SEWING AT THE COTTAGE!

Today was kind of a yucky day so I sat at the sewing table and put together the rest of the daisies.


I'm not enamoured with the whole thing. I don't know why, it's a lovely design even though I realized once I started doing the flowers, that I'm not into the flower thing. I like them fresh in a bouquet I think or in the garden.


I decided not to put the whole 24 flowers into the design
as I'd really not liked it at all.

It's not the geese! I like those. I'm sure many of you have
done this too. Loved the pattern in the magazine then,
when you do it....it's just doesn't grab you.


I am going to finish it mind you as I have so many hours
into it now and all the fabrics are cut out. But, I'm not
sending it out to be quilted. Nope! I received an email
from Trish at Compulsive Quilting and she suggested that I outline the geese, then stipple the rest and I'm doing that.


There is still a 10" border to go around the patterns so it will finish quickly now.

My sweetie looked at it and said he thought it was great and so much work, and best of all he said that I had learned new techniques! I did and will definitely do the geese again, but flowers aren't really my thing.

I have some left over and will make the effort of doing
a couple of pillow cases to finish it.

So you can see the geese are sitting on a chair just waiting for me to finish it all. I'm a bit bummed by it even though the sewing effort was well worth it. I learned . That's what this was about wasn't it? What did I learn?

That I usually do my own thing and I should stick to that most of the time.

Tomorrow, weather permitting we are off to the mainland to purchase paint for the two, count them two addirondac chairs or as they are know here Bear Chairs for the dock. I'm looking forward to going to town where more than three people in the post office at a time is a crowd!

PUSHING UP DAISIES?

I started out today by actually hand sewing all the stems of the flowers. How good was that? It was so relaxing. Ok, I didn't do the bias binding, Helen made it last night.



She made it as one continuous piece of fabric then she cut the fabric and voila! All the stems were done in no time at all!



Today she was back and made enough of the bias binding to finish off this quilt! I'm quite please with her work! But , she didn't press it! She rolled it all up neatly (of course) and tied it well so that It will come off the roll so beautifully when the time comes to add the binding.
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I managed to do one strip of flowers but for some reason even though I measured (I really did) I was a bit off at the bottom so I had to kind of squeeze the last little daisy (I'm calling them that) on the panel.
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I think there was a bit of creative licence on my part so the
next two panels will be as close to this one as possible.

The directions weren't totally specific about the stem part, so I just made it all one and pressed my flowers over it.

I also realized that if there wasn't stabilizer (?) on the back to make it stick that the fabric moved a bit. So I had to spray a couple of pieces.

Improvising as I went along as usual for me anyway.

I also used the blanket stitch (needle down) which was just what went wrong with the first sample of this baby!

Here are a couple of the flowers. I am so happy you can't imagine and this is so very cute too! I'm definitely keeping this one.

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Now I bought Hunky Dory by Chez Moi for this but really except for the first few pieces, there were lots that I wouldn't buy if I was buying yardage. It's pretty, but it also has lots of yucky greens and wishy washy beiges too. It's not like the Swanky one I bought last year.

I just wouldn't recommend it as a favourite.

Tomorrow I hope to finish the flowers, then, the piecing of the whole quilt.. Helen is here to help if I need her.

A georgous day at the lake today. Wine and cheese on the dock!

HERE'S THE GEESE...AND THANKS FOR THINKING OF US!

First, I'd like to thank you all for your kind posts and
private emails inquiring how Courtney's operation went.


It went very well but we both had no idea that we would be back there within 6 weeks for the second of three processes to remove or make very tiny this tumor!

Apparently the biggest problem is that it sits so close to the bone thus, the pain, the difficulty of the removal of it.
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Now, since the kid weighs in at about 130, is 5'6" tall and hardly even takes aspirin....you'd think that a bit of morphine would put her into lala land. Well it didn't. Turns out she is quite drug tollerant and felt a lot of the pain. Go figure!
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So, between the morphine and the percacet, she wasn't in
pain, but had lots of upset tummy and continued so into
the wee hours of the night.

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Today she is back to normal and thanks to her mom's
making her have Lipton's Chicken Noodle soup, it made
the you know what so much easier!

So again, thank you so much for thinking of her this past weekend. Blog friends are the best!


Ok, on to my geese. I've put them all together, have to say that it was so much easier than I thought. I just laid them out on the table as you can see from the top photo
and marked each row so that I didn't goof it up.

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It all went together very well in a couple of hours of sewing and pressing.
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I do think that this was the easy part though as tomorrow I tackle the bias vines for the flowers and start pressing the flowers onto the white strips.


It's coming well and Helen is here on the island to guide me along.
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She loved her trip to Ireland even met the editor of the Irish Quilting magazine which has been started by a woman from the United States and has featured "Irish Muses" also known as Micki the lucky ! I say that as Micki has Irish luck so seems to win many of the blog giveaways!
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Helen will be in one of the next few issues as she donated a quilt to the Irish flooding victoms. It cost her more to send the quilt from Canada than it did to make it! Well almost, but so very generous of her.

We are expecting a storm this afternoon, the weather is very humid so I'm going to batten down the hatches as they say and think of what to have for dinner if the power goes out!