Carli The Quilter

Hello to all my faithful followers. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your following little old me.  As you may have learned else where, Google Reader is about to disappear. This means that if you want to continue following me and I certainly hope you do want to continue learning about  my various adventures!  So on my side  bar, you'll see an  "follow me via email" box, click on this and add your email address to it and soon you'll see my posts in your email address inbox. Do add your email address, I don't have any way of knowing those email addresses. You will have the opportunity to become engaged with the community's of Northern BC and and the women I'll be teaching. New friends of similar interests can be found. New ideas can be exchanged with friends new to quilting, sewing and embroidery. You'll see the various communities I visit from my blog postings. Classes online will be available to blog followers...

Spring and summer, all at once has arrived in the Bulkley Valley . In this photo, I'm sitting in my living room looking out onto our back lawn. Our two storey workshop/rugged shop party place and huge upper storage area sits resting beside the Bulkley River.  We have decided to move to Terrace, B.C. and we're hoping that you might like to help us? Rick is my #1 handy man, dinner maker and house husband! He's keeping our property looking lovely. And you remember in an earlier post of the broken dish mosaic I did on the kitchen back splash? Not to mention the awesome Dresden Plate quilt I did? My favorite thing to do is to crazy quilt!  I ts part of my DNA I believe. Its so relaxing, creative and attention grabbing, why wouldn't anyone do crazy quilting? I know, its all that fussy, irregular, not precise bit of the work, right? We all have our 'things' that we do love and no one really gets it outside of another crazy quilter! ...

Garage sales are fun, they provide a welcome little look into a person's life. You are laying out things that were once important. And the rain didn't stop anytime soon. More tarps just went up and the wind played havoc with our tarps. The puddles grew larger. By 8 am, we were wondering what kind of a dismal display of 'garage salers' would even come by. We are located 31 km's from Smithers and this is a long way to go. But people came and laughed and talked, lots of stuff went off our property. Lucky for us, our karma swarmed with interest in both our garage sale items and our property. It was awesome fun to give away things, just because and to accept a lower price just  because you knew they couldn't afford anything more.  :) You know? Its not always about how much money is made from your garage sale! Its about community, talking, joking, selling to friends and letting things go. Letting the past wash away into the...

Last weekend we took a well deserved break, driving out to Terrace all prepared for a camping weekend. It was really nice, relaxed and I even got to do a little machine embroidery at the Embroidery Club at Northern Vacuum and Sewing. I arrived on Friday, the ladies had already been going for two days! I say its almost like a retreat, but not quite, like a quilting gathering but not quite that either. It was fun and so much experience in the room! The ladies were busy with their own projects! I got this much done! These solid color chunks of 100% cotton are from my friend Pam at Mad About Patchwork! As you can see, I'm learning about stabilizer's, they are very important with machine embroidery. I am sure that I could have asked "The Ladies" for help choosing, but thought I had the right stuff. Learning is the natural flow of life.  I see these kittens, panda and rabbits in something fun very soon. I'm not concerned that they are perfect! I left at th...

I didn't think I had properly posted the full story of my journey on the Smithers 2013  Centennial Quilt.  Here are more photos close up so you could see some of the fine details of this quilt and some of my thoughts of taking on a huge project. It began because I had a dream.  I just couldn't fathom that our largest community in the Bulkley Valley would not have a centennial quilt when celebrating 100 yrs. We live very northern lifestyles. If we want opera, we must fly to Vancouver paying lots of dollars to get there. I felt we have so much to celebrate in our community that it was only fitting that we have an awesome quilt to represent the growth in the last 100 years of Smithers. I originally had discussed this idea with Heather Gallagher at our local Chamber of Commerce and she was inspiring, telling me of her idea of a train barreling down a line. Hence, the train became the lower focus of the entire quilt.  I took the projec...