Every now and again something wonderful comes in the mail ....

The Sister's Choice quilt is back from being beautifully quilted by Blackbird Quiltery, Roy and Lisa always do a wonderful job of quilting which really transforms my tops.

The back is green and hopefully you can see some of the detail ..
The loops are in the narrow lime green border, and can you tell they have quilted around every motif in the outer border !!!
Trevor says the quilting looks like grapes and vine leaves.


A couple of blocks to show close ups of the quilting ... can you see the feathers?

I will be binding this quilt at my retreat next weekend, it is mid winter here so it will nice to sit and sew with the quilt on my lap.

Ahhh .... the hills of home ...
heading towards our beautiful valley and the ground is green now that the heat of summer is past, it is mid winter here now though little rain, it has however been just enough to change the landscape from brown to green so took some photos as we were driving along, huge amounts of new vinyard plantings too, it is the first time I have seen these.

Needed to have a storage bag for my large square rulers as they are clear - predating the fluro type - every time I put the rulers down I "lose" them so decided to use some lefyovers from the orange crush to make a storage bag, son decided it needed a handle and suggested using a tie, so off to the thrift shop I went and then attached the tie to each side so now *Voila* the bag can hang up - and I can find the rulers!!

BTW I used a towel which had become thin for the batting.

photo that didn't add to the previous post

Seems this photo did not come through on my post so have added here, my apologies if it did in fact come through before.

minis

This week we managed to get home for a day and a half so this is some of what I got up to ...
Gatherd some logs for the wood burning cooking stove and when I next had a look the top of the log was smothered in tiny, tiny ants - of course by the time I got the camera a lot had disappeared .
I went through just one of my big plastic tubs of ASP's [already started projects] and there were 20 in there at various stages of completion.
Most are blocks from swaps esp nine patches so they won't necessarily take much to complete them as some will be set side by side whereas others need to have more added to them so now I will be getting a wide exercise book to document the projects and their status.

Also have 5 large quilts to complete - the Orange Crush, Carolina Crossroads, Third Weekend in October and a lilac quilt for a much loved niece in the U.K. and of course Trevor's heart quilt.

So think I will do the swap blocks projects as leaders and enders and make slow steady progress on them all.

Arrived back here to Trevor's and Stashbusters are going to do the next stay at home retreat focusing on making up swap blocks and other orphan blocks into quilts - how timely is that??

In the meantime I have been fascinated by the minis and dolls quilts that others have posted about, I certainly have enough scraps to be able to do them ...

Decided on square in a square blocks at 3", needed to change the machine needle so took the opportunity to needle punch some foundations.

These are the fabrics I am going to use for the dolls' quilts.

This mini quilt is going to a personal swap which is to represent where we live - we live in vineyard country however, for a decade we lived in a log cabin when we were living in a different region.

The backing, which I forgot to photograph is a burgundy toile depicting country scenes so I hope [a] that I get it completed this week - and

[b] that my swap partner likes it!

Okay that's my lot for now - hope you all have a good weekend/week