No Wedding Quilt Wednesday

No progress on the wedding quilt today, unless thinking about the quilt and not doing anything about said thoughts could be considered working on the quilt. It was, however, a quilting day today. Everyday for the last five days has been quilting day. I am chugging away at a lap quilt for my grandma; the first free motion quilt I have ever attempted.

Since I am an overachiever, I finished the meandering stitches on the centre of the quilt and decided to try pebble quilting one of the borders. I had no idea what pebble quilting was until I discovered http://www.handmadebyalissa.com/pebblequilting/ . My pebble quilting looks atrocious compared  the stuff featured on that site but I am really enjoying the texture that my hurried, uneven circles are giving.

 Pebble quilting uses a ton of thread and the thread for this quilt cost more than the fabric! The process has been long, I get about four, fifteen minute sessions of quilting done a day because any longer than fifteen minutes and the sewing machine pedal is so hot it burns my foot. I am just thankful my sweet little Apollo can't crawl yet so he is safe sitting on the floor of my sewing room, playing with his toys.

Wedding Quilt Wednesday

Well, it really isn't Wednesday and I am a bit late on posting this but I really did work on the quilt last Wednesday.

For those just joining me I am making the quilt pictured below for The Aunties as a wedding gift. The pattern is from http://purlbee.squarespace.com/wedding-quilt/.

It would have been easy to simply go with the colour scheme laid out by the pattern designers but that, would be too easy. One of the aunties loves red but the other is more of a blue girl and since I love blue for the bedroom (a good sleepy colour) I decided to go with a blue to purple colour scheme.

I was originally going to collect the fat quarters of fabric over time, picking up a fabric as it caught my attention but this proved to be difficult. I would have to bring my fabric with me or a photo of the fabric so I could make sure the fabrics flowed together nicely. Instead of that crazy making idea, last Wednesday I made my way to Quiltessential http://www.quiltessentialco.com/ in St. Albert and chose 20 fat quarters for the coloured blocks of the quilt.

The ladies at the store were very helpful and patient with me as I browsed, took down, put back and finally chose fabric. The didn't even grumble when most of the quarters I wanted needed to be cut off the bolt. A lovely place to get lost in for a bit, I highly recommend them.

It took a few hours but here they are. The 20 blue and purple fabrics.

I'll try to be on time next Wednesday.

Crunchy Granola!

We have had some pretty productive days here in the burbs since I convinced the man that I would like for us to stay home a few days a week. I usually go along with his get out of the house quests but I need to regroup from the epic road trip.

This week G and the man hammered through a jumbo box of organic granola and at $9 a box that can be a pretty spendy habit. Today it occurred to me that, given my culinary savvy, I could probably make just as good or better granola for a lot cheaper.

I spent a bit of time with some cooking blogs and some cookbooks and with an idea of ingredient ratios, I came up with my own recipe. It really is quite easy and in 30 minutes G and I made enough granola to hopefully, satisfy us for the week.

Recipe after the jump

The Aunties Get Hitched

So the purpose of this epic family road trip was to get to Georgetown in time to be a part of Amy and Anita's wedding. We were so honoured to be invited, not only, to be there but to participate as well.

The beautiful brides, newlywed

He looked so impressed

The brides were stunning, the weather was great, the flowers were beautiful and I drank way too much red wine. It was a beautiful day to celebrate their love.