Saturday, January 31, 2009

SULKY KK 2000- WHITE QUILT

See this little can on the right? Well all I can say is WOW! What a great product! My sweetie
bought this for me in my bag of goodies for Christmas. I looked at it and didn't give it too much thought, well actually thought that the quilt store just gave him a sale for stuff they didn't sell much of.

Well I tell ya, (Sarah Palin style) it's the best little product! I used it sparingly, have done 2 quilts with this and still loads left. It went on so smoothly and I had lots of work time with it and was able to manoeuver the fabric as I smoothed the quilt. It saved me about 2 hours of basting, which is how I put a quilt together. My fingers weren't sore.
Enough shmooshing of this product. It does say that you must work within the 24-48 hours of spraying, and they mean it as I found out, but that's for another day.

One thing though, I changed needles in my sewing machine to do this. It worked much better with a new sharp needle.

So here is this little quilt. It's small and I just love it.It was supposed to be 48" square. But when I had cut out the corresponding 81/2" squares of all these colours, well it just looked like a dog's breakfast!
OMG it was awful is all I can say. So I got out the white and the little flowered print and took apart the combinations of the large squares and the nine patch and started all over again. Isn't this just the cutest little thing?


I just love the look of it with the white making the nine patch look so amazingly crisp. I know now that some of the problem with me doing quilting is that I just need to simplify my work and have much more fun with it.
Here is something else I learned. Try a new
needle for hand sewing. OMG (again) it made
the work so much easier. I do not have sore fingers from hand finishing.


So I posted the third photo to just show some of the
squares. I have of course so much fabric cut
out, but not to worry. I am going to do stacked
coins with it.

I do not remember being so sick of winter as I am this year. So much cold. Never mind the amount of snow that we have had! Its the cold that just gets to my bones even with a downfilled coat to walk my little westie. He wears a coat and loves to walk, but usually the wind just gets to my face and we must turn around.
It looks wonderful from the back patio doors though and very pretty to look at.
I am imagining the spring meltdown. There will be flooding for sure in some areas.
I've not been posting because Jerry has been working on the computer and he starts early in the mornings. I'm sure I'll get some time next week though.

Monday, January 26, 2009

COTTAGE DREAMING AGAIN!

















This is a partial photo of the old kitchen at the cottage. The brown is the panelling that was there and Jerry is doing a primer coat of Freshstart from Benjamin Moore on it. It's the best to cover panelling.



We then painted it a soft creamy yellow. Everything else is white in the old cottage so this really freshens it up. We lived with the kitchen for 8 years before finally doing it up. We bought Rona kitchen cupboards and Jerry put them up, with my supervision of course (oh yeah I am good at supervising). I handed the tools, held the cupboard against the wall and just oohed and ahhed at the work.







And here is the kitchen completed. We bought the new dishwasher at Home Depot. It's a lot lighter than the one we have at home, but goodness a dishwasher at the cottage!


We justified it because we live there for 6 months of the year. Kelly lost her job as chief dishwasher!




It was so exciting to have the drawers on the right there to put utensils without having to yank at the drawer to get a knife. The window looks out into the great room which Jerry also built from the bottom up. That's another day's postings.



On the left is the other end of the kitchen which before had the fridge and stove, with an old cupboard on the left to just hold pots and pans.






Now, it has pot drawers and the top drawer is for 'junk' can you believe it!






The fridge is from Sears that we bought when we built the great room and had the barge come across the lake, and at $1,000.00 for the day, at that time, we used it for everything. Looked like the Clampets on that day I tell you. We got the new fridge which was the largest we could find and the stove with self cleaning oven and as few gadgets as possible due to power surges we can get there. It's better than the fancy ones I have at home. Really!










On the right is the brown panelling that was painted a soft yellow and see below for what it looks like now. So different when painted.














You know, I probably said something about this kitchen before, but it's been so long and I am anticipating going back in April/May when the ice goes out on the lake, we leave to go to this place


The table is an old table that was at the cottage when we bought it. I think it's the only thing remaining of the original stuff that was there. Jerry took the old warped top off and built a new one in about 45 minutes! I waited 8 years for him to do that! Not like he wasn't busy in the meantime, anyway, the top I stained with puritan stain, painted the bottom a soft black and voila! It looks amazing. All the cheers of joy from Kelly were worth it as she had given us the art frame for Christmas to go in the place where we put it.



See what a difference the art work does. It was just what we needed to finish the kitchen. The flowers are real! Our new neighbours at the cottage live on a farm. They grow veggies and their neighbour grows those flowers. Each week I am presented with this beautiful bouquet of flowers. It always this big too! And the kitchen is just perfect!


I love the way the whole plan as they say came together.

Sunday, January 25, 2009

I'M DREAMING AGAIN



Ok, so because of this unbelievably cold winter, I put myself on this beach in the Virgin Islands. Doesn't it just look inviting today? It's 6 degrees above zero F. Now if that isn't cold, and bone chilling I don't know what is....
This beach is Smuggler's Cove and they made a couple of old movies there, one being the Old Man and the Sea and another that had Anthony Quinn in it and friends actually had bit parts in the film. when you see the movie, it doesn't look like Tortola at all. Oh well, that's show biz.
I'm trying to rectify a bunch of fabric that was cut up to supposedly be a quilt. I gag when I think of how awful it looks. I have discarded the plan of making another ugly quilt. Too many colours. I now realize, I must simplify my quilts, and I think I'll have more fun that way. I love white and notice on some of the blogs, and flickr that white makes colour stand out. I've been using toooooooo much of the colour and not enough of the white.
So, today or tomorrow, when I get my mojo working to quilt sew again, I'll post the corrections and the quilt as corrected.
When the pattern calls for 14 fat quarters, I think that's where I get lost. Too many for my liking and so many patterns. So, I am just not going to do that for a while.