Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The Quilt of Belonging

This weekend I went with a few ladies from the guild to check out The Quilt of Belonging. It was amazing. Unfortunately no pictures were allowed. If you ever get a chance to check it out in person, GO.

It is a HUGE (36 x 3.5 metres) quilt each block represents one of the countries or nations that Canadians come from. There were even a few countries that we needed to look up on the map once we got home.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

What I Did on my Summer Vacation

Here we are at the beginning of the world tour. We managed an empty seat so even Owloysious had his own seat. :)




Our first stop was England. This is the inner courtyard of the Victoria and Albert (V&A) museum. It was amazing. The plan was to go to the V&A, the Natural History museum and the science museum but instead it turned into a day at the V&A.



We spent a few days visiting friends in Tewksbury. This is one of the views from a little walk (hike) up a local hill. It hard to believe from this picture but 6 weeks prior, this view would have looked like you were looking at an ocean. (Tewksbury became famous this summer because of flooding)



The next stop was Sweden, where I had to take a picture of Ikea.



This year was the 300th anniversary of Linnaeus so there were all sorts of events going on. Plus, everywhere you went it was decorated in flowers in his honor.



This is just a typical street view and I thought it was pretty. The white building to the right was in a pretty famous movie a while ago. (I'm blanking on the name.)



This is the church in old Uppsala. It's pretty amazing. One of the first Christian churches in Sweden, right beside 4 Viking graves and a grove of oak trees where the vikings used to torture their enemies.



Our last county was Norway. This is a picture of Vigeland, if you get a chance to go there, it's a pretty amazing park. It's hard to imagine the scale of things and that one person could have created all the sculptures.



I couldn't resist a little shopping. This is the shopping I did once home. Hidden in here is a gift or two for my Secret Santa Swap. I hope once you receive your parcel you like it. I've been blog stalking and have quite a few ideas. I'm now suffering the best dilemma of narrowing down the choices.



While visiting I worked on a couple of projects. (Can't travel without something to work on) I've decided that I love train travel. You get time to work on things and you meet the nicest people when you have a project in hand. The apple core quilt (The curved one) was my first attempt at hand piecing. I've decided that curved piecing is a good one to learn on, it was much more forgiving of slightly crooked seams. The apple core quilt (front & back) was made from the Celebrate Spring charm pack. The other quilt top was made from the Summer in the City charm pack. Both are from moda fabrics. I've been recently inspired by all the doll quilt walls I've been seeing on some blogs and have been inspired to start my own as decoration for the new sewing room.


This is the shopping I managed while travelling. I got to visit a shop in each country. The fabrics are the same as you'd find here and more expensive so there wasn't too much temptation there. I did find some really interesting books and patterns and it was so much fun to see what people are working on in the different countries.