rain, rain go away!

It's a dreary day here, cold and rainy, and I am hunkered down inside. But my thoughts are elsewhere.  I am blessed with an incredibly creative, strong, hard-working, generous, kind-hearted woman as my mother.  I love her so much.  She deserves all the good fortune in the world. 

On to a little stitchy distraction: the weather is clearly NOT cooperative, so I have gone ahead and photographed my latest finish, the orange string quilt.  It is sunny and cosy and crinkly.

This quilt is not my best work to date, far from it.  But I learned something from making it, it is cheerful and comfortable and will get lots of use on our living room sofa.

I'm not a great photographer, and every one of my quilty photo shoots has one of these -- a crooked kitty-cat action shot with my toes in the frame. Today we're letting it all hang out.

While I had the camera out, I decided to get some photos of our bed quilt -- the largest I've ever made (queen size), made to coordinate calmly with our Amy Butler curtains in our cosy little "master" (ahem) bedroom, and one that I actually finished several months ago.

Really I should place "finished" in quotes, since this quilt went straight into daily use before I could snip all the threads...and there are even some stitches (an aborted attempt at quilting inside the large circles) that need to be unpicked.  Oh well. This one is warm and well-loved.

It is backed with the softest flannel -- Anna Maria Horner's Good Folks.  Of course this makes it heavy, and the free motion quilting was quite a workout.

Yummy.

Currently on the machine: my little quilt for the Toronto Modern Quilt Guild "solids" challenge! Robert Kaufman generously donated charm packs of Kona Cotton in the "dusty palette."  The challenge in our branch of the MQG is to make a quilt top from that charm pack plus no more than 1 yard of 1 additional fabric (from our own stash). 

I am making a square playmat.  I cut the "charms" (5" squares) into 2.5" squares and then paired them with an oatmeal solid.

If you look closely (and of course that's what little ones do when they're playing, right?) you can see that I embroidered the word "play" in the centre square of a nine-patch block.

I am now busy quilting little pebbles into the oatmeal sashing. 

This is a simple project, but I absolutely love it!  It looks like a game board, and I think it will inspire lots of play.  I can imagine little cars traveling the pebbled laneways, and action figures taking their places on the coloured squares....