Carli The Quilter

Hi everyone! I woke up this morning in the Cowichian Valley to a chilly -5 C. I know to my northern friends this is "no big deal" of any real kind of chilly. But to me who craves less cold, its a chill! I was up this Monday morning to the visit my new quilting friends, women of a wide age category, wide experience in all forms of quilting and many that are Canadian Snow Birds. But none the less, they are now my support for conversations, questions, idea exchange and sharing of our mutual love of quilting! But alas, time is getting away from me again. Up first is my finished on my dining table from last week. My African Violet Craz Quilt table runner. My husband now affectionately calls it the Black Hole table runner. Over the weekend, I did get some time to actually get started on the finishing of this Mexacali Heat Quilt. I have begun making the Nine Patch Blocks for the broders. As you can see, its coming along. I found that as I cut, se...

When I first  moved to Telkwa many 14 years ago now, I met up with some wonderful ladies who quilt and I participated with one Round Robin quilt exchange with them. We all met one evening and as we distributed our brown paper bags going around the room and I handed off my quilt to the person on my right and we began. Each participant's name was entered into a ledger of the event to keep track of who would be the next participant for your starting block. As I have posted before, I made this quilt top with 5 or 6 other quilters in a Round Robin. Its a tough project to find and design a finishing border for it because its so "WOW -ish" you know? It has languished like many others in a bin waiting for me to get on with it! But I didn't due to life getting in the way of quilting. Well I've made some progress on this quilt, in the form of a graph paper design for a border. More on that later. I made this block when I received all the var...

I am having such fun with setting my own personal goals to get on with finishing the numerous tops I have. I have decided that if I take a top out of the "Finishing Drawer" then I must not start anything new until its finished and gone from my sewing womb.  I love to call my sewing room, a sewing womb. It reminds me of a good friend who lives miles away. We write real letters between each other. I started this modest foray into modern quilting by taking my obsession in crazy quilting to more solid colors as that's what I thought the early modern quilting I saw meant by the early days of modern quilting. That was I confess, in 2005.   Then I did my usual quilt as you go in crazy stitching so all that was required on this modern quilting experiment was machine embroidery stitches from my good old trusty Janome. Then it went into the drawer and another 12 years went by and for one reason or another it sat, I passed it over many times, as I was...

I am super charged like a wee bunnie! And I wanted to reassure my readers that I'm NOT going anywhere. You can be content that I will still be posting the projects I'm working on and give you all a progress report for my new adventures! I am back to working on the new details of Blooming Crazy which I started last year. And its given me a new perspective on what is actually crazy quilting. Stitching happy little trails and new pathways is about me finding the bliss I've wished for quite some time. New pathways and happy little trails are just where my steps will take me. I have begun to find my bliss and I'm determined to get back to fun! Fun stitching, fun sewing and fun life. This a long time crazy that is getting finished and will soon have a complete version for you. Do you find yourself singing while you stitch? I have a new friend who is helping me with gratitude. While she is working on my feet and I'm relaxing, I listen to he...

Do you ever think about why you are writing a blog? I ask myself this question frequently. I have much to share on quilting, stitching, and free form embroidery. I'd dreamed of being able to work from home like many others have done too, right? We all love to hang in our PJ's, being productive and efficient if we could right? Its amazing how many of us wish to make some money from the hobbie/addiction crafting activity we all love. If you share this idea, have a blog and want to expand your intermediate quilting by some of the ideas I've shared with you in this blog, let me know?  I began writing my blog with a spirited awareness of the enormous size, complexity and complicated nature of the Internet. I understood that our very large world could read my blog or not.... if you don't pay attention  and forget about your blog, your ideas can sink to the bottom of the lake! I am a person who loves to read. I have wide interests and with garde...