Mariner's Compas Progress

Despite not positing much about it, I have been making slow progress on the Mariner's Compass wall hanging.  Before loading it on my frame to baste it, I drew out the compass pattern I wanted to quilt in the large triangles in the corner of the quilt.  It was much easier to do the marking without the puffiness of the batting.

I'm using Quilter's Dream wool batting on this one as well as Superior Threads (So Fine, Bottom Line, and Lava).  The wool batting gives a very nice loft to it and once I have the filler stitching done, it will really make the designs pop out.

Here's one of the corner squares with most of the basting stitches pulled out.  I still have to do the filler stitching to make the compass motif stand out, but you can get the general idea of what it looks like.  There was a lot of stopping-and-starting on this one due to the straight lines and doing it on my regular sewing machine.  It was also a lot of maneuvering the quilt around, but it will be worth it in the end.



For the ribbon border around the center motif, I've decided to do a lot of straight line quilting to cause your eye to travel down the curling ribbon.  The red pieces have parallel lines spaced a half inch apart.  The blue pieces have parallel lines stitched a quarter inch apart.


Again, this caused a lot of starting and stopping (and lots of threads to bury), but I like the look of it.  The white triangles outside the ribbon will be stitched with dense quilting to cause the rest of the design to come to the forefront.


I've also done all the outline stitching around the center compass, around the outside borders and I've done some free-motion loops on the dark colored squares in the outer border.  I'm saving a lot of the dense quilting until the end.  The exact method of the dense stitching is still a bit up in the air until I get a little bit further in the rest of the quilting.  I'm debating whether to just do dense stippling or to do something like McTavishing or some other fill (circles, waves, etc).  I'll probably end up decided at the last minute.  LOL.

Hope everyone is having a great week so far!

Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Trapped!

Last week was a relaxing week and I had every intention of blogging....  Then had too much fun relaxing and enjoying my vacation.  :c)

We didn't go anyway in particular for vacation, just stayed around the house.  However, we did do a lot of visiting with family which was good.  Of the 10 days off on vacation, 5 of them were spent with family.  The other days we did some chores around the house and completed some projects that we had been meaning to finish up.

One of the items was to rid our front garden of our chipmunk problem.  We have 16 acres of land, with about 100 open acres around us and the chipmunks decide that they need to dig in my flower garden!  Argh!  I eventually had enough when they started killing some of my plants due to digging out the roots of the plants.  So we purchased a live trap to catch the chipmunks.

They certainly are cute little guys, but I'm tired of them digging in my garden.  The first day we had the trap, we caught a chipmunk within 3 hours.  The next day, we caught 3 more chipmunks.  At this point, we're up to 6 chipmunks captured.

After we capture them, we throw a towel over the trap so they don't freak out as much, and then walk them across the road (about 1/4 mile) to a farmer's field.  We see it as fair play... the farmer's field dumps all his rain runoff into a culvert that dumps onto our property (and floods it every time we have heavy rain), so we return the favor by giving him chipmunks.  There originally wasn't a culvert dumping the farmer's water onto our property until about 10 years ago when the farmer was tired of his fields flooding.  So he called the state and they put in a culvert, but never actually managed the water on the opposite side of the road.  They just let it dump onto the properties.

Anyway, we'll continue to trap the chipmunks and we may eventually start to mark them with spray paint to see if we're taking them far enough away.  If not, then we'll take them the opposite way on our property and cross a small river and deposit them on the other side.  That should at least deter them a bit.
 Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations

Busy...Busy...Busy...

Its been very busy the past few weeks here, but I think I may have a chance to catch up on some blogging now.  Work has been busy as have things at home.  Somehow it got to be July and I have no idea how that happened.

So backing up a few weeks....

In mid-May, we spent the Saturday before Mother's day at my parents' house.  Its become an annual tradition for us to visit the Saturday before Mother's day and we celebrate Mother's day, my Mom's birthday and my sister's birthday.  We typically will take my Mom out to her local garden center and help her buy plants for her gardens and then help plant them before we leave.

I decided to do something a little different and brought a cake with us from a local bakery.  Its a great Italian bakery with traditional Italian cookies, but they also do some awesome cakes.  Here's a picture of it before we devoured it.  :c)


It was very yummy with marble cake on the inside with a mix of chocolate mouse and strawberries between the layers in the cake.  They do a great job with their cakes and they always look too pretty to cut into.

Around the same time, we noticed that a robin had made a nest behind our trellis.  Why it made the nest on the ground is beyond me... but she decided it was a good spot.  Three eggs in the nest initially, but she did lay a fourth egg later on.



It was really cute seeing the first two babies hatch.  Here they are along a few hours out of their shells.


The one downside... something did attack the nest after all four babies had hatched.  Initially one baby was missing, 2 were injured and the 4th was fine.  Then a few days later, only one baby (the uninjured one) was in the nest.  A week later... no baby bird.  We later found the remains of the bird in the lawn.  Since then, we've also seen a fox around the property, so I'm pretty sure the fox got the baby birds.


The good thing is that the rest of our garden is flourishing.  The picture above is from a few weeks ago, but the plants still look great.  These flowers are pretty much done at this point, but others are starting to come out now.

On the quilting front, I did finish all the straight-line and in-the-ditch quilting I need to do on my Mariner's Compass quilt.  I'm removing some of my basting stitches and then will show an in-process picture of the quilting.

Hope everyone is enjoying their summer so far!


Happy Crafting!
~Sarah at upstateNYCreations