Congratulations Canada!!!

The Gold Medal mens hockey game was an absolute thrill to watch, and hats off to the US team for such a great game but I am so happy that Canada won. It was exciting from the first second to the last and a great effort by both teams.

To all our Canadian Olympic Athletes....a big congratulations on all your achievements. You've done us proud. You've made Winter Olympic history for Canada with 14 gold medals, but more importantly, you won the hearts and minds of all Canadians and have served to pull us together as a Nation.

Your efforts are amazing and I thank you for making this the best Winter Games I've ever watched....

The Olympic medals are beautiful. For those who don't know the story behind the making of these amazing medals, please read on here. Medals of the 2010 Olympics

My Quilt

A few posts ago I showed you the quilt I was working on. Much time has passed and I finished that quilt ages ago, just haven’t had time to post the pictures. I am so grateful to have Andrea’s store in Sidney because she has a big quilt frame and she can put the quilt together in no time at all. All I have to do is prepare the top, clean up the loose threads etc. cut the batting and backing to the size required and she does the rest.  She just sets it up on the frame, we chat about what kind of quilting I’d like done on it, and two days later she called to say it was ready.

I don’t mind paying because if I had to do this at home, it wouldn’t get done. Being that it is a quilt size bedspread, not just a quilt, there is no way I could accomplish the same amount of detail of quilting and have it done so beautifully, so the cost is worth it. It makes it more likely that I would do more quilting knowing that in the big projects, she would be able to finish them for me.  All I had to do when I brought it home, was to do the binding on the edges.

The next challenge will be to make toss pillows. I saw Andrea working on a rag quilt at the store the other day and thought that would make a great pillow. I picked up a little more of the quilting flannel I used in the quilt, so now I have enough fabric to do those. I will make pillows to match the quilt, but I didn’t want to do the standard matchy matchy kind of pillows, so it was timely that I saw here working on that rag quilt.

If you like quick and easy type of projects, here are a couple of links for making rag rugs. A great way to use up scrap fabrics that aren’t big enough for other projects. Keep in mind, the fabrics have to be woven fabric so that when they are washed at the end, the edges you create will fray, that’s what gives it that wonderful rag rug appeal.

An Important Note: DO NOT wash your fabrics before hand. I know you would usually do that to avoid shrinkage later, but for this project, you don’t want to prewash or your edges won’t fray when you wash it later. Here are some free instructions I found. Just Google rag quilting and you’ll find tons. Pay close attention to the washing instructions, it will make a difference in the finished product.

Rag Quilt 1     Rag Quilt 2     Rag Quilt 3

And this is my finished quilt from a few weeks ago. I will post the rag quilt pillows later.

 

A Valentine Doll

One of the things I worked on and finished the week before Valentines Day, is this little cutie. The original design is a Cindee Moyer doll called “Silvanna”. If you want a simple and sweet doll to make, this is a good choice. She is a stump doll, so you only have a body, arms and head to do. Even the face is a sleepy face, so no eye details, couldn’t get any easier than that.

I told my friend Janet that I would try to whip up a doll for her Valentines display at the tea shop, so this is what I managed to do. I am calling her “Cherise”

Colour Theory

Our doll club was privileged to have Marie Browning give a talk at the last meeting. If you’re not aware of who Marie is, lets just say she’s a crafter/artist extraordinaire. She has written tons and tons of books, is connected to so many organizations and is in such high demand, that we were so fortunate that she was able to fit us into her hectic schedule. You can see more of her work here.

Marie talked to us about colour theory. Sometimes it can be a dry topic but she made it so interesting. She gave us a quick and easy exercise to do. It was so simple but makes the concept of colour theory so much fun and easier to understand. Simply put, she gave us little pictures of various things, a piece of card stock and we brought some trims to share with each other. We attached the pictures to the top of the card then you simply study the colours in the pictures and find trims to attach below the picture both in the colours you find and the proportion of those colours.

What the exercise is meant to teach is to observe what you’re really looking at, the variety of colour, the amounts of each colour and how the proportions of each create the palette within the picture. Some colours are intense, some you hardly see, and others take up much of the space, But whatever you look at after doing this simple exercise, then forces you to pay more attention to colour and the many variables of it.

If you do this exercise yourself you can build quite a collection of cards that you can use as a reference tool when and if you need to know how certain colours might look together. Here are the two cards I’ve done so far. The funky little buttons came from one of the ladies at my table and just seemed to be the perfect thing to use. Aren’t they fun.

  

Half Pint Pixie

A while ago I showed you what I received for my Christmas Exchange at our December doll club meeting. Thankfully, everyone brought in their dolls to the January meeting so we could get a better look at what everyone received.

I was able to get pictures of my Half Pint Pixie to show you. To bad we couldn’t all have such nice looking cheeks, (the ones in back…) ;o) If you’d like to see more of the dolls we exchanged and other dolls our club members have made, just follow the link to our “Gallery” page. Cloth-A-Dollics

Enjoy