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Crafting in 2012

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It's fun and always makes me feel more productive to look back and see what I made during the year.  Do you do that?I've been feeling very unproductive the last week or so. I've enjoyed having lots of family time but I haven't spent any time at all at my sewing machine. I pulled out a couple of long lost knitting projects to work on in the evenings because I can be a bit more social while still "making". Mostly I've not been crafting. I'm really feeling the itch.

This is MOST of what I did this year.

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Winter Wonderland

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To celebrate the start of winter today we went out to enjoy our freshly fallen snow.

We live on a glacial moraine that is filled with interesting geological features. Today we walked up a kame in the state recreation area. You can see the cone shaped hill there in the right side of the photo below.

Michigan is really a pretty interesting place to live. You may remember when I wrote about the kettle hole in our yard."

The hill in front of you, known as a kame, was formed thousands of years ago when water from melting glacial ice flowed through a large crack in the ice. Glacial melt water carried sand, gravel, and rocks, depositing them at the base of the crack to form the kame.  To help picture this, imagine how sand flows through and hourglass and creates a rounded pile of sand in the bottom of the hourglass."

I'm thrilled to have everyone home for a few days. Let the festivities begin!Happy Solstice. 

Holiday Sewing

I've been busy with some holiday sewing. I made another Flashback Skinny Tee for miss P and then added a bit of embroidery from Aneela Hoey's Little Stitches. The shirt is made from a thrift store woman's top and I was able to save the neckline and sleeve hems. Yay for quick sewing projects.

The design was one that P had marked in the book so I'm pretty sure she'll like it. Since this is a knit fabric, I left the interior of the bird free of stitching. I didn't want the fabric to become stiff from the extra stitching.

Miss P has been doing a little holiday sewing of her own.

Now, I must get back to Santa's workshop...Are you working on any special holiday projects? I'd love to hear about them.

Getting Festive

We put up and decorated our tree two weeks ago but didn't find the icicles with the other tree decorations. P and I went through all the other boxes (there are many boxes) of decorations today and chose some things to put out other places around the house. We STILL have not found the icicles for the tree. I miss the way they twinkle with the air movement in the room.

I wonder where we put that bag last winter when we packed all of the decorations away. It will probably turn up six months from now -  like that Easter egg we found a few weeks ago....

Swiss Chard - Rossie Made Me Do It

This week I finished the Rossie Made Me Do It quilt. You may remember that I chose this group of fabrics as a blogger bundle for Pink Castle fabrics. The pattern is from Elizabeth Hartman's Modern Patchwork: 12 Quilts to Take You Beyond the Basics

I tried my hand at quilting pebbles. I had attempted this before but wasn't happy with the results. On this quilt I quilted the pebbles in the white background fabric. I was having fun with it and not rushing and I think the pebbles turned out pretty good. I have to keep reminding myself not to hurry with the quilting. I'm always happier with the end product when I take my time.

I really liked the way the colored hexagons seemed to float above the background pebbles or bubbles sort of like lily pads on a pond. In an effort to keep that look I just stitched in the ditch around each triangle piece.

The binding was a little fussy but also worth the effort. I used straight cut binding strips like always but did inside and outside miters. The inside miters required a little bit of origami-like folding before stitching them down but I love the look.

Here's the whole thing.

And another look at some of those miters.

Decisions, Decisions

I have a couple of quilts pin basted and ready for quilting but I've been struggling with just HOW I want to quilt them. I don't want to do an all over design on them, I want to do something that really complements the piecing.In my lack of decision and procrastination on the quilting I got into a cleaning frenzy in the sewing room and found a pile of old Christmas fabrics. Do you see that selvedge? 1993!

A few hours later and I have a stack of gift bags. I made them in all different sizes depending on how big the fabric pieces were. I went through the suitcase of trims and found bits of ribbon that I used for ties. I just folded a bit of trim and stitched it into the side seam. Then you can just tie it around the top of the bag to close it.

I still haven't decided how to quilt those quilts but at least I have a stack of gift bags to show for my time. And, the sewing room is a wee bit tidier.

What have YOU been working on?

Happy Land to the Post Office

I'm so happy about my trip to the post office today. I have most of my Christmas packages ready to send and also a few commission works to mail away. I finished this Happy Land quilt yesterday while the pumpkin pie was in the oven.

This was made with Thomas Knauer's 70's vibe quilt pattern. I quilted it with groups of wavy lines.

The fabrics are all from the Happy Land line by Sis Boom.

Happy Thanksgiving

I hope everyone is having a wonderful day. Happy Thanksgiving to all of my American friends and happy Thursday for the international folks!

After putting our turkey in the oven, we walked the fields and scouted out a tree for Christmas. Mr. B won't let us put up a tree until December first but at least we know which one it will be.

This one wasn't quite big enough.This one was too tall but the top section will work great.

I have a week to tidy and get ready for the tree and all the holiday decorations.

I am thankful to have my family together for the holiday and that we can walk out the door to our field to choose our Christmas tree.

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Happy Land

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I've been in Happy Land this week. Thank you all for the birthday wishes. It is really nice that you take the time to leave me a note.

Birthday celebrations and sewing - some of my favorite things.

Yesterday I finished up a commission quilt top out of Jennifer Paganelli's Happy Land fabric.

I used Thomas Knauers pattern that is great for mixing up a riot of fabrics like this. I love the mix of squares and rectangles.I'm still thinking about how to quilt it. Hmmm. I think it needs something curvy. 

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Little Stitches - Aneela Hoey

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While at Quilt Market, I had the pleasure of meeting the lovely and talented Aneela Hoey and also picked up a copy of her book, Little Stitches: 100+ Sweet Embroidery Designs 12 Projects.

Miss P, of course, perused all of the books that I brought home from market. In fact, she filled this one with sticky bookmarks and notes for me about which embroidery designs she likes.

I flipped through and read her notes. She likes this one but she wants the mamma bird to keep a watchful eye on the baby. I thought these birds were particularly cute and simple enough to be stitched on thick terry/velour fabric,  I added this little design to her Halloween elf shirt one day while she was at school. I love the transformations that fabric has taken - Bathrobe to costume to cute shirt with embroidery.

Aneela's book is full of sweet designs to dress up existing clothes or home dec items or add to just about any sewing project. There's even a pull out section with iron on tranfers of the designs included in the book. So many cute little animals, delightful girls, and fun every day objects to stitch.I know Miss P wants more of these designs embriodered on some of her other clothes. Just look at all those book marks! I think I'll let her do some of the embroidery though.

She loves the spruced up top!

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Sandhill Cranes

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This week we went to the bird sanctuary near us and watched the Sandhill Cranes come in for the night. They spend the night in that wetland area you see in the first photo.

At first we saw a few small groups of cranes flying in. Then more and more larger groups and many groups at once. It was fun to hear them calling as they flew. The ones already on the ground in the wetland area would answer back.I'm posting these pictures at a larger size so that you can click on them and see some of the groups of cranes in the distance.

(in the photos above and below you can see about 6 groups of cranes in the distance, surrounding the sun below the cloud)

Note the groups in the distance below just over the trees.

So. many. cranes.

This sanctuary is one of a few places where the Sandhill Cranes congregate before heading south together in mid November. We feel lucky to have seen so many on one visit. There were thousands coming in while we were there. Certainly, it the most we have seen in one night. It was a beautiful evening for bird watching.

Instagram Photos

I finished the Dala Sweater and couldn’t be happier with it! The pattern is #dalasweater by @elenormortensen. More details on my ravelry page. #knitter #strandedknitting #operationsweaterchest #handknitsweater #makersvillage #makersgonnamake
I started this sweater on our car trip last week. I had chosen a different yarn for the horses but it was thinner and didn’t work well with the blue. I frogged the few rows I had knit and subbed in some yarn from my stash when I got home. The y
Narrow hand appliquéd bias strips. 1/16” quilting lines not going over the appliqué. I’m about a month in on the quilting and ALMOST finished. Whoop! Quilted with Invisalign on top and Decobob in the bobbin. Threads by @wo
This summer we watched my two oldest grand kids one day a week. Towards the end of the summer they started making projects on their own in the sewing room. They made lots of little projects from my scrap basket including pillow cases and tiny quilts