A Great Weekend of Making Baby Quilts

Liz and I are having a great weekend in Calgary making Baby Quilt tops. There is a population explosion in the Lucyshyn family so what a great excuse to have fun with the great fabrics that are out right now for baby quilts.

Liz had the one that is in the foreground pieced before we started the weekend. She had bought that as a kit from Periwinkle Quilts in Saskatoon when we were there over Mother's Day weekend. The "minkie" yellow pieces make it lovely and soft for the baby - but are more difficult to work with. I found the panel with the letters and numbers on the black background at Rossville Quilts. With borders it makes a fun quilt. We found this wonderful piece of flannel (below) with "glow in the dark" animals for the backing for that quilt.

This quilt is from the Moos and Hoos series of fabric. The sashing strips (and cornerstones) are small - just 1/2 inch finished. They were a bit of a pain to work with - but now that the top is finished we are very pleased with it.

This Noah's Ark quilt will be a pocket quilt to put Beannie Babies into. There was coordinating fabric that I got to make each of the pockets. We didn't have any batting here last night so we got the tops of the pockets done but had to wait on making the pockets until we had batting.

We took the ABC Menagerie charm pack as the starting point for this quilt. To add more interest we cut the squares in half and matched them with coordinating fabrics. The alternating blocks with the circles are a from a flannel that Liz found at Fabricland (perfect color match). We got things done this far last night and realized we needed to wait until morning to sew them together (avoiding mistakes when we were tired).

Our morning has been productive - here is Liz sewing on the last border. Below is the finished top. That makes 4 tops this weekend plus the 5th top that Liz had done before I got here. Looks like I will have a full suitcase going home and lots of excuses to use my long arm!

Quilting really is about Sharing the Love

I got an email with attached photo this past week that reminded me once again how quilting is really about "Sharing the Love." In her email Ashley said that she had saved the quilts I sent for the children until they moved into the toddler bed and attached this picture of her son in the big bed.

That prompted me to go back and look up some pictures of his older sister with her quilts. I think this is so precious with her reading to her doll.

When I made the quilt for the new baby boy I remember thinking that a 2 year old little girl would not understand why this baby was getting all of the attention - so I took left over pieces of flannel and made a fun quilt for her - thinking that she could cuddle with it and have it to play with her dolls. From this picture it's clear that the quilt was a hit!

New Garage and More Quilts

I had a second car garage added to my house this past year. This project took longer than originally intended, first due to the need to "jump through hoops" to get the variance from the county, next due to the need to get the gas company to move the gas line and finally because of all of the bad weather we had this past winter. Now it is finished and I am very pleased with the rust color of paint for the trim.

Myra Levine's daughter, Sami, graduated from high school and is getting ready to head to Denison University. I made her this laptop sleeve for her new adventures.

These two Quilts of Valor were a group project. During the Common Threads quilt retreat in Shipshewana in March participants made friendship blocks. Some of women then took the blocks and pieced the tops and I quilted them.

Johnny, one of the trainers at the gym, got married in May. Everyone at the gym got "into this" and we got lots of signatures, with several people even writing a message. As usual, I pieced the top, then got people to sign it and then I quilted it.