The First Day of Summer.....

Yesterday I made this little doll quilt top. I found the pattern here. It is from Kathleen Tracey's blog A Sentimental Quilter. Some great little quilt patterns there! I wanted to make something fun that could be finished quickly. I have backing and binding fabrics chosen, so hopefully I can finish it today. Most of the fabrics are from Barbara Brackman's Civil War Homefront. I love her fabric designs. (I have a little piece of turkey red fabric from Barbara Brackman's Civil War Reunion fabric on the way here too. :))


Summertime here in our garden brings strawberries... delicious!..



...and the coriander that has bolted to seed with the warmer weather. The flowers are pretty!




I have finished the last of my Dresden Plate blocks. I still have to chose a background fabric. I had fun making these blocks! :)




Summertime brings lots of new fruit. This is the beginning of a small crop of Gravenstein apples. When we moved here we planted a Jonathan apple tree on to which my husband grafted several other varieties of apple from my parent's garden. The only one that took was the Gravenstein. We have one branch that produces a small crop of fruit that are great for cooking.



This rose is actually from the root stock of a Mr Lincoln rose that died years ago. This year has been a great year for roses in my garden and this plant is covered in small flowers.


Two more Morrell blocks are finished!

This is the only block in the quilt with a vase.




This one has 33 flying geese blocks......well, I thought I made 33....one flew the coop! I hunted high and low for the blue fabric and couldn't find it. Luckily I found a replacement in my stash that is almost a matching shade of blue, but not the correct spot. If you don't look too closely the "odd" block fits in!




Recently I have tried a couple of "new to me" techniques. I love learning new ways of doing things. Both techniques I used when I made my friend's quilt.

The first was strip piecing....yes, I had never sewn pieces together that way before!!! It was much faster than the usual way of stopping after every sewing line. Saves thread too!

The other new technique I tried was for basting the quilt. I usually try to find a large table and spread the whole quilt out and pin baste. Often the quilt won't fit on the table and mostly I have ended up with (huge) tucks in the back because part of the quilt hangs over the edge of the table!!!! That leads to lots of frustration, then procrastination over finishing the quilt because I need to rebaste the whole thing!

Well, several moths ago I saw videos on youtube by Sharon Schamber where she showed a different technique to baste quilts. I was reminded of the technique when I saw the links again on Janet's blog. Here are links to the 2 videos. Part 1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhwNylePFAA and part 2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k_EjBGz5vGQ
You don't need a huge space and luckily for me DH had 2 pieces of wood that were just right.
The technique worked perfectly for me first go!!! I will definitely be basting my quilts that way in the future.

The weather here is warming up and we have had the wettest Spring in years. (Last month we reached average rainfall for 12 months for the first time in 11 years!) The garden is loving the rain and warm weather. However, some parts of Australia have had more rain than they need. Spare a thought for Chookyblue and others who have had too much rain!


My favourite red rose Red Velvet. The photo doesn't do justice to the true colour of the rose.