The Month That Was...

A month in pictures - I went to the Remembrance day service here in Mahone Bay at the Cenotaph, before it started a C130 Hercules flew overhead, I thought so much of my Dad that day, he was a Pathfinder in the RAF and flew Lancaster Bombers. My daughter wrote very eloquently about him here

Soon after we went for our annual trip to New England, we went as far as Boston, then worked our way back to Portland for a few days with our very good friend Jo Diggs. Such a treat to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary with special friends at Top of the East in Portland, we wandered the old port and had some wonderful meals as always! On our way north we stayed in Belfast, Maine and stopped in at Fiddlehead Artisan Supply, a wonderful and art supply store, they always have such great things for our artistic grandkids. While there I could help but notice this young girl dancing about the store in this wonderful coat. I couldn't resist talking to her, Magnolia, and her Mom. What a delightful pair! Magnolia had just the personality to wear such a coat. She loved showing it off and talking about how she and her Mom made it from recycled, felted wool sweaters. I'll never forget her! Wish we had longer to stay and chat but the store was about to close.

When we got back we jumped in with both feet to get ready for our town's annual Father Christmas Festival. For the first time my local Guild was asked to hang our Christmas quilts in the Welcome Centre. This was the 10th anniversary of the Festival, an event the whole town gets in on with wandering choristers, horse drawn wagon rides, Christmas house tours, a gourmet market and Father Christmas himself wandering around town.

Two original Father Christmases!

A corner of our display with my Festival of Trees in the middle.

Now to get the house ready and some baking done! Merry Christmas to all!

O Christmas Tree 2014

It is that time of the year again, how did December get here so fast? I am behind as usual, my blog is suffering! Kate did a little update and Squarespace has a new format so it has been a steep learning curve just when I was used to the "old" way! I hope this will work ok, we had to change my website address for a bit, but we are back now with the old one, I hope all the glitches are worked out.

So many to chose from...

We are getting there with Christmas fast approaching. The boxes have been mailed off to our wild west family in hopes that they will arrive in time. Next on the list was the hunt for the perfect Christmas tree. Off we went at the crack of dawn last Sunday to walk the paths high up on the hill at Mike Falkenham's tree farm in Lunenburg County "The Christmas Tree Capital of North America"! We have been having this adventure for a good 35 years or so and we have never been disappointed. Every year we see truck load after truck load of Christmas trees headed south or we read about Mike's trees going in refigerated containers to the Caribbean and we wonder, "will there be one left for us?". We our kids were little we sometimes went in the summer to find and tag our tree, then the fun came in Decemebr to try and find it!

If you ever need help finding the right tree bring along a 7 and 9 year old! Every tree was the right one and it didn't take long to find it along with some mud to play in and some logs to climb on. The great outdoors has so much to offer!

Both trees got loaded on to the top of the car for the slow drive down the hill to the baler.

They go in nice and ful and come out like a sausage!

Everyone helps Mike to bale the trees.

A days work done and it isn't even 9:30! Now to get the tree home and decorated!

An Amish Adventure

Several things in the last month or so have prompted me to look again at Amish quilts. I wrote about a recent experience here on this blog post. I had rediscovered some already cut strips of solid Amish colours that I had tucked away along with a big bin of all my solid fabrics from previous Amish quiltmaking.

This quilt is the result, it is away now at Lynn's, our local longarm quilter so I don't have a picture of it quilted. I sewed it using precut pieces and the Courthouse Steps traditional log cabin pattern with thanks to Heather Stewart for her inspiration. I had made this quilt last fall which I started in Heather's workshop. I loved making it so it was time to make another but bigger. The new one is bigger, 30 blocks plus a border.

All this inspired me to search through some old scanned slides of some of my previous Amish quiltmaking.  I especially am fond of "Quiet in the Land" and "Just Plain Fancy"—both names come from books about the Amish. Quiet in the Land is by Ann Chislett, a play about an Amish family who are conscientious objectors and Just Plain Fancy is a children's picture book by Patricia Pollaco. Pictures of my Amish quilts can be found here in my Flickr photostream.

All this would not have been accomplished had I not worked through Roberta Horton's An Amish Adventure, a wonderful book that taught me a lot about colour as well as how to "quilt Amish". I also attended a lecture by David Pottinger around the same time and was inspired by his Quilts of the Indiana Amish.

Just the other day I had an email from Amazon, with a link to a new book. It still amazes me that they track our purchases and send out emails when a new book comes out that we might be interested in because we have bought something similar before. Urban and Amish: Classic Quilts and Modern Updates by Myra Harder looks at traditonal Amish quilts and then new, modern ones that have been inpsired by the old Amish ones. On the Amazon page you can see images of quite a few of the quilts. Some work, some don't as far as I can tell without seeing the actual book. I am not convinced that Amish quilts need to be modernized!