Now I'm buying YARN!!!!

While on vacation in New York State, I took time in Rochester to visit the local Joann Fabrics. What a great selection of yarn they had! Yes, I said YARN. Now that Carson and I have started rug punching we need heavy yarn to do it - and I don't knit and don't plan to. So I ventured for my first time down the yarn aisle at Joann's. Mike and the boys were quite surprised to find my arms laden down with huge balls of 10 different colours of Lion Brand Wool-Ease Thick and Quick yarn! Now how am I going to store it?

More rug punching

I have been experimenting with my Oxford rug punch and some of my felting yarn. The variegation in the yarns makes a wonderful design when you punch with it. Here are a couple small pieces that I have made - I think they would make great little tea pot coasters.

Rug Punching

I love the look of hooked rugs, but honestly I don't have the patience to do them. I consider myself a very patient person, but when it took me 2 years to finish on 20" x 20" hooked rug kit that I bought at Market, I knew that it just wasn't for me.

I do however love punchneedle so you can imagine how exited I was when I first saw rugs made using "rug punching". This technique uses the exact same stitch as punchneedle but on a bigger scale. You use heavy weight yarn and a large punching tool and within HOURS can have a small punched rug. Here is my first rug punched piece - a kit that I bought from Attic Heirlooms http://www.webpagesbyme3.com/atticheirlooms/index.html . This small piece is 12" x 15" and took only a coupe hours to finish.

Carson is currently working on a cat rug - here is his work in progress along with the Oxford Punch Needle that I bought along with the kit.

Country Home Studio Tour

I'm so excited! I've just been juried into the Christmas Country Home Studio Tour which happens the last weekend of November and the first weekend in December in the Thousand Islands region around Brockville. My quilting friends Linda Potter and Linda Scallion have both been involved in this studio tour in the past and I've always thought it would be an interesting thing to do. I have LOTS of wall hangings and quilts that I don't know what to do with, so this will be a great opportunity for me to sell some of them. As my home is not within the tour boundaries, I will be a guest artist and will be exhibiting at the Lyn Museum in Lyn, Ontario.
If you would like more information on this tour and the other studio tours run by the Thousand Islands Arts association, you can check out their website at www.tiarts.org .

My birthday present

My mom always loves to poke around in my fabric stash. She always comes over to find just the right piece to finish off one of her projects and I usually let her have free reign - I figure I owe her way more than that in babysitting fees alone!

Apparently, over the years as she has been "borrowing" fabric from my stash, she has also been working on a scrappy quilt - the top of which she gave me for my birthday back in May. You can imagine my surprise when I opened my present to find a quilt made entirely with my own leftover fabric!! It has pieces of fabric from almost every project I have made - and is a wonderful reminder of every one of those projects.

So she gave me the quilt top for my birthday, but it still needed an outside border - we found the perfect one in where else but my stash!! But it still needed to be quilted, so last week we mounted it on my machine and Mom got to play. It came off the frame a couple days ago. I just called tonight and the binding is almost done - I can't wait to put it on my bed!