March Sewing Space

All seems quiet on the blog lately, but behind the scenes I'm being pulled in every direction. Here's what my sewing space looked like in March:

We had a week off here for March Break, so I travelled to Lake Louise for a few days to visit my sister. We skied in the Rockies, hiked Johnston Canyon and walked across the lake, along with sightseeing in Banff and Canmore. By chance, we happened to park across from Canmore's quilt shop. Despite the advertised eight thousand bolts of fabric, and calls of, "We'll see you later, just ship it home," I showed great restraint and only walked out with two metres of fabric. And of course 8 hours on planes, plus graph paper, a pencil and the latest issue of Canadian Geographic equalled a new quilt design. But that one is a secret for now. I've already given too much away.

Late afternoon light, the sun just dipping below the peaks

Early morning stillness

That new quilt design happily coincided with National Quilt Day, celebrated with a sale at my local shop - where I picked out the perfect fabric for it - followed by an afternoon of sewing with some family. Sewing turned into watercolor painting, turned into, it's 7 o'clock already?!, we should probably eat something.

At the sale, I did pick up some more deep and gorgeous Kona Bay Hibiscus, along with my first-ever batik print for the backing. I pulled the others from my stash. The plan is to make another Jewel Burst quilt, likely for a charity raffle. This time I'll use the purple for the background and the greys and whites for the jewel burst and border, opposite to the previous version. I usually use low value colours as background, so this will be a bit different for me.



Also during the March Break, I quilted a throw quilt my Grandma pieced, which had a short deadline and shall be revealed once its recipient has seen it. She's been working so hard on it.

I've been eager to get my hands on the Jewel Burst quilt to start the free-motion quilting around the centre, but sewing time evades me. I want to have enough time to get into a flow and finish in one sitting. Maybe it's different with practice, but at this stage in my free motion quilting I find it hard to quilt with the same consistency when I've stopped and started again. A colleague and I are presenting at a teaching conference this weekend, so my time and energy are reserved for that and hopefully I'll return to my machine next week.

Finally, I joined Bloglovin. I started adding all the blogs I read to my page and realized just how many there are! Then I realized I could sort them into groups, which made them much easier to navigate and look for new posts. So if you use it, click the button on the top right in the sidebar to follow me.

I can't resist posting one more photo of Mt. Fairview, with the boathouse at its feet. I think this is my favourite landscape photo from our trip, shot on our first morning there, when my body woke to another time zone, while the mountains loomed and the world still slept around us. I waited for dawn light and took my tripod and camera out on the lake to play a bit. This one came from my phone.