I have seen two different Road to Ireland quilts on other blogs lately. Take a look at Eileen‘s blog to see her beautiful blue version, and take a look at Linda_J‘s blog to see her friend’s pastel version. Both of these quilts are beautiful!

Now take a look at my version:

I know, what happened; right? My version isn’t quite in the same category as Eileen and Linda_J’s.

M’Liss Rae Hawley’s instructions in her book, “Fat Quarter Quilts”, says the following:

“One of my favorite fat-quarter quilts, Road to Ireland was a happy mistake. The blocks came out the way I planned, but not the setting. (My planning consists of marks on napkins, ferry schedules, and the like.) So I rearranged my blocks, and I love the result.

The Road to Ireland setting looks best when there is high contrast between the road fabric and the six fat quarters.”

This seems fairly common sense to me and yet as you can see, I have missed the “high contrast” part. Perhaps I concentrated too much on the planning stage of making marks on napkins and too little time on the choice of my contrast fabric.

The good thing about this quilt is that it was made entirely from my stash–that part of the plan worked. However, if I had even switched the placement of the red and green fabrics I think the design would have shown up better.

This quilt stalled at the unfinished top stage for years and I finally quilted it up in November 2005 as a practice piece on my long arm.

However, all is not lost. This quilt is currently in my mother’s quilt collection. My mother is willing to adopt any of the quilts that I make–especially those that I don’t particularly like. In fact, she watches this blog on a regular basis to scope out quilts that can be nabbed in the future!

I have a quilt hanger in the entrance to my house. I like to change the quilt that hangs there on a regular basis. Right now this is the quilt that hangs in that location.

This quilt is Night Flight. My friend Colette and I renamed this quilt, Nightmare. This quilt was made in 1998 when I had only been quilting one year. All the flying geese and triangles presented many challenges for a beginner quilter – hence the name, Nightmare!

This quilt was the second project that I participated in during the “Annual Pre-Christmas Quilt Weekend” on December 6, 1998.

The pictures below were taken that weekend and show Cyndi, Veryan, Colette, Teresa and myself with our projects. Veryan made her blocks into a table runner and had most of the quilting completed by the time the weekend was over. As you can see, Colette’s piece was still at the block stage and she couldn’t hold it up for the picture. I had some of my blocks together but the border was not yet together.

The top may have been finished in 1998, but it too k until 2002 to get it quilted.

July is a month of celebrations.

July 7 – Miranda’s birthday (Miranda is my son’s girlfriend)

July 8 – Harold’s birthday (Harold is my husband)

The picture above was taken last Sunday on our deck as we celebrated Harold and Miranda’s birthdays.

July 8 – Brenda’s birthday (Brenda is my husband’s sister. No, they aren’t twins. They were born on the same date–not the same day. There are 6 years between them.)

July 8 – Colette’s birthday (Colette is one of my good friends who has moved south to Arizona. She has her own blog that can be found at: http://www.lapagedecolette.blogspot.com/ (Happy belated birthday, Colette. Colette is the only person that I know that can have birthdays year after year and not age a year!)

July 9 – My parents’ anniversary. (Usually we celebrate their anniversary at the same time as Harold and Miranda’s birthdays but this year they had to travel two provinces away to attend a funeral at the time of their anniversary. We missed them at this year’s barbecue celebration.)

Last night I put the borders on my “paint chip challenge project”. I spent today quilting the piece and adding the buttons. I saw Dot’s challenge project and she made her block into a pillow. I thought that was a fabulous idea and so I think I will borrow it and make my top into a pillow.

I changed the outside border from what I planned on using originally. This piece was also in the fat quarter bundle. The houses on this piece are smaller and I think better suited to this size of a project.

I have been reading in quite a few blogs about the pets that different quilters have. So I thought I would share a little about a pet that I have, a cat named Joey.

Back in 2005, we had two dogs–a large German Shepherd named King that lives predominately outside and a small toy poodle named Nikki that lived predominately inside. By the latter half of 2005, Nikki was definitely showing her age with the numerous health problems she had.

My daughter had been begging for a kitten for quite some time and we had always said, no to her. After all, we already had two dogs, we didn’t really need a cat. Finally, my husband said we should probably be saying yes to her, and not continually denying her request to have a cat. After all, we knew we would not likely continue to have two dogs for much longer as we knew that Nikki would likely have to be put down very soon–she was failing fast and there was nothing that could be done for her.

In November my husband thought he had found the perfect kitten for her. My husband works at one of the government’s research stations here in Canada and knew of a kitten that was going to be in need of a good home. It had been befriended by the dairy students and they had been carrying it around all day in their pockets. They were going to be returning to university and could not take the kitten with them. Who could resist a pocket-trained kitten?

I agreed that this sounded like the perfect kitten for our daughter and so we broke the news to her. She was so excited! My husband returned to work the next day prepared to claim the kitten only to find out that someone else had beaten him to it. Now what were we to do? We had promised a kitten to our daughter. Well, now the hunt was on. “Mom, if I can find another kitten, can I still get a kitten.” I said sure thinking that it would take some time to locate a kitten. Lo and behold she had a friend who needed to find a home for some kittens and we could have one right away.

On December 11, 2005, I sent Dana with her Dad to the farm to have a look at this kitten. I told them both that if Dad felt the kitten was healthy and suitable they could bring it home. (I didn’t really think that they would return from that excursion without said kitten.) Dana was so pleased. She brought home a small black ball of fluff–a Persian cross kitten. It was terrified and lived behind our couch for days. We only got glimpses of it from time to time.

Nikki only lived for another week. She died on December 18, 2005. However, the week she lived with Joey, I swear she taught him everything she knew. Joey exhibits several characteristics that remind me of Nikki–even though he is a cat and Nikki was a dog!

We took the kitten to the vet to have a check up shortly thereafter. We thought the kitten was only 3 months old. The vet had a look at the kitten and said that it might be the size of a 3 month old, but it was definitely older than that – at least 6 months old. Our vet said that the kitten was old enough to be fixed and we could have it de-clawed at the same time. We thought that we would have to wait to have this done until the kitten was older. We ended up leaving the kitten with the vet with a promise to check on it the next day.

When I called the vet the next day to check on how things had gone the vet was laughing so hard she could barely talk. My daughter had named the kitten, Tia, which means princess. The vet was saying to me, “How attached are you to the name, Tia? We have started calling the kitten, Mr. T”. Well it turns out that Tia was a boy, not a girl! We took in a 3 month old female kitten to the vet and got back a 6 month old male kitten. We still laugh to this day about this.

Once the kitten came home, Dana started working on a new name and Joey was what stuck. It turns out that Joey has become very much my cat, not my daughter’s. This is no fault of my daughter’s. She loves Joey–he just prefers to be with me. It doesn’t matter what I am doing in the house, Joey is not too far away. Even though he has only been with us for 19 months, I can honestly say I don’t know what it was like before he was with us.

These pictures were taken in December 2005 shortly after we got Joey. Notice he has chosen to sleep on the quilts! These pictures surfaced when I had the 35 mm film developed that was in my camera when my digital died just before Grad. What a surprise to see these old photos!

I found this little quiz on the internet. When I answered the questions it told me that my ideal pet was a cat! Imagine that!

Your Ideal Pet is a Cat

You’re both aloof, introverted, and moody. And your friends secretly wish that you were declawed!