Getting To Play In My Sewing Room

During the summer I would rather be outside enjoying the summer sun and warm temperatures than being inside. Our summers are short enough so when the weather is nice I will embrace it and enjoy the summer days!

Lately though, I am playing a bit more in my sewing room. I have a billion and one ideas in my head and I just need to lose myself in my sewing room. I have a few projects on the go right now and thought I would share some of my work.

First of all, one of my good friends, Kelly, I sew with on Thursday nights is getting married. She asked me some time ago if I would make her head dress for her and I of course said YES!!! I would LOVE to!! She gave me this beautiful champagne coloured satiny fabric and the beads that came from her Mum's wedding veil and head dress. The beads she has are just beautiful. She has many little tiny pearls and other beads but my favourite are these bigger beads seen in the photo. We plan to put some of those on her head piece tonight when she comes to our sewing group. I want to put the already padded and covered head piece on her head to decide where to start and stop the beadwork so that it shows up the best on her wedding day.





September is not that far away and I have to get started on the quilt I want to teach in the Fall season. I started using my EQ6 software and have been playing with a nice 15 block sampler quilt. This will be a 12 week course starting September 15th and running to the first week of December.

So as I was mentioning above, I decided to get my hands busy with my EQ6 software and teach myself more design work on the computer rather than sitting down with graph paper, pencil and coloured leads to do my designs. I figured out how to scan and import my own fabrics into EQ6 and now the possiblities are endless for me!!!!!! I'm soooooooooooo excited! My next lesson to teach myself is how to import my EQ designs to post here on my blog to share with you what I am doing! But for now I do have three blocks I made up last Thursday night that are going into this quilt.



I am looking forward to teaching this quilt as I will be showing my students alot of great techniques such as working with templates, rotary cutting, hand and machine applique, working with half square and quarter square triangles, Y-seams, paper piecing, crazy patch, matching points, sashing, borders, layering and quilting and of course binding! It will be a great beginner course or a good course for quilters who would like to learn more about other techniques.

For those students who do read my blog, I wanted to let you know that due to the Mundy Pond Facility closing to all courses, I will be teaching out of the Shea Heights Community Centre. If you have any other questions or comments regarding this, you can certainly drop me an email at comfortcovedesigns@yahoo.ca I hope to have my yardage requirements available by the end of August when registration is available for the Fall season.

I am also working on another little project, but it is still a little hush hush right now. But I will give you a little sneak peek at what I am doing. I promise to give you more information when I am able to go public with it!!!!



I hope everyone is having a wonderful safe and happy summer out there! We are planning on heading to the woods again this weekend for another camping excursion. We love to camp whenever we possibly can. We have a cozy little campsite when we get all our gear set up and I promise to take photos!

Til next time

Quiltingly Yours
Andrea

First Camping Trip of the Summer and Got Plastered!!! :)

Trevor and I decided we would head out over the road this past weekend to start our first bit of camping for the season. We didn't go too far for this trip as friends of ours invited us out to their campsite in Butter Pot Provincial Park. This park is perhaps 20 minutes outside the city. This was also going to be Alexi's first camping trip with us. It was an experience to say the least!

Alexi as sweet a dog as she is, she is aggressive around other dogs. Our friend's had a sweet little Maltese dog and loved to play and roam around the campsite. Unfortunately we had to keep our little Alexi on a lead the whole trip as she thinks she is the boss and the dominant one and proceeds to bark and charge at other dogs. We are in the process of getting her out of this habit through the doggy obedience we have her in. I really want to be able to take her for walks in the park or around Quidi Vidi Lake (a popular lake and walking trail here in St. John's), but these places are popular for other people to walk their dogs, it wouldn't be wise to take Alexi yet. Soon I hope.

Anyway, here are a few photos of our first trip. By the way, we don't own the camper trailer. See that little blue tent back in the trees, yep that's our favourite way to rough it!!! :)

The second night we put up our kitchen tent over the picnic table so we could enjoy the evening without fighting away the flies!

Alexi posing for the camera

We are getting ready for our first hike.

2 hour hike along Butter Pot Hiking Trail. It's a nice little hike that takes you right to the top of Butter Pot hill.


Although this was a long weekend, we came home Sunday afternoon as Trevor had to work on Monday morning. We packed up our camping gear and headed back to St. John's around 3pm. We had a nice time despite Alexi barking her head off at the other dog and whimpering because she was tied to a tree and couldn't be close by to us all the time. We spent all Saturday hiking and then at the beach to cool off (it was a very hot and sunny weekend here).

When we got home we unpacking all the gear and settled down out on the patio to relax and enjoy the rest of the sunny warm weather. We broke out the frozen margaritas and Trevor treated us to Swiss Chalet delivered to our door. I love not having to cook on hot days!

I also managed to get in a bit of sewing on the deck. I hauled out a little bit of embroidery I had put on the back burner during the renovations and move and did a bit of stitching.



Today, while Trevor was working I decided to putter around the house and just get plastered!!!!!!!!!!! Nope not the "plastered" you might first be thinking of, but as in drywall plastering!!!! hee hee!! I have never plastered in my LIFE, but I bought a couple nice round track lights for my sewing studio to get better lighting down there. The original lights were there since the 70s and they were these big ugly square monsters that have off terrible lighting. I had my electrician come in last week to install my lights but in the end I had two big gapping holes. The new circle lights were smaller than the square light. And you know what they say, you can't fit a square in circle! So I headed to the local hardware store and the gentleman at the shop helped me figure out what I had to do. I picked up my bit of strapping. Had another nice fella in the lumber yard cut the piece of wood to the sizes I needed, and also got the bit of sticky netting I needed.

I head home with a touch of fear wondering if I was going to do this right. I put the fear in it's place and with the help of Mum's experience (as she had to do the same thing herself with her new fan in her bathroom of my basement apartment) I knew we would do fine. She was a great teacher and I manged to get the strapping and the gyperock in place and started to get plastered!!!! LOL I must say the first coat went on pretty good and I was pleased with the results. Tomorrow after work, I will sand down that first coat and put on a second coat. By Wednesday I should be ready to paint the two filled in holes where I have my new lighting!!!




I changed into some old painting clothes for the messy plastering part. For a laugh Mum thought it would be cute to dress up in a sexy black dress and high heel shoes while plastering!! hey gotta look good right!!! ahhh but there was no good looking fella around to see me! LOL


ahh the joys of being a new homeowner!!!

Well it's Monday evening and Alexi and I are off to our class. Two more classes to go and the course is over.

Til next time!

Quiltingly Yours
Andrea