowledge, time to use the materials and supplies I was able to find, time to get back to my long arm. 

I am heading back with a renewed sense of my abilities. The teachers I took classes with made me realize that the power to create my own long arm designs is indeed within me and that the more I hone my skills, the wider the scope of work I will create. The freedom of my recent days has encouraged more creative thoughts than I will be able to complete ever. I made new BFF’s!! (Lorette chuckled I know when I told her I had to google BFF because I couldn’t remember that that second F was for..oh dear....) and I was fortunate to have so many share many wonderful stories with me.

It took this trip and this experience to me to solidify that things will be changing for me....soon.

1 and 1/2 inch strips of goodness!

Any time I have to be creative these days seems to spent either in front of my longarm, or, with a pair of knitting needles in my hands. I am merely a competent knitter, leaving the really creative knitting to my sister, Joanne. I have a couple of standard sock and mitt patterns that I use repeatedly (my sock pattern is so worn, I have packing tape on one side to hold it all together and no, I can’t knit from memory..). 

I have completed quilting another quilt before my kids get home for a Christmas break. This top was made by another local quilting friend and she is actually the woman who gave me my first quilting classes. When we first moved to NB, I left behind a solid group of friends in our little community in Goose Bay, Labrador and I was anxious about keeping busy and making some new connections. My husband’s job took him away long hours (which was slightly ironic because we had moved here so we would have more time to spend together as a family..) and I was kind of house bound with two little ones only 17 months apart. So, I signed up for a quilting class through the local community college and a swimming class at the Y. The swimming was all I needed it to be, but the quilting class didn’t get enough participants for it to be a go. When I asked, the college wouldn’t give out the instructors contact info but they would have her call me (a strange privacy issue in a city of 130,000 where her name is synonymous with quilting).

Well, she did call me and for three glorious hours we chatted and made connections and I found a new friend. While we chatted, my two darling toddlers mopped the kitchen and hallway floors and helped themselves to a cheerio snack! Remember, twenty years ago phones were on cords and my range of motion was about 10 feet in any direction..I could see the chaos occurring but knew the mess would be worth the time it took to tidy up. As a result of that call, she decided to give a class at home and so began my foray into the world of quilting.

Her lovely top is the result of a challenge to use up an extensive collection of 1.5 inch strips given to her.

I used Lava, a variegated thread on the top, a navy thread on the back and stitched some evolving clamshells over the entire surface.

I really enjoy being on that side of my machine and watching the design as it grows.

I am not sure who will be receiving this lovely quilt, but I know they will enjoy the calm, yet scrappy feel this quilt has.

The Needle and Thread Network will be taking a short holiday break, so I am joining them today..

Ah, I just got word she loves it so much, she is keeping it!! Great news!