September Already

I cannot believe the sun is lower in the sky and the days are already shorter.   How did I miss July and August?  Well first of all my computer got sick.  First it was letters, specific letters, which would not work and I tried unsuccessfully to fix it.  Do you know how many words contain h and g and how often you use the back space key?  I found out. It was in the hospital for computers for a while.  I was also lazy because I have other computers but not the easy bookmarks of sites and remembered passwords.  They serve other needs.    Well the keyboard is now new and h and g and backspace work very well.

Then the CONTRACTORS descended on my house.  This year it is the back yard.  My tomato plants have been transplanted 3 times as the heavy equipment moved in; a temporary but easily breached fence went up for the dogs and the whole landscape changed.  It is beautiful and somehow I have acquired an extra 200 ft of flower and veggie beds.  Did I say I am crazy.   It is hard to source perennials in mid summer but it looks gorgeous now.   Whatever they put in the beds has things growing in leaps and bounds.

Then in the midst of this was getting quilting done for the Exhibition here in the Valley.  This included a gorgeous quilt a friend entrusted to me to quilt.  I had to screw up my courage and hope for success and breathe deeply before putting Hortense to that beautiful canvas of fabric.  The result was a first prize.  It is gorgeous.  This was also the discovery of wool batting.  It makes such a lofty quilt and it is so light.  It was perfect for the quilt and Hortense just purrs when working on it.   I am sure  the quilter will not object to seeing a picture here.

Here is a picture of the finished quilt Logic and Passion.  It too  was quilted with the wool batting and it is so light and the loft suits the design.  I created a free form tulip and it was quilted in random squares.  The inspiration for the quilt originally was a fabric covered in gorgeous red tulips.  With my new garden I just might have some real ones this spring.  But that is getting ahead.

Hortense has been busy and I have managed around sick dogs and contractors to clean up my sewing room.  Right now a Christmas quilt top made a couple of years ago is on the frame with a new stitch design which looks like overlapping rose petals.  So each day must have time carved into it to doodle on the quilt.   Christmas Roses play a part in the fabrics so the border is an open rose I drew and a holly design is scattered over the quilt top with the spaces between done in the overlapping rose petals.  No one says you have to have a formula to machine quilt. Just go for it.

I also finished a top made with patterns from a site called Quilt Pattern Playground. Free Patterns  This was part of one of our challenges at the guild last year.  I took the opportunity to make a quilt that is asymmetrical.  I will post a picture when it is quilted.  It is pretty but challenges your perspectives when looking at it and I think the challenge may be dimmed by the quilting.  It is not traditional but I will rein it in.  After all quilting makes the quilt.

Now I finally found just the right Christmas quilt to make in a current magazine and my fingers are itching to get started.  It will help to reduce my stash of Christmas fabrics.  As well I posted a picture of some beautiful fabrics previously to make a French Braid quilt and now it too is in the line up of work.  The colours have been shouting out of the drawer they have been confined to.  The projects will balance each other as putting together many similar blocks could get boring so alternating seems a good idea.

As well I learned something this summer on a personal level.  I learned what the word malice means in actual physical terms.  It was a challenge but it made me think more of the value and support of friends and particularly friends that are quilters.  This is a theme that you see over and over again in quilting magazines; books; on shows; on blogs. The love and caring the community of quilters offers is totally and absolutely true.  I know I am rich because I belong to that community and nothing can diminish that richness not even malice.  If a quilt looks comfy it is because a lot of love that comes through the fingers of the quilter is in the quilt and it never loses that love.  So make a quilt; buy a quilt; cuddle under a quilt.  Quilts can be a magic shield.