Well, it's been a minute! I've been quiet on the blog. After my last post, I enjoyed a two-week vacation in British Columbia to visit family, who have all migrated from Nova Scotia to the opposite coast.
Yes, daughter hugs are the best! Hiking Dog Mountain in Seymour Provincial Park outside of Vancouver (below) ranks pretty high up there too.
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The skywalk may not look like much, but check out the view from the top:
I'm lacking photos of Victoria, as well as Sydney Island where we spent a lovely day at my brother and sister-in-law's cottage. We of course enjoyed visiting with mom and dad as well.
I came home to large pattern orders (yay! but a lot of folding, bagging, packing and shipping). That was followed by bookkeeping, design proposal deadlines and a writing deadline. I will say, after a lovely two weeks away, it took a little while to get my head back into work mode, but I finally managed and cleared the decks so I can now turn on the sewing machine and play with fabric for the first time in a couple of months.
I need to choose what to work on. Here's what was on the design wall at the end of July:
I think it needs a wide red border. That will require a trip to the quilt shop. I'm all out of red yardage. Maybe I could cobble together a scrappy border, but I rather think it needs a calmer, uniform border.
My other top choice requires lots of communing with my seam ripper.
Almost a year ago I put this project away because of a misadventure with colour value, which I got around to sharing here in December. I ended up making the pattern cover quilt with different fabrics (more about that one coming soon) but this original attempt has been nagging me for a finish. I started ripping seams to remove sashing so I can rearrange the blocks and hopefully save most of this work and fabric.
Here's the last photo I took last fall. You just can't see the design in those yellow blocks. It was even worse once I added sashing.
I'm almost done ripping seams. When that's done, I'll remove or move most of the yellow blocks and add wide background top and bottom borders. We'll see how that goes. Maybe the discarded yellow blocks will end up in the backing.
I think I'll finally turn on the sewing machine tomorrow to make progress on one of these projects.
How was your summer? A sewing desert, or a productive few months?
Happy quilting,
Joanne
