What a Whirlwind!

Belated Thanksgiving wishes, everyone! I thought I'd have time to post during the weekend but the sched was pretty packed so it's time for a little catch up. The pumpkin pies got made Saturday morning and were thoroughly enjoyed throughout the weekend. I used a new pastry recipe that has baking powder and milk in it and it turned out really nice - lovely to work with. I think this is one of my favourite pies so I was certain to get my share. I made four so there was lots to enjoy on the weekend and some to send home in care packages.

It was also a weekend for quilts. Anne had made a Between The Lines top for the daughter of a friend of hers who is due soon so she wanted to try her hand at machine quilting it with her walking foot. We set her up in the kitchen so that I could crack the whip over her while I made the pies.

The top has some Paddington Bear and Clifford The Big Red dog prints in it, along with lots of greens and a bit of blue & gold. It went very well for her and she was thrilled to get it done. I think she thought it might take longer than it did, but in a few hours it was done so now it just needs to be bound.

Then she moved on to Addi's quilt; this is the one for her god daughter for Christmas that she designed this summer. She has all the blocks made for the centre of it so I laid those out and she got all of that sewn together as well. It is really sweet, particularly the fussy cuts in the centre of the white blocks. I don't have any photos on my camera but I'll get her to send a few through so that I can share them with you.










And, the more we talked, the more we realized that it might be nice for Addi's older sister Emma to open a quilt on Christmas morning too so we did a bit of digging and came up with I Spy. It is a promotional pattern from Pink Chalk Studios.

This is the photo that we were working from...









and this is my henscratching that lays out the dimensions. We cut the bricks in the centre panel 6" x 3", so a little bigger than the pattern that we had. And we created the block border out of fabric squares - the original pattern used a large stripe but I didn't have anything in that scale so we improvised. Emma is 10 so we wanted it larger than a baby quilt. This one should end up around 50" x 70", a perfect size for wrapping herself up in to read (she is a voracious reader).














Talk about a quick turnaround on this one! We started cutting at 8 p.m. and by 11 p.m. everything was cut and the centre panel was all together and pressed.

I'm still working on the outside borders but it should be done later today so I'll post more pics tomorrow.

All in all, a banner weekend for quilt production. So much to be thankful for!...M