Carli The Quilter

If you live in a small town then you'll understand the folksy festival that Smithers celebrates every year. We're a conservative, religious and active community. We have all sorts of usual services for visitors and you can find many churches like this one if you attend Sunday services or otherwise, its in Smithers. We love our Mid Summer Music Festival. Its mostly a family event, with loads of great music and lots of venues to just get your music out there. Later on in this post you'll meet a young man who sings the blues. Above, one of our local celebrities Jenny Lester usually pencils in this early July festival. You'll find plenty of young folk who recycle and its awesome to see this blanket is sweaters she harvested and remade into this blanket. Let me present one of our young people who sings his heart out. I don't remember his name, this clip is from several years and his name escapes me. Its a good listen though. ...

Cloud 9 Fabrics is one fabric manufacturer who seems to  have a great talent at picking awesome collections and they specialize in organic cotton. This one is a unique bundle that I bought a few years ago, so I'm sorry that its dated now, but what the heck, new fabric if new fabric, am I right? When I buy fabric I buy organic cotton, because I know the standard are set up to promote growers NOT using pesticides in the growing of the cotton and the milling, manufacturing has other standards to eliminate the less than desirable chemical use. I've made several with these fat quarters and I love the way they feel to hand quilt afterwards. So soft and seem to be just the right density for smooth hand quilting.  Here in this way I've made the Monkey Wrench block into a really earthy feeling small wall quilt! What you have to do to enter this giveaway is make a comment on my Facebook page here. I'm listed as Caroline Heinrichs, Te...

Let's celebrate International Women's Day! With a conversation about what each of us can do to reuse more from clothing, instead of giving it to a thrift shop. This past weekend,  it was a sunny day, but bitterly cold with a cross wind that took your breath away. I drove the crunching driveway to the home of Eve Rippel. I first met Eve back in 2004 when I taught a quilting class with re-purposed fabrics from clothing like denim, corduroy or other re-purposed fabric.  Eve was a breath of fresh air and still is some 10 years later. While others in the class were confused with how to actually harvest usable fabric from clothing, she was helping with this idea by just getting onto the whole subject. I think that this year I'd like to impress upon each you to do more to recycle clothing into something or anything interesting or useful. Eve with her latest great grand baby quilt. Eve's Mom taught Eve to sew during the 1930's in Saskatchewan, when ...

I've finally been figuring out how to find my photos and I'm having to transfer photos I want from my old Mac via a Data Traveller. I know its not ideal, but what the heck, its something I can do. I found these old photos and thought you'd like to see some of the work on reused denim that I've created. The photo above is the top edge of a pair of baby jeans, this cute little necklace fits over your head with the zipper down. This is what the cuffs look like opened up. I encourage you to rethink what you do with jeans, yes, I've seen examples of denim quilt and I've made some too, but lets rethink how else we can reuse denim. See you soon, let me know what you think? Carli

I often take my quilts in progress with me when I'm camping.  Summer of 2012 I started up Tropical Punch Crazy Quilt. I love to throw colours together and voila, you've got something that begins to speak to you. Really? Speaking quilts! The quilts tell me what they want, not the other way around. These two sisters are talking the same language! Layered combination stitches greet each other with warm open arms. Imagine, it all started here with a block that is saying, "Carli, I'm naked, I need some stitches to cover up my nudity!" I'm linking up with The Needle and Thread Network! Happy Stitching! Carli

My story as quirky as my life is with such a focus as quilting in my life, I'm so overwhelmed with the kind comments, the new followers and to be featured anywhere is such an honor! As you all know by now, the SCQP has been the main focus of my work over the past year. But I love to take a little break and do something that is well, how should I say, less taxing on my brain, my skill and not so stressful with real deadlines! So when my good friend and Bulkley Valley neighbor won the door prize at our recent 1st. Annual Re-Crafting Fair, I jumped at the opportunity to make a T-Shirt quilt. Here's a few shots of the progress so far. While these photos are not my best, you get the idea of the new techniques I'm using to finish a T-Shirt Quilt. If you've not ever made a t-shirt quilt, there are no mysteries  here, its straight forward with cutting the logo's back and front simultaneously in 12.5 inch or 16 inch blocks.  Notice the...

Last weekend, our crafting club held our 1st. Annual Re-Crafting Fair in Telkwa. Our mission was to educate locals and far away visitors about the many ways we've experimented to reuse textiles into new items. Reusing is an important task that all of us should be doing as often as possible.    We are just a small group of crafters who feel that our local communities and our local government need help in learning about this reality. We have a large number of people still throwing things into a Re-Use Shed with no one to care for these items on an ongoing basis. Consequently, we've learned that about twice a week, the workers drive a small bobcat front loader into the building and simply discard the clothing into the Knockholt Landfill that is about 45 km's away southeast of Houston, B.C.  We feel this is wrong. Education about 'how to reuse everything' needs to be done. We aim to educate everyone, including our local government. This blog posting docume...