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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