Puppies, catching up, and pops of yellow

Karen of KaHolly recently put a call out for some Dog Gone Cute blocks as a way to help raise funds for Animal Shelters after Hurricane Harvey. I loved these blocks when Lorna of Sew Fresh Quilts had a QAL for them a few years ago so I was more than happy to jump in and offer to make a couple.
Here are the two I've made, pressed and ready to send away. I hope they don't look too much like I dived to the bottom of my scraps ~ hehe ~ I'm sure they will work well with other blocks sent in!

*Here* is the link for the wee dogs I sewed...Dog One...they are fun to sew up :-)

As well as this I've sewn a few more hearts —

I got a little distracted when cutting the fabric for the lower block below, so had to remake it.....!

I've also completed some applique (if not the whole block) for September's A Holly Cottage Christmas SAL—

And another bit of applique —

So I'm chipping away at my projects.However I want to chip away at some more so I'm going to be bold and join in with Patty's One Monthly Goal again this month. I haven't joined in for a wee while; a couple of goals I've had this year have obviously been too ambitious and resulted in no-shows! So this month I'll keep it straightforward. I'd like to add to my Scrappy Sprouts blocks! This has been my Rainbow Scrap Challenge project and the last time I joined in with this was June with the yellow blocks. This month is Pink, I should be able to find some of that!

The last time I added to these was in June..that was a few months ago...

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The end of September is when we start keeping an eye on the bush out the back for the annual flowering of the Kowhai trees. There are pops of more accessible yellow all over the countryside but I do enjoy the trek to visit 'our' trees. 

Spot the Yellow!

You can see from these photos how tall and old these trees are..reaching up for light above the other natives. We fenced off this area of bush a few years ago and are starting to see young trees growing which is very exciting.

I had hoped for better bird life photos this year as I have a new zoom lens but because the trees are so tall, the camera is pointing directly into the sun still making decent photography difficult.

There are two tui here..they spent the whole time I was down here chasing

each other. The one on the right was being very terratorial.

There was some lovely bird song from the Tui though plus the whoosh of flight as the Kukupa/Kereru (Wood Pigeon) flew from tree to tree.

Rather than get at the nectar, the Wood Pigeon eat the whole flower. This one
(upside down) was having a real feast!

Just beautiful

As you can tell, I had a thoroughly enjoyable time ♥

(Blogging friends that I've swapped with and sewn for over the years may recognise this flower. I try to use it as a touch of special kiwiana.)

Time for bed now, till next time,

Happy stitches,

Weekend Sewing

I took this photo showing where I was at with my Evandale quilt after working on it on Thursday night.
Several borders of this quilt have applique cornerstones and I decided to make an effort to get them done this weekend.

With the addition of a few yummy treats (compliments of a sweet friend) I continued stitching on Friday evening, joining in with Friday Night with Friends; the monthly cyber sewalong hosted by Cheryll of Stitching Cubbyhole.

Can you spot them? Hehe they no longer exist!

The MOML fell asleep on the sofa (what a comfortable old married couple we are!) and I carried on stitching quite late. I had some more stitching time on Saturday with Joanne via skype; it was nearly Friday night for her so I figured I may as well continue on with FNwF  - what a good excuse to sew!

Show and Tell via the wonders of the internet!

All of a sudden they were finished and trimmed. I carried on with a little bit of a fix up job I needed to do on a border piece so I'm feeling quite satisfied now and a little 'all-appliqued-out'.

Next step, sew these onto the borders and attach to the centre....progress!

Time for a change; today I started a new project...this has been in the pipeline for a while...I've just been waiting to get a few others things out of the way.
This (legless) sheep is a re-make of a Farmgirl Vintage block...I'm not making the quilt again but using some of the blocks for a different quilt.

This fabric is called Bumble Berries by The Jungs. Fun, and perfect, I hope,
for the recipients.

As I want these blocks a different size, this block took me a while but I think I have it sussed! Hopefully further blocks won't take me quite as long!

With the rain we've had lately, the garden is refreshed and the soil friable again...and the weeds are taking off like nobody's business... I spent a bit of time tidying up yesterday - and you wouldn't believe it, the cheeky birds have been at the parsley!!

'till next time,

happy stitches,

Pigs and Gifts

First of all the pigs - this week I completed another block for my Anderson's Farm Barge's Farm mystery button club. I'd missed out Block 3 when I was away on holiday so some catch up stitching was needed.
This block stretches the imagination just a little but is rather cute all the same.

Block 3 - Joyride!

Again I decided to do some needleturn rather than stitching so the big pig, off on a joyride, is in fabric.

Lynette has showed us an assembly diagram for what we have done so far so I sewed mine up too - here are all the blocks together; this is the half way point.

And on to the gifts.... last week I celebrated a birthday (another case of saying "where has the year gone"!).

I had to make my own cake this year, but I made sure it got a candle!

In amongst the lovely birthday fuss, I received a couple of gorgeous handmade gifts.
Kerryn put this together for me...such a sweet simple runner, one of those fancy ones you have peeking out over the edge of a shelf or ledge :-)

Isn't it beautiful?

{I think this style of runner was inspired by Pam Buda's Tucker *here* on a Heartspun Quilts; a sewalong last year}.
And Kerry knows how I like practical gifts too with this lovely set of kitchen goodness.

Pom-poms and ric-rac add to the yummy-ness :-)

Thank you both very much, Lovely Ladies.

Below is what happens when you train your husband up to do (one fingered) emails and check out facebook when you go away on holiday..... he saw this t-shirt advertised on facebook and decided I needed one!! Isn't he a thoughtful (and understanding) chap?!

Hehe very appropriate, do you think?!

And no birthday is complete without a bit of grandbaby time.... it was lovely to skype with my son and follow the babies/toddlers all around the house!!

Into everything. The chair was serving as an ineffective barrier...!

On the quilty front, this week I basted my two Fabulous Friday quilts - looks like I have a bit of quilting to do, doesn't it?

I am needing some long uninterrupted quilting time over the next little while, although I still haven't decided what I will do on them!

I hope you have a happy and creative weekend,

and thanks, as always, for reading along,

OMG!!

Lots to report - One Monthly Goal! and Oh My Golly Gosh!

Lucky for me it's Leap Year as Leap Day today has given me the extra time I needed to meet my One Monthly Goal (OMG) for February.
I signed up with Heidi of Red Letter Quilts at the start of the month, pledging to finish this mini quilt this month. I was confident I had plenty of time to do the task but whew talk about squeeze it into the last few days!

This mini was a SAL called Market Day which Pam Buda of Heartspun Quilts ran in 2014. All I needed to do was quilt and bind it so I'm pleased it is finally done!
I quilted this by stitching in the ditch, and decided it needed very little else. I used one of my Bernina's decorative stitches in the border but it would have been totally fine without it.

The bobbin helps to give some perspective of size.
This mini is 16 ¾" square.

This was such a fun quilt to make, special thanks to Pam for this fun sewalong. (I have two more of these to complete....who knows, they might be turning up in a OMG post later this year!)
And thank you again to Heidi for hosting OMG; click *here* to go to her link up page, there have been a lot of finishes this month.
Oops, cant forget the Before and After photos —

Before

After.
The wee dog is happy with his new look chair :-)

And Oh My Golly Gosh, I have more finishes to report!!

Calendar Bears was in the pipeline for most of last year and here it is in its finished state - yaay!!
Thank you to Michelle Ridgeway of Rag-tag stitchin' for this lovely design, it was a joy to stitch.

I think this lady is my favourite block - what a great mixture, bears and quilts!
She's a little light, the background fabric is more beige than white.

Around this time every year, my local quilt shop, The Country Yard, has a special day to showcase its latest projects. As I work there, I've been busy helping to sew up samples for kits, classes and monthly programmes. It's a hectic time for all of us but also fun, getting to sew new designs, play with new fabric, and come up with ways to excite and motivate our customers. I designed this table runner for one of our classes. Apart from the binding there is no handstitching - the class is Invisible Machine Applique - should be fun!

While I love to do needleturn by hand, there just isn't enough time to do it all that way... I've been playing with this technique for a few years now and as new products come on the market, it just gets easier and easier!

I learnt something new today - well actually,  it was possibly just confirmation of what I already knew - sometimes it's just not worth doing house work ... a bit of a spring clean (well, early autumn clean) in the laundry resulted in water everywhere and a 90 minute round trip to town for a replacement part ... sigh ... I should have just ignored the housework and gone straight to my sewing!

Hope you have a creative week,

'till next time,

A flurry of fabric and invisible machine applique

Last week sped by in a flurry of fabric and threads! We were busy at The CountryYard getting ready for our annual 'New Year's' launch.
We had samples to finish, kits and bundles to package, and quilts to hang. We also had a big change around, and know we will spend the next few weeks trying to remember the new home of all our fabrics!!
Sadly I didn't get many decent photos of the new look shop as I thought of it too late and the lights are shining too strongly in the ones I did get. Here's what you see when you first walk in though —

New block of the month (Avalon), class sample (Country Sampler) on the wall.

Leeanne talks about some of our new quilts *here*. Some of them were real team efforts with all of us doing our bit on them!

Another little re-stocked and tempting corner.

I'm pleased this photo turned out ok as it shows the mini-spools I made
(at work) for a class.

I've really fallen in love with this mini-spool block. This one I made at home to test out my (EQ7) pattern. I have high hopes of making more :-)

Here's something else new. This is the block I've made for the start of our Tuesday Medallion Mystery. I followed the rules set for Part One....... of course I cant share them here as we have to sign up at the shop to get the instructions :-). Part Two will see us adding something to the block.

I made this block from one of Kim Diehl's books (I have plenty that I drool over regularly!). It's re-sized to fit the size we needed for the Medallion Mystery. Although I love doing needleturn applique I didn't do it here. Instead I experimented with 'machine needleturn'.

I have done this before but with freezer paper - which can be fiddly to remove at the end. This time I used the water soluble applique paper shown below.

I was able to use the printer to print out most of the shapes I needed. The rest
I just traced on.

One side is fusible, so I ironed that to my fabric then used a glue pen and my
fingers to turn the raw edge under.
There are tools to do this but I don't have them.

A dab of applique glue to position the pieces in place, then sew on with a fine
zigzag.

This photo is just for me - so that if I lose my scrap of paper I can remember what settings I used! I've played with the size of the zigzag so I can get it as small as possible but it does have to be big enough to catch the fabric on the applique and then off to the side on the background. I used to do the zigzag a lot smaller but it was quite slow and, as I say, it was easy to misplace the stitches.

You can see the stitches here - so it's not as invisible as needleturn but it is
a lot quicker! I use Wonderfil Invisifil thread but one of the Invisible threads
would be just as good. (The thread for the centre circle wasn't the best colour
match; I should have pulled out something different.)

This photo is from a post I wrote on this method 2 years ago. You can see where
I cut the fabric to get the freezer paper out. I much prefer using the soluble
applique paper. I haven't done much of this technique since
then so it was good to revisit it.

Update: After Julie's question in my first comment, I decided to have a bit of a play. I had heard that the paper doesn't physically dissolve, the fibres soften, maybe the in-built glue dissolves.

This is a scrap of the paper with a squirt or two of water on it.
I was interested to see what the printer ink did, it left the paper and dissolved into the water - a bit worrying when you think it is against the fabric!
{I mopped up the surplus ink with a tissue and when the piece dried what was left there just dried on the applique paper.
After a bit it seemed to disappear but I guess the next step would be to wet a printed-on scrap against fabric and see what happens.}

 In comparison the scrap with the ballpoint pen written on it didn't have any ink bleeding or mess.

Here is the scrap after sitting in water for 5 minutes. It is very soft, has kept its shape and feels quite nice - I would like this sitting in amongst my quilt. 

It doesn't disintegrate as such - say like washaway thread which you never see again after wetting!

Interesting, huh? I think I would experiment a little more before using it in the printer again - it did save a lot of tracing and I would like to think it would work without putting ink into my quilts! (And thinking about it, the instructions say it's ok to put through the printer so it would seem it cant cause too much harm).

I've more bits and pieces to report but will tackle them another day. I hope your week's got off to a great start and you're finding time for some Creative Me Time.... I'm off to do that now ♥
Happy stitching,