Here are some pictures I took at the Ottawa Tulip Festival this past weekend. My friend and I walked from Lansdowne Park up to Commissioners Park and took photos along the way. I’m hoping to go to Major’s Hill Park this coming weekend, but the tulips might be past their prime by then. We’ll see.

P.S. The above was creating using the new Gallery feature in WordPress 2.5.1 … sweet!!

Here’s a quilt I made for my sister’s birthday that I gave to her a couple of weeks ago. I had hoped for it to be a Christmas present, but that didn’t happen. It uses 168 hour glasses. I used up all of the 6 inch Charm squares I had collected. It’s the biggest quilt that I’ve ever machine quilted. (I must ask my sister to measure it for me … hey sis, can you measure the quilt, please.)

I used Spray Basting for it, and it worked really well, in most cases. I had some puckering problems in one area, on the front (back is fine), and I’m not sure whether I didn’t spray enough or what happened. It’s towards one of the edges in the middle of the quilt. Any ideas? Once it was all quilted and washed, the puckering is hardly noticable anymore.

I quilted all seams, stitch in the ditch style. First I did the rows, both horizontal and vertical, then I did the diagonals in both directions. The quilting took me a lot longer than I thought it would, but I got much faster as time went on too. I’m far more confident now too.

I used Shelley’s updated tutorial on Joining the Ends of Double-Folded Binding, and it worked flawlessly the first time. I was so thrilled.

I thought the back looked nice, so here’s a picture, showing off the quilting lines.

Today is my 6-month blog anniversary. It’s been a lot of fun and I really enjoy working on this blog. I love reading other blogs, so gathering my huge list of Quilting Bloggers has been amazing. The massive amount of free projects and wonderful tutorials available for quilters on the Internet should keep me posting for years… hehe.

What’s next? I have lots of plans, first up will be organing the Quilting Bloggers list into a format that’s more user-friendly than a massive list sorted alphabetically. I hope to have this ready by the end of the month, so stay tuned. Are you a quilting blogger that I don’t have listed yet? Drop me an email (michele@quiltinggallery.com), and I’ll be sure to get you added. Next up, well, you’ll just have to wait and see, but I think it’s super exciting and I hope all of you will too.

In the meantime, please continue to leave comments, send me links to your favourite tutorials or free projects, and even pictures of your finished quilts. I would be thrilled to post them.

To help celebrate my 6-month anniversary, I’m having a give-away. It’s simple to enter, post a comment below and answer two simple questions (1) What’s your favourite part of quilting; and, (2) Where are you located? I’ll pick one random winner on May 15th to receive 6 (one for each month) pre-washed fat quarters taken from my stash and some other goodies.

Thanks for the adventure so far and Happy Quilting,
Michele