Scraps No More

I was lamenting to Lori the other day about all my bags of scraps and how useless they are, mostly because I don't remember I have them, and I don't like digging through bags to try and find something suitable, so I go buy more fabric, which is fun, but not necessarily frugal or even necessary. She told me a great idea for organizing my scraps, and then I read another good idea in the latest issue of American Patchwork and Quilting that I will also pass along for any who may not have read it.

Lori's idea is to take all your scraps and cut them into the largest usable size you can. You need to decide at the outset how small your smallest scrap will be. Personally, I don't think I'm going smaller than 1.5 inches, as that will make a one-inch finished square. That's small enough for me. So, utilizing Lori's plan, if you have a scrap that is smaller than a half-yard but bigger than a fat quarter, the first "scrap" you would cut is a fat quarter. Then from the remaining fabric you would cut squares as large as you can until the scrap is used up, and any itsy-bitsy leftover pieces you can feel good about throwing away.

Any fat quarters can then be put with your fat quarter stash, and the remaining squares can be sorted according to both size and color. For example, you might have a shoe box or Rubbermaid container, whatever, for all your eight-inch blocks, and within that container, blocks of different colors would be in different Ziploc bags. Or, conversely, you could have a container for all yellow fabrics, for example, with Ziploc bags for each size. I'm not sure which would be more useful. I suppose everyone will have their own preference.

The second idea for organizing scraps comes from Kathie Holland, whose quilt, "Scrap Happy" appears in the October 2008 issue of American Patchwork and Quilting magazine. Kathie buys half-yard cuts of fabrics, and then when she gets home, she cuts that half-yard into two fat quarters. One fat quarter she leaves as is, and the other fat quarter she cuts into strips of 6.5, 4.5, 3.5, and 1.5 inches. I haven't done the math, but I assume that uses up all the fat quarter. She organizes her stash then according to widths, not color. Kathie says this method gives her fabric to use for nearly any application, piecing or applique, including up to an 18-inch square from the fat quarter. For those of us who love the scrappy look, this is an awesome way to organize those fabrics.

I'm planning to use a combination of the two methods. If I have a half-yard of fabric, I will cut it like Kathie recommends. If my scrap is less, I will cut it into strips or squares as per Lori's suggestion. If the strip is long enough to be useable, I will keep it as a strip. If not, it then becomes a square. I think I want to organize by color and then by size, so my boxes will contain all strips or squares of one color, then organized by size.

I have a lot of work ahead of me to organize my fabric this way, but I think when I'm finished I will be amazed at how much fabric I have. I am hoping it will inspire me to make a lot more scrappy projects, as I love that look. Scrap on, quilters, scrap on!

Quilt Retreat!

At long last here are some pictures from the Sisters Quilt Retreat. I was going to call it the First Annual Sisters Quilt Retreat, but who knows where we'll all be next year, so it might not be annual. We'll definitely do it again, though. As they say, a fun time was had by all. There was much talking, amazing amounts of laughing, some tender moments, quite a bit of quilting fun, and even a brush with the law.

My project was the first one we did. It was a landscape quilt of three mountain peaks in the Canadian Rockies called the Three Sisters. Could there be a more appropriate quilting project for three sisters? I think not. Plus, it was an easy project, all fusible applique, and even though none of us got our quilts quilted, all of us got them finished and ready for quilting. As an added bonus, we also got to travel in person to see the Three Sisters in the Canadian Rockies near Canmore and take a picture of the three sisters with the Three Sisters. My absolute favorite quilt shop is in Canmore, Sugar Pine Quilts, and, well, let's just say it was a hit with all of us. We loved the fact that there were so many patterns, most of them with the option to buy a kit, in such a small store. Here are pictures of the three sisters with the Three Sisters and my landscape quilt (nine sisters in all in these photos).





Lori's project was the next one we did. She had brought prodigious amounts of fabric from both her stash and my mom's stash so that we could have lots and lots of choices while we made fabric postcards. I loved making fabric postcards. You can use up lots of cute fabric scraps. They go pretty quickly. You can embellish them within an inch of their lives, and, according to the lady at the post office where we went to mail some, you can mail them with no problem. Hopefully Vanessa and Emily get theirs soon. Here is a picture of the one I made for Jenny, my daughter's roommate. I also made one for my mom but did not take a picture of it before I gave it to her. Sorry!



Gayle had brought a fun book, Mosaic Picture Quilts, by Pat Durbin. We were hoping to get a chance to try making a landscape quilt out of a picture of Mom and Dad's house, but we ran out of time. I was very intrigued by this method of landscape quilting and I plan to try it sometime. Here's a picture of the book.



Lastly, my niece, Tresa, sent a project with her mom that became the hit of the quilt retreat because it was so portable and easy to take with us on road trips and do in front of the TV in the evenings. She gave each of us a Clover yo-yo maker and enough fabric squares to make a yo-yo American flag. I've only got about 20 of my yo-yos made, but here's a picture of the Clover yo-yo maker and five of my very cute yo-yos. I liked doing it so much that when I was in Utah the next week I bought the small Clover heart yo-yo maker and the small flower yo-yo maker. I highly recommend all three. Thanks, Tresa!



So that's the Sisters Quilt Retreat. I wish we could do it all again next month. I envy those of you with sisters at close proximity. I have to enjoy mine through email or phone calls or short but sweet in-person visits. Love you both!

Nothing of Significance

I've said it before, and I'll say it again. Non-quilters do not understand quilters. Sure, some of them try, like my daughter, Denise, who went with Lori and I to six different quilt shops on Saturday. By about the third shop she was so bored she confided in me that she almost wished she had gone with her dad to look at underground sprinker system parts at Lowe's. Thanks for trying. I do appreciate it. I was not bored even by the sixth shop. In fact, I'm sure I could have gone to six more.

The second example and the title for this post comes from a non-quilter at the Canadian/US border. While crossing said border, my sisters were asked about purchases made in Canada by the US Border Patrol guy. When they said they had bought quilt patterns he said, "Oh, so nothing of significance." Well, I guess what he meant was they didn't spend much money, but to a quilter them's fightin' words. Wisely my sisters did not fight with the guy, who had a sidearm and probably wasn't afraid to use it, and who could have kept them at the border indefinitely and confiscated all their quilty stuff, but we were all a bit up in arms over the casual classification of our treasures as "nothing of significance."

Dear non-quilters, you don't have to like quilting, you just have to understand that we love it. It is of significance to us, and it is seldom, if ever, boring. We quilt because we love the joy of creating. It is not to have a "blanket". I personally don't even care if I keep what I quilt usually. It is the journey that we treasure, not the end result, although it is fun to have a project completed, but, honestly, we are looking forward to the next project (and usually starting it) before the first one is finished. To those of you who try to understand, thank you. To those of you who don't, it's a sad, sad little life you live.

Quilty and Other Goodness

I have had a lot of goodness lately to write about, most of it not quilty, but I have been working hard, hard, hard so that I can take my week off for the 1st Annual Sisters Quilt Retreat, which I expect to be jam-packed with much quilty goodness, maybe even excellence. My project is semi-completed, and looking pretty good, if I do say so myself. I plan on sleeping little, quilting much, laughing more, and revelling in sisters for a solid week, and then it's off to Utah for a week. My son, Eric, is going to the Dominican Republic for two years on a mission for our church, and we are taking him down to the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah, where he will learn Spanish and how to be a good missionary. We will miss him, but we are so proud of him!

I had the great good fortune to see James Taylor in concert this past Saturday. Talk about goodness! Oh, he was everything I had hoped for and more. When he sang Sweet Baby James, my heart just about melted with the sweetness of it. They performed a rockin', jammin' version of Steamroller Blues which, as Eric is fond of saying, melted my face off. So much of fun! He also sang a surprisingly haunting and mysteriously solemn cover of Rodgers and Hammerstein's Oh What a Beautiful Morning. So lovely. I can't even begin to tell you how great this concert was, nearly three solid hours of JT and his Band of Legends. Easily the best concert I have ever been to.

So that's my goodness report. Isn't it great when life is full of goodness of all kinds? I'm am swimming in it right now and feeling very lucky. Wishing you all whatever kind of goodness you need.

My New Toy

I got a new iron yesterday. If this iron was for ironing shirts or something, I would not be one bit excited. I really dislike ironing shirts. My daughter loves to iron. I have no idea where that came from. No, ironing clothing of any kind is not fun. I am only excited about this iron because it's for quilting.

I used to have a Black and Decker Digital Advantage iron. I liked it fine, but one day it just refused to heat up, so it was time for a new one. I looked around a bit, couldn't find anything that really seemed like what I wanted, which was something with a lot of watts that heats up quite hot, has good steam, and will last for a long time. I had heard good things about Rowenta irons, so I had planned on looking at them but hadn't had the time. My husband offered to look for me, and he came home with a Rowenta Focus iron, 1700 watts of power and lots of steam holes.

I should say that I haven't actually used the iron yet. I have had no time to quilt, which is very sad, and I am certainly not volunteering to iron anything else. I have looked at the iron and plugged it in, and it seems good so far, so let's hope that Rowenta lives up to all the hype and that this is the best iron ever. Who would ever have thought that a new iron would be this exciting, exciting enough to write on the blog about? Do I live a sad, pathetic life, or am I just enjoying grown up things? You make the call.

SISTERS QUILT RETREAT BEGINS IN 10 DAYS!!! Now there's something to get excited about!

Rocky Mountain High

Alberta, for the most part, is very, very flat, lots of farmland and prairies and big sky. A lot of people love it the bigness and openess and, well, flatness of the Alberta prairies (my daughter, Denise), but some of us do not (me). I am a mountain girl. I grew up by mountains, and I feel safe with them hovering over me, sheltering me.

We live about two hours away from Waterton Glacier International Peace Park, which is a national park that crosses the border of Canada and the United States. It's part of the world-famous Canadian Rockies, and it's my favorite place in Alberta. Nowhere else in this province recharges my batteries like a trip to Waterton.

We go to Waterton several times a year, and I always bring my camera, and I always get some amazing photographs. There are a few other things I always do in Waterton.

1. Smell the air. It has the best smell in the world. It's uniquely Waterton.

2. Feel the mist off Cameron Falls. It's both soothing and invigorating at the same time.

3. Skip some rocks with my son, Eric. I am bad, he is good. If I can skip a stone three times I am highly pleased with my skill. Last week he skipped one at least 20 times. He wins.

4. Stand on the dock at the lake and take a "boat ride". This is an optical illusion. We don't actually have a boat, but if you stand right on the edge of the dock, where all you can see around you is water, and you look at the water sort of unfocussed, like those computer-generated 3-D pictures that were popular a few years ago, then you feel like you are moving. It is way fun, and if you get your eyes to cooperate, you can go on a "trip" that last probably two or three minutes. I get much mocking from my family for this love of the fake sailing, but I don't care.

5. Eat an ice cream cone. Waterton has a tiny little town with a lot of gift shops and art galleries and one amazing ice cream parlor with homemade waffle cones. Yum!

6. Wish I lived there. You can buy a cabin there, if you can find someone selling theirs, but they are way out of my league, even for the ones that look like a shack.

So I share with you some of my pictures from the latest trip. I wish I was going there tomorrow.

Cameron Falls



Butterfly by the falls



Wildflowers



Amazing amount of logs fallen across the stream. I don't know if it's beavers or weather responsible for this, but that's a pile of wood! (For all you Corner Gas fans)

No Fireworks, Just Floods

It was a very eventful Canada Day here in Lethbridge, but not with the usual festivities. Yesterday we got 45 millimetres of rain (nearly two inches for those of us non-metric people) in 90 minutes. We usually get that much rain in an entire month. As you can imagine, the storm sewers were not able to keep up and roads and basements everywhere were flooded. Our basement, luckily, did not flood because just before it started to rain we were inspired to put our extensions on the downspouts "just in case". Thank you.

So here is a picture of the road that leads to our house flooded with about four feet of water. Luckily our house is miles away from this spot. It was kind of exciting being the lead story on the Calgary news, and it was kind of fun when Gary and I had to run through the rain to get to the store. I have never seen rain like that in all my life. And it was also lucky that there is one road that goes from the south to north Lethbridge that didn't flood or we wouldn't have been able to come home for who knows how long.

I missed the fireworks, which were cancelled due to the flooding, and it was kind of inconvenient not to be able to flush toilets or use water for several hours after the storm, but we survived, and I hope they find another summer night to have fireworks just for fun.