Great Mail Day today

I'm so excited today. I received to parcels in the mail that I've been waiting for. One is a gorgeous teal necklace from Lee's Hope Jewelry in Pennsylvania. A portion of the sales of the jewelry go to support research for Ovarian Cancer. The necklace is gorgeous and best of all, it fastens in front which is ideal for this lady with gel nails, and it has a big enough clasp that I can actually fasten it myself. Love, love, love it . . . I'll be on the site again soon ordering more jewelry. www.leeshopejewelry.com

I also got my parcel from Knit Picks. I'd ordered 2 balls of Stroll fingering yarn in a wine colour, some gorgous bamboo needles and a fluffy black sheep tape measure. I'm going to be using this yarn to make the Haruna shawl from Ravelry. It was a free pattern download and looks easy enough to put together. This will be my challenge for this year and if I can get it finished by summertime, then I'll have something to wear when I go out or when I'm sitting outside in the evenings.

What a wonderful day!

While I've been waiting, I've been making a simple garter stitch shawl with some bulky yarn that I have. For the last two years, I've been trying to make a vest out of this yarn and I always get to a certain point and lose count and mess up. I think the wool was trying to tell me something. Maybe I shouldn't be making this pattern. So, the other night, while I was re-watching Lost, I picked up the yarn and needles and cast on 3 stitches. I'm increasing at each end to make a triangular shape, just to use up the yarn. When it's finished, I"m thinking I'll crochet some coloured flowers to attach to the edge to dress it up a little. This is my creative piece for this year where I'm creating my own design - hope it turns out all right.

What are you working on? If you need some inspiration, check out some of the other knitting blogs. A couple of my favourites to visit are Mary Jane's Tea Room and Tiny Owl Knits . . . I love their patterns and always feel inspired after reading them.

Happy knitting!

Addictions

Are you addicted to a particular website? My addictions are facebook and recently Pinterest. If you haven't joined Pinterest yet, you should at least check it out. The inspiration there just from the photographs is worth it. If you do a search on your favourite craft, up pops inspiration, patterns, links to blogs, etc. I could easily spend hours a day on there - but have to keep reminding myself that there are things to do around the house.

It's Springtime!

After a depressing winter which saw me say goodbye to my mother for the final time, I've managed to deal with the grief by crocheting. While my mother was in the hospital, I started a baby afghan, it was easy to work on while sitting at her bedside for hours at a time. There is a great yarn shop in the town where she lived and I bought several balls of purple/lavender yarns and proceeded on making this blanket. Last week, saw me finally finish it. I'll post pictures soon. I keep hoping that one day I'll become a grandmother and these little blankets and baby sweaters will be used but in the meantime, I'll just keep making things because they give me great satisfaction.

After I finished this blanket, I did some searching through the knitting blogs I follow and on Ravelry and found a gorgeous shawl pattern that I have to make. It's called 'Haruni'. The shawl pictured is made out of Stoll Tonal Yarn from Knit Picks. After reading through the directions, it's easy enough to make - may take awhile to finish but it'll look lovely. I went onto the Knit Picks website and ordered 2 balls of Stoll Tonal Yarn in the Wine colour - which is a mixture of reds and purples. It looks lovely and rich and will be perfect for summer evenings. I also went a little crazy and ordered some gorgeous Harmony wooden needles to knit the shawl with and a little black sheep tape measure. You can never have enough tape measures and I love the whimsical ones. Now, I'm waiting for my yarn to arrive - which should be next week, if Canada Post is quick.

While I'm waiting, I'm also in the midst of spring cleaning my house. Where did all of this dust come from? I'm purging a lot of stuff. IT's time for a change and I'm tired of a lot of the things we have around here - so out with the old to make room for some of the things I'll bring home from my mothers house. I brought back all of her houseplants - so far so good - they all still have green leaves, so that's a good sign - right? I've always been a hoarder, probably due to my childhood when my father used to give away all of my stuff to anyone who admired it. But there comes a point in ones life where it's time to clear out and reduce the amount of stuff that is stored. I'm looking at a lot of my stuff and I'll be putting lots up for sale. I have Quilters Newsletter Magazines from the 70's - in fact, I have several years worth of them, plus many other quilting magazines that would be a treasure to someone. They're filled with patterns and hints and good articles too. I haven't got to my fabric stash yet - but that'll need to be thinned out a little too - although I'm not sure how I'll be able to part with any of it. Maybe I'll just have to make a bunch of quilt tops and then one by one, tie them or quilt them and either hang onto them or give them away to charity.

The next few weeks are going to be fun. A lot of work, but fun getting rid of things that are no longer needed and finding homes for items that still have a purpose, just not in my home. Now, I have to train my family to keep the living areas of the house tidy. That will be a major challenge in itself.

I hope today finds everyone happy and healthy and working on some special projects. I'd love to hear what you're working on. Let's inspire each other!

Happy 2012

It's been a long time since I wrote in this blog. My life has been busy and then in November, tragedy struck. I had to go over to the mainland to be with my mother who had been admitted to the hospital. After a week of sitting at her bedside day after day for hours on end, she slipped away from us. The visit where I thought I was just going to pick her up and take her home with a change of medications turned into spending a month planning a funeral and attending to paperwork. My saving grace was the crocheting and knitting I took along with me.

It's been a rough ride for the last few weeks and the coming months aren't going to be much easier. I still have many trips to go back to her house and pack things up and eventually sell the house. It's a hard thing to do and my emotions are running high right now.

To help me cope with all of this and give me something to look forward to, I've joined up on the Monthly Make It (click on badge to the right of this post), which was posted on the blog of The Felt Fairy. Every month, there will be a different craft to work on . . . the challenge of this will be just what I need this year.

I hope to be able to write more often in my blog and share more things with everyone. On that note, Happy New Year Everyone and I hope 2012 brings you much happiness, health and wealth . . .

Good Morning Everyone!

It looks like it's trying to be sunny here on the Pacific West Coast today, I sure hope it succeeds. I haven't been doing a lot of sewing lately due to work. I've been spending a lot of time down at the gift shop helping to get it ready for cruise ship season, which is now underway. It's a huge job, boxes and boxes of items to price and place on shelves.

I was watching American Idol last night and wow! what a show. I think each of the top 13 contestants got to sing with their idols. They sure know how to put on a good show and I was so happy to see Steven Tyler hit the stage with Dream On. Congratulations to Scotty McCreary for winning the title; and congratulations to Lauren Alaina for coming in second. I'm sure this isn't the last we'll hear from either of them.

I have a busy weekend at work - hopefully it'll be the last busy one now that the ships have finished with their repositioning cruises. Next week, we'll be on our usual schedule and I'll have more time to work on my quilting, knitting and planting some much needed flowers outside.

I hope everyone is enjoying this lovely spring weather and managing to get some quilting and knitting done. I'll be taking some stuff with me in the car to work on during my breaks, but I'm really looking forward to my two days off next week and getting some much needed things done around the house.

Happy Quilting and Knitting!

TGIF

Happy Friday to everyone who is reading my blog. In the Pacific Northwest, we've had all kinds of weather this week from snow, hail, sunshine, hurricane force winds - you name it, we've probably had it.

I've been working at the borders of my disappearing 9 patch quilt, in between meetings and other stuff that gets in the way of sewing. So far, I have a 4" white border, a 1" patched border using the fabrics I have in the quilt and will be adding a 2" white border today. Then, I'll be adding some applique to the 4" border in the form of 3D butterflies (I hope they work out the way I picture them). I'm loving this quilt - the colours are gorgeous together and it'll look so pretty in my livingroom on my burgundy leather couch.

I have a wool batt that I'm going to try. I bought this at a wool producing company in Alberta a few years ago. This quilt, I'm going to tie and add little buttons to it. It'll make a nice quilt to cuddle under on cold evenings when watching television.

I'm also going through a lot of my patterns for items to make for craft fairs in the fall. I used to do the craft fair circuit and haven't done it for a few years, but this year, I plan to get back into it again. I love meeting new people and knowing that my products are good enough to purchase.

I have some adorable decorator doll-type patterns I want to try too. The last time I made a doll was when my kids were little and I used to make baby dolls and clothes for my daughter and niece. I'm ready for a challenge now and have a few doll patterns just waiting for me to tackle them.

Have a fantastic weekend - I'm going to spend it sewing up a storm!

Back to Quilting!

Well, the book has been put on hold until more research has been done on it. In the meantime, we've been snowed in for the last week. This is what happens when you live in a city that doesn't get snow, one snowfall and the whole city shuts down. The one snowfall dropped over a foot of snow last Wednesday and we've had snow off and on since then.

With being stuck in the house (I don't own winter clothes because we don't have 'winter' in our piece of paradise), I decided to go through my stash of fabrics. Gee, I didn't realize I had so much. I started quilting about 30 years ago and I have at least that many years of a fabric collection. In 1999, I stopped quilting when my cousin and quilting buddy died. I returned home from her funeral with several quilts in various forms of completion. They've been tucked away since then - I couldn't even look at them, let alone do any quilting or sewing for myself. I used to work the craft sale circuit every winter to make extra $$$ but even stopped that. A lot of things have gone on in my life since then but last week, with the snowfall, I suddenly had an urge to start creating again.

I've been reading a lot of quilting blogs and getting lots of inspiration. In my stash, I found a couple of charm packets that I'd bought years ago. After some searching on the internet, I found a pattern for a disappearing 9 patch, which I put together in an afternoon. I loved it and had so much fun with it. The charm squares I had were both Moda, one was all pinks and the other was 'Poetry' - they look gorgeous together. Today, I"ll be adding borders and 3D butterflies to them.

Yesterday, we had rain all day and the roads were clear, so I ventured out to my favourite quilt shop and spent way more money than I should have but I was loving every minute of it and came home with some wonderful pieces of fabrics - I call them my 'shabby chic' collection - they have that old fashioned look in the lovely soft colour - love them.

Have patience with me on this blog - I'm really getting into trying to set it up nicely and will run into some bumps along the way, I"m sure. Happy Quilting!