The following are some of the sand castles at a world class sand sculpture competition that is being held near here.

These pictures were sent to me by my aunt who lives two provinces away. I am always amazed at the magnificent pictures that people send me from far away of things that I have never seen that are literally located in my backyard!

Thank you to all who posted comments or e-mailed me with your suggestions for the border treatment on my challenge quilt. There were many great suggestions – many of which I will be saving for use in future quilts.

I will be including the inspiration photo on the label for the back of this quilt. Labels have to be covered for the voting of the quilts on guild night. I am going to ask if I can display my inspiration photo next to my quilt for the voting.

I love the suggestions for a piano key border or small rectangles “floating” in the border. (I am definitely going to use this idea on a future quilt!) However, I only had one fat quarter of the challenge fabric and I used all but one small piece to do the centre of the quilt. I felt I should be including the challenge fabric in the border if I were going to do a piano key or rectangle border so I passed on these ideas for now.

If I had more time, I would have done my zig-zag down the quilt in quarter circles or drunkard’s path blocks. Because I have such precious little time to finish this, the more complicated curved piecing was out. I also considered something like this for the border but a lack of time ruled it out.

I liked the suggestion of putting the theme of the challenge, “The Beauty of the Earth ” in words on the border. I tried using the embroidery alphabet feature on my sewing machine to put the words in the border. However, after some fiddling and experimenting, I felt I should spend more time familiarizing myself with this feature on my machine before attempting to include words on the front of my quilts. Because of the small size of the quilt, Tonya’s free form letters were ruled out on this one.

Linda J. thought that a narrow black border followed by a wider red border might work. I ended up with just that–a narrow black border and I found the perfect “tulip” tone on tone red fabric for the outer border. Linda also sent me a link to the words for the hymn, “For the Beauty of the Earth”. I had not made the connection to that hymn until that point. I will be using this hymn as part of my label.

I tried to take a picture of the border red tone on tone fabric – it looks more orange in this picture than it is in real life.

This is how the quilt looks with the borders added. The top has been quilted and is now ready for the binding, label, and hanging sleeve. Good progress for this weekend.

Remember this fabric? This was the fat quarter that was distributed to guild members for our fall quilt show challenge. The theme of this challenge is, “The Beauty of the Earth”.

I knew when I saw these pictures, that I had the inspiration for my challenge piece.

Because I am not gifted in art quilts or free form / original design, I needed a pattern that could be pieced simply. I chose the rail fence design. I can see ribbons of colour in the fields of tulips in the photo. I have tried to duplicate what I saw in the photo into the design of my quilt.

I am now at the stage where I must decide on a border treatment. The photo below is my quilt so far–it is the centre of the quilt. Please ignore the black surrounding the piece–this is not a border. I took the photo against a black piece of fabric. The dark zig zag next to the red zig zag looks black, but is actually deep purple. There is no black on this quilt so far.

Do you have any suggestions for borders?

Remember this quilt?

I quilted this quilt for our local quilt guild.

The quilt will be raffled at our quilt show on October 28, 2006.

If you are interested in purchasing a ticket to win this quilt, please contact me: silverthimble@shaw.ca.

Tickets are $2.00 each or 3 for $5.00.

These two pictures are the fat quarters that I have been collecting to make a Yellow Brick Road quilt for my bed. I wanted a quilt that said, “Spring”, so I have been saving florals and blenders for a few months now. I have machine quilted several quilts from this pattern for customers; I will now have one for myself.

For those who are unfamiliar with quilting language; a fat quarter is a yard of fabric which has been cut into 4 pieces, first down the fold and then in half width wise. Most quilting cottons are sold on the bolt with a single fold down the middle. When opened, the fabric is 44″ wide. If you were to ask the shop to cut a quarter yard of fabric, they would cut the piece 9″ wide. You would end up with a piece of fabric 9″ x 44″. Another way to get a quarter yard of fabric is to cut a half yard (or 18″ x 44″) and then subcut down down the fold to end up with two pieces of fabric 18″ x 22″ otherwise known as a fat quarter–the same amout of fabric, just a different shape.

So, in summary, a fat quarter is a quarter yard of fabric cut on the fold to produce a wider yield–approximately 18″ x 22″.

The following is a useful reference for what you can cut from a fat quarter.

99 – 2″ squares
50 – 2 1/2″ squares
42 – 3″ squares
30 – 3 1/2″ squares
20 – 4″ squares
16 – 4 1/2″ squares
12 – 5″ squares
12 – 5 1/2″ squares
9 – 6″ squares
6 – 6 1/2″ squares

In Canada we use the Metric System and fabric is sold by the meter. Because almost all quilting patterns are written for imperial measurements (inches and yards), we must convert from yards to meters when purchasing our fabric.

Some useful conversions are:

1 yard = .91440 meters

1 meter = 1.09360 yards

1 yard = 36 inches

1 meter = 39.37 inches