A Special Edition Retreat for Ovarian Cancer!

When one of your sewing sisters receives an unexpected and serious diagnosis what do you do? Whatever you can to support her and your community, that's what. I like to stick with what I know (yes we already made a lovely quilt to keep her cozy at chemo), so this weekend I'm hosting a special edition Quilt By the Bay for the members of her three stitch groups.

A growing group of friends have signed up for the Ovarian Cancer Walk of Hope taking place in September. We are doing this because we have the #ladyballs to take action; to support our friend and the thousands of Canadian women who are currently in treatment and need support plus the thousands more who will receive this frightening diagnosis in the future.

Our non-profit retreat on Saturday will result in a hefty donation in support of our team. Because everyone is paying a premium to attend (and will receive a charitable receipt for a portion of their registration fee), I thought I'd reach out to some of my industry contacts to make this an extra awesome & celebratory day with goody bags!. Everyone kindly jumped in with fabulous items for us, plus a few extras. That's where YOU come in!

This Saturday, during retreat, I'll be posting on IG. There are a couple of extra goody bags and a special donation from me that will be up for grabs in exchange for a donation to our team.  I hope you'll check in to @poppyprint to see what we are up to and share words of support for our pal, who is rocking her way through chemo on the way to surgery later this summer.

To give you a little teaser, here is a list of our generous sponsors (mostly wonderful Canadian companies), to whom I say a heartfelt thank you!

Firstly, a huge thanks to the friendly folks at TrendTex Fabrics for supplying our actual goody bags, plus lovely fabric treats and other fun items! Located in Port Coquitlam, BC, TrendTex is a leading Wholesale Distributor in Canada for quilt shops and manufacturers. They are proud to represent some of the best fabric companies in the world such as Benartex, Cotton + Steel, Hoffman, Michael Miller, Moda, RJR Fabrics and Stof. 

And speaking of RJR Fabrics, they've sent us a gorgeous brand new Cotton and Steel print by Rashida in the Ovarian Cancer colour of support (teal). This fabric isn't even in stores yet!

  

Canadian companies Emmaline Bags (the best source for your bag hardware needs and the awesome FREE Retreat Bag pattern), Camelot Fabrics out of Montreal and N. Jefferson (local wholesale distributor that has been so supportive of me and my business) have all happily participated.

And finally, my publisher Martingale sent some fabulous books. I appreciate that they are always up for supporting their authors!

Tune in on IG this Saturday, or feel free to donate to our walking team anytime! Help us help Ovarian Cancer Canada to support patients, their families and the search for a cure.

Big News - of the BOOK VARIETY!

Keeping secrets is really hard work. When there are 12 women involved, all of whom blog and actively participate on social media, it is almost impossible. So, just in case you haven't yet caught wind of my exciting news, here goes:

I WROTE A BOOK!

MARTINGALE PUBLISHED THE BOOK!

THE BOOK WILL SHIP IN MID-FEBRUARY, 2015!

The best part about this book project? I got a lot of help from my friends. You know that retreats are my thing; I've been running a day-retreat business for almost 10 years and hosting 25 women on a 4-day annual retreat  for 8 years.  My dream for this book was to bring together a virtual retreat of my talented online pals (80% of whom I've had the pleasure of retreating with in real life!) and to share our ideas for useful projects that will help get you and your sewing stuff from home to retreat.  Plus, I wanted there to be a bunch of great patterns to sew once you got there! I've even included a fun group activity for an afternoon sew-in with friends at home if a sleepover isn't in the cards for you just yet.

The amazing people at Martingale worked with me to refine my proposal and I think we've come up with a really unique concept book full of gorgeous projects that everyone will want to make! There is truly something for everyone here. I can't wait to share more with all of you in the new year. For now, thanks to the gorgeous cover, you can have a preview of what to expect inside:

Martingale is based just outside of Seattle, an easy 3-hour drive south for me, so I've been to visit a few times. The staff are incredibly supportive and kind and their offices are so lovely - as you might expect there are gorgeous quilts hanging everywhere!  Perhaps one of the most fun and unexpected parts of the project was being able to participate in the photo shoot.  You know photography is a bit part of my life, but I've never had the chance to work with a true professional before.  For this, and for absolutely all of the aspects of Make It, Take It, including concept development, design, editing and layout, I feel so fortunate for their expert guidance.

Now that I've seen the book listed on Amazon and had the thrill of knowing the publisher likes the projects enough to feature them on the cover of Martingale's latest trade magazine, it is all becoming a reality that feels so satisfying and exciting.

In the new year, I'll be able to introduce you to all of the amazing designers who helped me fill this book with exciting projects. All of them will get to share their own projects and tell you a bit about their designs.  It'll be a blog hop, so of course, there will be books to give away! 

I wish we didn't have to wait so long, but the busy Christmas season is just around the corner, then many of us will be off to QuiltCon.  Let's face it, I've been waiting almost 2 years to hold this baby in my hands, so few more months isn't going to break me.....I don't think. Wink.

Uhm, You Missed a Spot

A couple of weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting Thormanby Island again. My generous friend A invited our little gang of island-hopping quilters that usually descend on Mayne Island every February for a retreat. As you can imagine, our February weekends are almost always spent indoors, enjoying the cozy sewing room while buckets of cold winter rain fall outside.  Let me just say that our August weekend together had 90% more sunshine and about 20 degrees of Celcius more to enjoy (as an August weekend should!).

The perfect cabin quilt!

It stood to reason that I should bring along my almost finished scrap vomit quilt - which, by the way, I will now refer to as the Scrapalicious quilt. This quilt has been over a year and a half in the making (actually I've pieced two of these tops and have enough squares cut to make a few more!).

• Katy's fab tutorial for the quilt is here
• See my Anti-Voodoo piecing tutorial for making sure your squares make it from the design wall to the machine in the right order using a method I learned years ago from a favourite quilting teacher. This works for efficiently piecing blocks into a quilt top as well.
• A post including a pic of the second top I've pieced with different coloured "B" blocks is here 

Back in February I'd finished the quilting and attached the binding while on Mayne.  As I do with all large quilt bindings, I pressed the binding to the back and temporarily secured it with tiny dots of Roxanne's Glue-Baste-It.  Hand-sewing the binding has been a hit and miss 'whenever I feel like it' activity for months and it needed to just. get. done. I figured if I brought the quilt along to sleep under, I could finish off the binding in the daylight hours while sitting on the sunny deck. Which I did. Wearing a bikini. OMG. That's all I'm saying about that.

And then I came home and washed the quilt. When I pulled it from the washer and saw batting and frayed thread, I had a momentary coronary event thinking that something had ripped the quilt, until my brain registered that, in fact, I had missed sewing down about 20" of binding!!! So, yeah, I missed a spot. Oops.

Scrapalicious: the Full Frontal

So, although you've seen several iterations of this quilt from blocks, to top, to quilted top, now it is finally complete, washed and folded on the back of our family room couch for everyone to enjoy.  Even this little gnomey.

I free-motion quilted it in an all-over interlocking flower pattern that I learned last year in a FMQ class with local teacher Lynne Fanthorpe.  I had so much difficulty with the Sulky 40wt thread I was using - it was breaking constantly and driving me mental with stopping/starting and burying threads. I finally had to abandon it from frustration but when I resumed quilting at Mayne my friends helped me discover that the variegated spool I was using was simply 'bad thread'. It broke with a gentle tug! I had pulled my hair out and came very close to tears thinking that my machine, the tension, the batting, the many needles I tried, or my skills were to blame. I've never experienced bad thread before. Luckily, I had a second spool of the exact same brand and colour variegation that I purchased on the same day as the offensive spool. The second one worked PERFECTLY FINE. Bizarre. 

Next time I'm sticking with Aurifil thread and less involved quilting. I'll also do a more careful check of the binding before my quilt gets its first wash!

A Very Special Delivery - Blogger's Quilt Festival

Welcome to my Bloggers Quilt Festival post!  Some of you may recognize this quilt I've chosen to share in the ROYGBIV category because a very similar one made by Tracey and her friends was featured in the festival last year! I sent Tracey a block for her quilt and it became my inspiration - not only the design, but also the sentiment - for this quilt.

I had the great pleasure of delivering this beautiful quilt to a very special person earlier this week.

This is what I've been busy with over the past 5 weeks, with regular updates on Instagram. A mom in our school community received the worst possible news while on vacation with her family in March. She has a long road ahead to regain her health and she needs to know that we are with her all the way.  There was a sense of urgency to get a quilt around her brave shoulders, so I put out a call to my retreat customers and fellow members of the VMQG to help.  They responded as quilters do: with generosity and grace.

I also organized several sewing days around my dining table for mothers and friends in our community so that they could learn how to piece a scrappy sprouts block and put their love and strength into this gift as well. Several women had never sewn before and others hadn't touched a machine in years, but they patiently laid out their blocks and carefully sewed the patches together for their dear friend.  I had pre-cut squares and pre-pieced half square triangles from my stash ready for them to select.

In the end I was overwhelmed with the number of sprouts blocks that came in. I couldn't bear not to use every single one, so there's a lovely stalk of them holding up the back. Piecing 74 blocks made by over 30 different people has it's challenges but I was determined to let this project come together peacefully. This isn't perfection of technique, but it is absolutely perfect.  In the final layout, a vertical sashing between the columns and a slight offset of each stalk of sprouts keeps things interesting and hides the subtle size differences in the blocks.

A sweet purple Dresden just for Deanna - the four full stalks of sprouts represent her incredibly supportive husband and their three amazing boys.

The VMQG retreat over the first weekend in May was my opportunity to assemble the top and backing, sandwich this 78" x 82" quilt and complete the quilting.  It's quilted with an all-over swirly and looping meander using a gorgeous variegated Aurifil 28 wt in pale yellow/cream/lilac. The backing fabric is a Michael Miller print called Old Script with lilac-coloured cursive text.  It's bound with a V & Co. Color Me Happy green bead stripe cut on the bias, plus a little strip of purple Lizzy House pearl bracelets around the lower left corner. I used 3 strands of coordinating lilac embroidery floss to blanket-stitch the label on.

There's just something extra-special about this sweet sprout block that makes it the perfect choice for a group-effort comfort quilt.  I send a heartfelt hug and thanks to Tracey for allowing me to share her mini-tute for the sprouts block, and the same to every woman who had a hand in the making of this quilt. 

This quilt is so cheerful and full of hope; it is made with love and just plain feel-good vibes.    I know it's already working wonders.

Visit the festival at Amy's Creative Side and have a look through the festival links to see hundreds of amazing quilts made all over the world! Amy does an incredible amount of work organizing sponsors, categories and voting twice a year - it truly is the biggest quilt show online! Thank you Amy!

A Christmas Greenhouse

Making special gifts for family and dear friends is what Christmas is all about for me, and I know many of you, too.  The minute I saw Amy's Victorian Greenhouse pattern for foundation paper piecing, I knew that I would make it for my lovely friend. She recently inherited her mother's sweet greenhouse and after dismantling, transporting and setting it up in her own backyard, she spent last summer filling it with various seedlings, tomatoes, strawberries and a sweet garden chair.  I know it is very special to her, and that it will enrich her garden fully, not only with warm memories, but also vibrant, healthy plants.

We share a love of Liberty prints, so I had a look through the stack of tana lawn that I brought back from London last July to find just the right print to fill the greenhouse. I used my own poppy-printed fabric for the ground and Joel Dewberry's new woodgrain in grey for the border.  The foundation print is one of rocks that I've had for years and had never found a use for. It is perfect here.

The pattern, although featuring some super skinny strips, was very easy to sew on the foundation. I used a product called "Fundation" printable sheets  to print the pattern directly from my printer.

I sewed ties into the top and bottom seams (between the pillow front and back) to keep the back overlap from gaping. 

My friend visited with her family yesterday and we exchanged our heartfelt gifts. I was absolutely thrilled to receive the most beautiful hand-woven tea towel from the first cloth she has created on her table-top loom. You can see the blogpost about her newest obsession, and my treasured gift, here.  While Christmas is definitely a time of giving, I will freely admit to being a most appreciative receiver as well!

I hope you are enjoying spending some time sewing for special people in your life, too!

A Birthday Box

After watching the Canucks win in overtime last night (on TV), I started a much-delayed birthday gift for a friend. I mean, how much time can a box pouch take anyway? It was only 10:30 on a Friday night....

I've never made one before, so I scoured the internets for available tutorials and decided to use this one by Libby. Even the lining is completely turned, so there are no exposed seams on the inside of the pouch. Just to ramp up the challenge, I decided to cut into my stash of never-used coated cottons and chose an Amy Butler print for the lining (I got mine at a shop that has since closed, but I found some for you here).  Even though I make a lot of bags, visualizing how stuff is going to turn from inside out to right side out is not my strength, so I went slowly.

The tutorial was easy to follow with excellent photographs. The only issue I had was trying to sew over top of the zipper ends "in the same place" on both the lining and outer fabric (a luscious AMH linen interfaced with Pellon ShapeFlex, by the way).  I found this impossible due to the bulk of the pull tabs, but it's no biggie, it just means you can see stitches at the end of the zipper on the inside of the pouch.  This, of course, will make absolutely no sense to you unless you've tried to make one of these before!

The other issue that kept me up until 1:30 a.m. was finding the right needle for the job. My stitches were lovely on the top, but when trying to sew through any seam allowances that included the coated cotton, the bottom of the work was a bit of a tangled mess. The vinyl side of the fabric was not touching the plate or foot, but just sewing through that stuff proved disastrous to my tension. I think the thread must have been sticking to the vinyl within the layers.  Finally, a topstitch 80 needle coupled with increased top tension did the trick.  See Amy Butler's tips for sewing with her vinyl coated cottons here.

 

In the rare seams where I had to sew over the right (sticky) side of the coated lining, I used a teflon foot which easily glides over the vinyl.  Apparently a piece of tape on the bottom of  your presser foot can do the trick just as well - if only I'd known before springing $25 for the Pfaff foot! I've heard of putting tissue paper on top of the vinyl can help, but then you have to pick paper out of the stitches. No thanks.  I wish I could have given the pouch a final pressing (all boxes/bags/pouches look best with a good pressing) but I didn't want to risk melting the vinyl!

Rumour has it my friend's husband forgot her birthday today. Ouch. I'm so glad I stayed up late to make this for her!

London Herself

You've already seen an Instagram primer from my trip in the form of a mosaic and the special Liberty Fabric post is here. Yesterday I posted more about the Fat Quarterly Retreat including the people I met, handmade goodies I swapped, and projects that I made in workshops.  Today, I'll take you on a little photo tour of the city (or at least the small portion that I saw). For those of you wanting to sit through a slide show of all 186 photos in my Flickr London set, head here.

Keep in mind I only had one full day of sightseeing, which also had to include shopping for gifts and a momento or 3 for me, lunch, dinner, many drinks to keep hydrated in the heat, a show and visiting with new friends!  Leanne and I met at 8:00 a.m. to start the day with a quick coffee/breakfast at Starbucks and we didn't return, sweaty, exhausted and laden with shopping bags, to our hotels until after 10:30 p.m. We rocked it, actually.  Rather than a chronological story, I'm just going to take you through the day in pictures.

Museum of Natural History

A pretty Kensington mews - laneway houses in converted garages

Sweet ride!

The approach from Leicester Square

Seats for the evening's outdoor London Opera production in Trafalgar Square

Trafalgar Square fountain

Big Ben from Trafalgar Square

Charles I (familiar flag in the background, flying at Canada House)

The years have taken their toll, base of Charles I statue

Admiralty Arch

 

No mistaking who's office this is!

Approaching Leicester Square to buy our discount show tickets; we saw One Man, Two Guv'nors which despite being about 90 degrees in the theatre was very funny and entertaining.

It was here that Leanne and I met up with Shevvy, a super fun member of the London MQG and willing companion for lunch and some Covent Garden shopping. It was so great to meet her (as well as Susan and Marg & daughter Emma from Australia for dinner and our show) prior to retreat starting. Just having a few more familiar faces at a retreat of 150 people was a comfort. Oh, and for those interested, we ate at Jamie Oliver's Union Jack's - a casual open air resto under cover of Covent Garden Market where we enjoyed flat bread pizza and coleslaw. It was so hot, no one was really all that hungry.

Morning in the Theatre District

The ubiquitous double-deckers (never rode on one, sadly)

Garden courtyard behind St. John's (the "Actor's Church") at Covent Garden

Covent Garden market stalls at lunchtime

Last night's holdovers, the Crown & Anchor

We missed out on Laduree while in France last year; the Champs Elysees line up was just too unbearable, so I enjoyed a salted caramel macaron at the London location instead!

Covent Garden covered marketplace

The rest of the day was spent in and out of Covent Garden area shops (Cath Kidston, where I purchased a sweet summer dress, Leanne scored a wallet and Shevvy a handbag all on sale. Then to Fly London where I found the most sublime black pumps on sale pour moi, and SuperDry for a cool belt for T). I also picked up some great tea towels (Leanne was hoarding them and I really felt it necessary to get on the tea towel bandwagon!) at Cath Kidston and the National Gallery gift shop and Tshirts, mugs and magnets at the London Transit Museum gift shop. 

Friday morning the time change finally caught up with me and I was wide awake at 5:30 a.m. What to do until the Liberty talk at 11:00? After completing some handstitching on my little house tape-measures for the sample swap, I decided to sneak out without waking Susan and head to Hyde Park for a walk. There wasn't much action in the park at 7:00 a.m. except for intrepid triathletes swimming in the murky Serpentine, dog walkers in the meadows and a few cyclists. It was a gorgeous morning and by 8:30 a.m. as I closed my loop around the Serpentine, it was already extremely hot.

morning view from my hotel room

Mounted police (?) setting out for the day 
ETA: my Brit friends inform me these are military men, the Horse Guards, returning from morning training in the park.

self explanatory!

The Queen's Temple

Hyde Park heron takes flight

Symmetry at the Italian Gardens

Italian Gardens - gorgeous

On Sunday afternoon after the retreat ended, I still had about 5 hours to do something Londony before dinner plans with the Fat Quarterly crew. There was a group headed to Liberty for more shopping, but I was rather spent (quite literally and figuratively) and wanted some quiet time on my own. A trip to the Tate Britain, boat ride on the Thames to the Tate Modern and a walk back along the South Bank was my afternoon. 

Frisbee okay?

At the Tate Britain

"First Abstract Painting" Ben Nicholson, 1934. Quilt inspiration!

Brits: is this actually MI6, or just the building that stood for it in Skyfall?

Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, South Bank

Tate Modern

Millenium Bridge, looking north to St. Paul's. When I was in London 13 years ago this bridge was closed as it was too unstable for walking. Seems under control now.

Bubble fun on the South Bank

Snacks from an Airstream

Power To The People

Where boards go to skate...

Where they go to die. Skateboard graveyard,  Hungerford Bridge pier

A view of Festival grounds on the South Bank and London's tallest building, The Shard

Gloucester Road tube station, my 'home' station in London

Kensington still life (near my hotel)

Never tried them, but it's a lofty claim!

Have you had your fill? That was a big post to get through, thanks for stopping by. I hope you enjoyed the visual tour of my brief stay in London. I left the city after retreat for a few days in lovely Derbyshire with Lynne and her children. Photos of their local town and village will be my final UK trip post - coming right up!