Dec 21, 2016
Well, it’s certainly a busy time of year. I’ve been a little lax posting on the blog but only because I haven’t been home a lot these days and if I am home I have been busy quilting client quilts which of course is a good thing.
Last Tuesday my partner and I ventured a driving trip up the Island to Nanaimo to have a visit with his Mom. It was cold and clear at least down in Victoria and not much snow around where we live. However once you drove a little ways north there was lots of snow. My partner has a boat that he keeps at a farm near Nanaimo so we dropped in to see how it was fairing with all of the snow.
This is what we found. You would think this would be fine right? Just brush the snow off and we would be good to go. Not so! The snow had melted pooled turned to ice and then more snow on top. The weight of the combined snow and ice had ripped the cover in several places and we tried to get the snow off of the boat with no luck. There was at least 4 inches of solid ice under that layer of snow. We finally had to go and purchase a new tarp and tear this on off. Oh well. The snow is gone now as the temperature has warmed up however last weekend my partner and I witnessed this when we took Cocoa for a walk.
The above picture was actually taken a couple of years ago by John Broughton of the Times Colonist newspaper but you get the idea. We live near what are called Panama Flats and every fall and winter these flat areas become flooded and when the weather is right they freeze over and you can skate on them. This has not happened in over two years now but this year the cold spell lasted long enough to freeze the flooded fields so that you could skate on them. Of course the next day the weather warmed up and it rained.
I actually found I enjoyed the bit of cold weather we got this year, it will be interesting to see if we get more or if that was our winter. It’s hard to tell around here these days.
On the quilting front I finished quilting a customer quilt. This time a created a pantograph using Electric Quilt 7. I will post a blog on how to do this for anyone interested as it is actually not that hard once you figure it our.
My client made this quilt using a layer cake and it was coffee themed so I thought it would be fun to try my hand at quilting a coffee mug. I found a simple drawing of a coffee mug on the internet. I find that copyright free colouring book pages are a good source for these types of images. I traced it linking two together to make the design and then used Electric Quilt 7 to create the actual pantograph. I think it worked out quite well and it worked very well with the overall design of the quilt.
Well, onto wrapping Christmas presents since that day is coming up fast I had better get at it. I hope everyone is enjoying the holiday season and all the festivities.
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Dec 12, 2016
Oh the weather outside is frightful! Ugh! We haven’t had any real snow in Victoria for at least two years now however that was broken last week and it snowed again this morning. Granted the one snowfall lasted all of one day but still!
The positive thing about snow it that it is beautiful and it does make life interesting here on the southern tip of Vancouver Island. Since we don’t get a lot of snow a lot of folks don’t even bother putting winter snow tires on their cars and the city doesn’t really have what you would call snowplows. Also, the snow we tend to get is slippery and wet heavy snow. Our temps don’t always stay below freezing so that means that everything thaws in the daytime and then gets frozen again at night making roads like skating rinks. Folks laugh at us back East because around here just a few inches of snow can pretty much shut the city down. Oh well, it makes for quiet sewing days.
The above are two of the views that Cocoa and I enjoyed Friday morning on our walk. Well, actually I don’t think Cocoa enjoyed it at all. It was his first real experience with snow as he hails from the streets of Las Vegas. He kept lifting his paws up and then finally he turned around and tried to get home as fast as he could. On the Saturday when I called for him to go for a walk he didn’t even budge from his bed. As of yesterday the snow was gone and it rained all day however this morning it snowed but has now turned to rain.
With the weather the way it was this past weekend I actually got a lot of sewing done! Yeah. I got top quilt tops finished that I have had on the back burner for over a year now.
These two are huge queen sized quilt tops. The Gravity quilt top on the right was the fabrics from the kit. The blocks on the left were mostly from my stash. The photos aren’t the best as the quilts are very large and I couldn’t find a space large enough in the house to take good photos. It was a little too wet outside to try that. They are now finally in my to be quilted pile. We shall have to see how long they both languish there.
Last week I also finished quilting a client quilt. She had completed a large twin sized quilt for a little girl. We chose to go with a fun simple flower design in an Aqua thread using Superior Thread Sew Fine 50.
She used a nice cozy flannel for the backing of this quilt. This quilted up beautifully and was a lot of fun to quilt.
I have more client quilts coming however with the weather these have been delayed so I may get a little more sewing time in today. I am on to sewing up a quilt for my very first great niece who is making her arrival in late Feb early March. Mom and I will be travelling to the mainland again in January for the baby shower so the quilt needs to be finished soon. I have another sew day coming up this Saturday with a group of friends and we will be having a pot luck lunch as well so I should have the quilt top finished by this weekend and should be able to quilt it over the Christmas holidays.
A snow day is only bad news if you don’t have enough fabric and thread!
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