Sweet Hearts Update

Happy Valentine's Day!

It seems appropriate to show how far along I am with the Sweet Hearts redwork designs that I first showed last Valentine's Day. Not far at all! But at least one is done:

Adding the loop knot to my repertoire was a big help, but I was still struggling with these for a long time. I used a ceramic pencil to trace the designs, and it rubbed off quickly, so I had to guess where to stitch half the time.

Finally last fall I saw that Pigma Microns come in red, so I bought one in the smallest size, 005. Pigma Microns are permanent, archival quality pens, and I found that the 005 makes a very fine line:

Now these are finally easy to stitch! I sincerely hope that they will be done before next Valentine's Day!

But honestly, I am not sure that there is a lot more redwork in my future once these are done. Even though I love things that are red and white, I have been finding it hard to warm to this technique. We'll see how I feel when they're all done. There will be nine in all, so lots of time to change my mind...

Snow Day

For the most part Toronto has not seen the bad weather that most of the northeast has received this year. I often say that we have a protective bubble over us! Today, though, we caught it. It has been snowing and blowing all day, and we have had at least 30 cm (one foot) of snow at our house.

A good day to stay inside and sew! I know two other ladies from my guild who said the same thing to me this morning. I started a new quilt! I made two of these:

And two of these:

These are the Scrappy Trip Around the World blocks that seem to have taken Blogland by storm (I have storms on the brain today). Bonnie Hunter posted this demo in 2005. Recently Hetty made a few blocks, which caught my eye. Then LeeAnn made her massive 96" square version, which really tempted me. I was holding the line, though, until I had a look at the Flickr group, which is at 1300+ photos and counting. I started to look for interesting settings and I was a goner.

Usually the line of contrast runs from corner to corner, but I saw one quilt sewn this way on the Flickr group. You can make some cute layouts with this block.

I love the way it looks like a collage of old newspapers! All the fabrics for this quilt are from my stash. I bought the text-based fabrics for another quilt (Collector, actually), and then changed my mind and decided to use just one fabric in the background there. Personally, I think this quilt is a way better use for them!