Glowing Hearts QAL Kickoff

Welcome to the ninth annual Quilt Along here at mmmquilts! Once again, this free Quilt Along kicks off today, on my birthday, and ends on June 15, what was the birthday of one 'famous Canadian', my dad. I am so glad you are here, reading this post, and I hope that you will join in. This year's quilt along features a smaller quilt, and, as usual, maybe even more so this year, the pace is nice and slow, so it's easily worked in with your regular quilting projects.

If you are new to the blog, welcome! I hope you'll peruse the tabs up top, maybe check out some of the activities and makes of mine. Be sure to follow me (see the buttons 'Get new posts by email' and Instagram on my sidebar) to be notified of new posts over the next 2.5 months of the quilt along.

Arabesque

And here she is, all pretty and toute finie!

I couldn’t be happier and more over the moon with this finish. Who knew it would end up so pretty, and, as people have commented and I agree, that it looks as if it was planned from the get-go!

Gratitude and Glimmers #93

Welcome to my post for the month of all things I like and for which I am grateful.  You can find links to more posts like this one at LeeAnna's blog, Not Afraid of Color. Glimmers are the little things that give me a frisson if you will, of joy or happiness or excitement or all three.

1. This is the fifth time we’ve been to Cuba but the first time we went to Cayo Coco. What another beautiful place! Here are just a few photos, none are photoshopped for colour. It truly is this eye-popping, saturated turquoises and blues. 

Damage from last year’s hurricane brought in sandbars and rocks that were not here before. It’s very shallow for a long way out. You can walk forever along the shore, kilometres of beautiful beach. 

SAHRR Finished Flimsy

I am just so darn happy to show you my finished flimsy for my SAHRR project #1!

Sorry for the inside shot but once again it was crazy-windy (hello, it's spring and I live basically on the shore of a Great Lake)! There was no sun today but at least I had some natural light on the design walll to photograph this beauty. 

Project Quilting 16.6 Harvest Apron

I love starting off the year with the Project Quilting Challenge, and I love the pace: six challenges over the course of 12 weeks. Yet each year I've participated, the final challenge always is bittersweet. Yes, now I can get on with my own agenda, but I'm sad to let the burst of creativity and, to some degree, ha, the intense focus on a project go.

Without further ado, here is project 16.6, 'Button it Up' where we were to incorporate the meaning, literal or figurative, of "button it up"  into our project. I went literal.

All those beautiful florals..and one maple leaf fabric from Northcott for Canada's sesquicentennial 🍁

This is my Harvest apron, a free tutorial by Inflorescence Designs. You can see a button in the centre of the waistband, and a toggle button at the bottom edge. Read on to find out what nifty trick the two perform to transform this apron into a little bowl or basket!

Heart Centre Project Quilting 16.5

Quilt designs come to me sometimes by doodling on graph paper, at other times by playing in EQ8, or, as with this one, fully formed into my head.

The quilt is now for sale in my Etsy shop. 

It was Tuesday, our last night in Cuba. I was well into my third book of the week, a gripping biological warfare murder mystery, The Chosen Dead by M. R. Hall. Quite chillingly, may I say, exploring the world of pandemics and modifying DNA and creating smart vaccines...published in 2013! Anyhow, I’d stayed up a bit later than usual, voraciously gobbling up the story, and, although I still had a hundred pages or so left, finally, reluctantly, turned out the light. And… my mind would not wind down. I’m the type of person who, once the light goes out and my head hits the pillow, is off to sleep within less than a minute. Not so that night. It was sometime after midnight before I finally drifted off. One of the things I was doing in an attempt to slow my mind down was figuring out what I would make for the ‘Follow Your Arrow’ challenge. Well that worked out fine as you can see!

Gratitude and Glimmers #92

Welcome to my post for the month of all things I like and for which I am grateful.  You can find links to more posts like this one at LeeAnna's blog, Not Afraid of Color. Glimmers are the little things that give me a frisson if you will, of joy or happiness or excitement or all three.

We had weird weather all through February: a lot of cold days in a row, a lot of grey, and a couple of times back-to-back days of rain one day followed by snow the next. This caused some beautiful ice-encased trees. Thank goodness it wasn’t too thick like a few years ago where many trees came down. This time the odd small branch fell, nothing major.