Life is happening in full force right now, disrupting all my plans, unfortunately not in a good way. Blogging and sharing pictures on social media is not high on my list of priorities at the moment. I am spending some of my energy on my vegetables, puttering around the garden makes me feel quite calm and relaxed. I have blanched and frozen a lot of spinach already, trying to get the most out of it before it bolts. The Super Gourmet Salad Blend from West Coast Seeds that KJ mentioned in a comment a couple of months back was my choice this year too, and I love it. Excellent results, and very tasty too. I did have a few mishaps though and killed all my cucumbers and most of my squash plants, and I also overwatered my tomato seedlings but I have learned that they are like weeds and very hard to kill. I transplanted them two weeks ago, and they made a very nice recovery. And I am very happy about the brassicas. We went through the trouble of building a cover for the whole bed, with rebar and PVC pipes (lots of good tutorials can be found on YouTube), and I bought some row cover fabric and a soaker hose. The brassicas are thriving in there, the cabbage moths and root flies can’t get in, and I haven’t seen any aphids yet (fingers crossed). The plants are huge and healthy, and the first florets are coming up on the broccoli. Even my own whimpy seedlings aren’t far behind the ones I bought at Minter’s. Last year I lost all but two broccoli plants to the maggots of the cabbage root fly. They just started drooping one day and keeled over the next, and when I pulled them, there were barely any roots left. So hopefully I will have a better harvest this year.

I will keep posting quilts when I have the time, and the Monkey Business BOM will continue as planned. The patterns are all written and will be published on the first of each month. Should I have to post a bit early or late, I will announce it in advance, so stay tuned for updates. This month, our monkey friend is still at the beach, playing ball and having a blast. The pattern is available for free download until the end of the month and will move over to the pattern store in July when the next block is published.

Click to download Monkey Business Block #6 pattern (English/Imperial)

“Over The River And Through The Woods” is a Crabapple Hill design, mixing hand-embroidered panels with classic pieced blocks. This lovely version was made by Sandra, and she chose “White Out”, a snowflake pattern for quilting. I wasn’t always comfortable doing allover designs across beautiful hand embroidery but Sandra’s quilt is a great example of how good it can look. The snowflake meander blends into the background and doesn’t take away from the exquisite handwork.

Sharlene made this cute quilt as a baby gift. What a great way of using up scraps, the more different fabrics, the better! The empty areas between the kites will be filled by their tails, Sharlene wanted to have it quilted first before starting on the embroidery. The pattern we used for quilting is called “Wild Wind” – perfect for flying a kite!

June made this pretty star quilt using linen in solid colours for the stars. The quilt has a modern look, and June wanted a simple, modern design for quilting and picked the pantograph “Taj Mahal” for her project.

This quilt was made by Mary as a gift for a music loving friend. Actually, she made it twice for two different friends. It sure gives a whole new meaning to the term “piano key border”. We didn’t have to think about the quilting very long, I have a music pattern with notes that was perfect for Mary’s quilts.

May made this cute little baby quilt with pinwheels in bright colours. The outer border fabric has dragonflies which would have been a perfect quilting pattern. Unfortunately I don’t have a pantograph with dragonflies, and I couldn’t find one that I liked, so we went with butterflies instead and used “Butterfly Tango”. What a sweet baby gift!

There are lots of ideas out there for selvage quilts but I particularly like this one that Gail made and asked me to quilt for her. The grey and white frames give the illusion of spools and make the quilt three dimensional. I just can’t stop looking at it, if I ever decide to make a selvage quilt, this would be my pattern choice. (Not going to happen anytime soon… I am not even collecting selvages.) The pantograph I used is called “Celtic Scroll”, a simple swirly pattern that stays in the background but adds movement to the design.

This is Kathy’s version of the Chilliwack Quilters’ Guild Block of the Month Sampler and the last of the three that I quilted for members. Ellen’s version can be found here, and Janet’s quilt was featured here. Kathy chose lovely blue fabrics for her blocks and also liked “Ginger Flower” as the quilting pattern.

April was a crazy month! It started with a pleasant surprise, I received a letter that because of my health issues I was considered “clinically extremely vulnerable” and was asked to book a vaccine appointment. Well, they didn’t have to ask me twice! I was very impressed by how well it was organized, there was no wait time at all, and everybody was friendly and cheerful. Then we had two weeks of summer. Yes, you read that correctly, from one day to the next the temperatures jumped up to summer highs. It still cooled down quickly once the sun set but it was very nice during the day. My veggies liked the weather as much as I did, and everything is growing nicely. And then, on a Friday night, my machine broke down. Not the machine itself but the computer control unit, and I had to ship it back to the company in Ohio. I had it back a week later, and while it was booting again, it kept crashing every ten minutes. So once again I had to send it in and wait for its return. The second repair luckily worked, and my machine is up and running again, and I have been quilting like crazy to catch up. Of course this happens in the middle of a pandemic when nobody has anywhere to go and they all keep bringing quilts and I am booked for weeks and weeks. I am very organized, and I can always manage a week of unexpected downtime but two weeks with the bookings I have right now just wasn’t possible. Everyone affected has been very patient, and one lady even moved her quilts to the end of the queue to give me some breathing room, so I am almost caught up by now. Next week I should be back to my normal quilting schedule, but I still have lots of other things to sort out that I just didn’t have the time for. I am really looking forward to the weekend!

As for our monkey friends, this month the little guy is ready for some snorkeling. I have only ever once tried snorkeling, a long time ago in Hawaii, and it was a wonderful experience. I would love to do it again some day. All those colourful fish, and we even saw a turtle swim by. Great memories! If you have been following me and my designs for a while, you know that I love bright colours. My monkey has turquoise and purple accessories this month, but you can pick whatever colours you like. There will be lots of different colours in the remaining blocks, and you don’t need to follow my choices, you can’t really go wrong here. As always, the pattern will be available for free download until the end of the month and then move to the store section when the June block is released.

EDIT: Another month has come and gone, and the fifth block is now available for purchase if you missed the free download in May.

Click to purchase Monkey Business Block #5 pattern (English/Imperial)

EDIT: Auch der fünfte Block ist jetzt auf Deutsch und mit metrischen Maßen als Kaufmuster im Pattern Store erhältlich.

(Kauf)Anleitung Monkey Business Block #5 (Deutsch/Metrisch)

This quilt made by Lisa is a variation of my favourite scrap quilt pattern. The original had four 2″ squares next to each other before a longer strip was placed in between, the variation adds a longer strip after just two 2″ squares. Other than that, the idea of alternating light and dark and the square/rectangle sizes are exactly the same. While I usually choose either a dark or light background fabric, Lisa did an excellent job sorting her scraps according to value and putting it all together. The quilting shows a lot better in reality than in the pictures, so I added a picture of the solid back for a better view of the quilting design called “New Delhi”.

I like to find backing fabrics for my projects that match the theme of the quilt. That doesn’t always work out but I was lucky and found some cute penguin fabric for the back of my Penguin Promenade sample quilt. I ordered it online and didn’t even notice it was flannel. I usually go for flat cotton but didn’t mind a flannel backing. What I did mind though was the leftovers. I do not have a flannel scraps collection, and I definitely didn’t want to start one. So I cut all the remaining fabric into the largest possible squares and contacted the We Care committee of my local guild. The guild has a huge stash of fabric donations for quilts, and I was sure there would be some flannel pieces that would work with my little penguins. The ladies promptly delivered flannel fabrics for me to use, and Gail even donated a super cute penguin flannel from her own stash for the backing.

I came up with some kind of layout, very simple, really, probably too simple, because I ended up sewing the rows together in the wrong order and spent some time taking it all apart again. When the top was finished I decided to just use a pantograph for quilting and chose “White Out”, a snowflake pattern that I have in my collection. And for the first time ever I ran out of backing fabric on my longarm frame. I could have kicked myself… remember that old saying about measuring twice before cutting? Well, the same goes for measuring before loading a quilt, and while I would never, ever not measure a customer’s quilt, I *thought* I knew how large my quilt top was.

Turns out I was mistaken. Because I cut different sizes of squares from the penguin flannel (I am going to make at least one more donation quilt from the leftovers, possibly even two) and had come up with different layouts, apparently I remembered the wrong finished size. Anyway, to make a long story short, there are tutorials out there on how to join another piece of backing fabric with the one on the frame without ever taking the quilt off of the frame. Let me tell you, that’s not as easy as they make it look in the video tutorials. I managed to do it with a satisfying result for a donation quilt but I will make sure that I properly measure and lay out every quilt from now on because I sure don’t ever want to have to do this again! But it is finished now, even the label is stitched on, and I will drop it off to be donated soon and get started on the next one.

Donna made this quilt for an avid fisherman. What a lovely gift this is going to be! The fabrics speak for themselves, and the quilt is already quite busy, so we chose a pantograph that adds texture and went with “Kristin’s Maze” for this project.