A new finish

 The Row-Along quilt of The Bee in My Bonnet is now officially finished with machine quilting and scrappy bindings. There was an almost sunny moment between rain showers yesterday so I tried how my rattan chair would feel on the new terrace. You can see the yellow leaves on the floor - the Autumn is trying to come already!

I stitched wavy lines between the blocks and free shapes on and around the pictures on this quilt.

 

Our summer apples are ripe, but there will be no apple sauce cooking this year.

 

 

My basket will remain empty!

 

I'm almost pleased with my stitching ideas, as the flowers look like flowers and the leaves and apples look like leaves and apples on the reverse.

 

The photo makes the borders look all blurry, but they are of a very pretty red and white checkered fabric and the corners are mitred.

 

 

I'm glad to have completed a project, and now I can concentrate on the two other quilts I'm working on, and maybe start a knitting as a TV project.

 

TdF 13 to 16 - slow progress on Peek-a-Boo Street

The past few days have been busy with a secret project so I'm showing you other pictures. My old rattan basket flower table could not bear the weight of rain but fell through the frame. It was only supported by the pleated rim, and when soaked in the rain it was easily bent. I must soak it again and put it under some weight upside down on a flat surface. The geraniums will get another pot.

 

 

We have had two anniversaries over the weekend, and celebrated the beginning of our story with a wild raspberry cheesecake. Dear Mr. K went to the forest to see how the bilberries are and whether there are any chanterelles yet. Bilberries were not yet ready, chanterelles were not to be seen, but he found lots and lots of perfect, worm free wild raspberries. Delicious!

 

 

 

I have machine quilted the Peek-a-Boo Street quilt and made the binding. I just need to iron it and sew it on, and I will have a perfect TV project for tomorrow's Tour de France.

 

 

Polka Dots and Problems

After an amazing warm period with a touch of summer the weather up here has returned to normal, below 15 C (60 F), rain and chilly winds. I have been suffering from ear ache for a couple of weeks, and yesterday had my ear drum pierced to drain the liquid and help me hear again. There was no infection, so let's just hope it will get better now. To make the day's program perfect I also had an appointment with my orthodontist, so my teeth are really sore today. Does this sound like I'm begging for symphaty, or what? I had ice cream today in town - mainly because I couldn't imagine biting anything - so I have had my pampering taken care of already.

This morning I put the binding on this little quilt I have been free motion quilting with more or less success. Let's just say that I used lots and lots of thread no longer visible in the quilt, and I still feel like I need to unpick some of the squarest loops.

I have been using Candace's method for the binding ends for some time already, but somehow I often manage to have a problem. This happened after I had just read Candace's nice and easy tutorial. First I joined the ends with a twist,  and then sewed the diagonal seam from the wrong corner. Third time was a lucky guess and the binding waits now for some TV hours for hand sewing.

The apple trees are starting to bloom in our garden. I hope the weather will be a little warmer so the bees can fly and we will get apples in the Autumn. I only have 7 jars of apple sauce left in the cellar.

Autumnal award

A couple of days ago Melanie gave me this award:

Thank you, Melanie! - I didn't get any rules to go with the award so I decided to give it to the following five blogs, in alphabetical order:


Antika Nöjen - Ewa-Christine who has antique and vintage textiles in her art

Eileen's Attic - Eileen my quilting friend with a love for vintage

Paperiaarre - Kaija my dear daughter

Shabby Chicken - Drewzel another Brownie with merit badges

Spirit Cloth - Jude who takes her readers to an amazing journey in textile art


Go and visit these blogs, they may be something quite different from your usual reads!

I have been exchanging emails with Melanie about mushrooms and their non-latin names, and I have told her how most mushrooms have their Finnish name. Here are some examples from our recent menus. I even found an English name for these, they are chanterelles (in Finnish kantarelli or keltavahvero):



And on Sunday we had these cousins of chanterelles, suppilovahvero:

The yellow ones grow at the time when, and in places where there are lots of yellow birch leaves on the ground. The funnel shaped brown ones are just beginning their season and can be picked when there is already frost on the ground and all leaves have turned brown. Masters of hiding, both of them!

This is something I tried a couple of years ago when I had my shoulder operated and couldn't do "anything" being one-handed for many weeks:

I took a one-afternoon course in sun-dyeing. I have not used these fabrics because I had no real plan when I put the leaves on the fabric so the different motifs can not easily be cut for use without distroying others.

I thought of giving it another try this summer, but it seems the summer days somehow disappeared and were spent on other projects.

This is one of them, the stranger quilt. I have been working on it again and I thought it was like one of the modern factory-made jigsaw puzzles you can put together "wrong" because the same shapes are repeated. You can put a sky piece on the wall or a flowerbed piece in the sky if you want to. This jigsaw puzzle came with no picture of the completed work, and so I had to guess which parts, or strips of patches, were meant to go together.

The rows are straight in one direction only, because all pieces were not the same size. No chance for my usual, boring stitch in the ditch here! At the moment I'm already sewing the binding, there will be more photos in my nex post. I used this great tutorial for the binding.

Pinwheel quilt and green thoughts

This is the pinwheel baby quilt with the checkered binding you voted for a while ago. I sat and waited for my father-in-law when he was having his feet seen to; and watched one episode of Heartbeat to finish the hand sewing part. The light blue shirts are not all the same colour, but when re-using material this can be accepted. (British series with village life and old times are my favourite.) Notice the little flowers, I have never before used embroidery in my quilts. The white squares looked so pale that I tried to cheer them up a little.




I haven't been lazy at all: on Saturday I finally made myself a light shopping bag to be carried with me at all times:

The pattern is a copy of our normal big plastic bags. Today I used it for the first time and carried 5 one litre jars, vegetables, apples, bread, cheese, meat and biscuits. It was very comfortable to carry. I used French seams because the material is synthetic, and I put a green bias binding at the top because a) I had a suitable length available and b) I'm going green with this bag.

It folds this small, and I will make a little pouch from the rest bit between the handles to keep the bag this small in my shoulder bag.

Which binding?

Now you have a chance to express your opinion and tell me which fabric I should use for the binding of the new baby quilt I have almost made:




The options are from the left: A) plaid like in the Friendship Star, B) blue floral print on white, or C) white floral print on blue. D) would be the heart print used in the pinwheels and for the backing. "I like it" will be a reasonable enough argument, feel free to comment. If you convince me, I may follow your recommendation!



This was the situation last night. I hope to finish the quilt tomorrow. Everything I used was from stash!

Grandmother's garden was kind of ready stitched when I started thinking what it will look like when I have washed the quilt and the cotton batting shrinks like I've known all the time it will do. And to avoid a catastrophy (in a small scale, but personally a disaster) I decided to quilt around each middle hexagon (where the pin is) between the zigzag lines three rows apart.






That means over 200 hexagons if I counted correctly. And that means that I should have started quilting around the blocks to emphasize their form instead of trying to make less and end up doing something that may be described as "interesting" or "a personal view". And at least as much work.

So, help me, which binding for the little pinwheel quilt?