The Berry Barn (Saskatoons in Saskatoon)

Here are some snapshots I took at The Berry Barn, Saskatchewan.  Enjoy!

First up is my favorite... taken in the parking lot.  

Next up, Columbine and a combine, with the Saskatchewan river in the distance.  I saw her down on the ground, posing so nicely.  : ) So I squatted down and snapped a dozen photos.  My rear end is now full of mosquito bites!  I was wearing blue jeans.  FYI.  She was worth it I think : )

Here are the gift shop windows.  It's a huge red barn that has a wonderful restaurant.  Saskatoon berries in everything!  

This one I love so much!  Then end of every row of bushes has a lamp on a post.  They are about the same height as my 4 yr old daughter.  They look so pretty all in a row.

This is the same side of the barn, but from the view of the lower river bank.

And while I was down at the river looking up, I saw this!

And this is what you see at the exit from the parking lot.  Cute hey?

Yeah, you know it.  Some of these will become fibre art : )  Just wait and see...

~Monika

ps.  Happy Saskatchewan Day Everyone!

Poor Penny - I'm handstitching!

Finally I am done the main surface of the phone lines along Highway 7.    I got it done this morning and love it more!  : )  Wanna see how I work?

Here's some beads waiting...

I hand stitched all the fence posts in, and added glass beads to the tops of the poles.  I LOVE it.  I feel like I had all the right embellishments (thank you Molly!).

I did not have thin enough grey twisty fibres for the far line of posts, so I made some!  I took two lines of dark grey rayon and one line of light grey rayon onto one hand sewing needle and just twisted them lightly together.  Worked like a charm.  I'll have to send that tip into a magazine.  Maybe I'll win something.  haha

Then I re-photographed my Highway 51 piece.  It's going to be submitted for consideration in a Canadian business calendar challenge, along with the telephone poles.

And my third entry will be my Bear Tracks.  The spiral hand quilting in the paws looks so great. 

All this and poor Penny is just sitting idle.  So I dropped the feed dogs after midnight lastnight, and tried out the free motion on the new machine.  WOW.  I didn't think it would feel so much different from the 4900!  Easy - and look!  Just what I wanted it too look like:

Then after that, around 1 am, I played around with the blog colors as you can see.  Dumb.  I should have gone to bed.  oh well.  I think I like the changes.

Have a great long weekend!!

ps- the Fringe Festival is ON in Saskatoon!!  YAY!

~Monika K.

and all her thread

A Pretty Penny...

I opened a separate personal savings account and have been slowly depositing anything I make on my art & quilts.  I was going to get a longarm, but then in April, my dream machine was launched at Janome.  It's has everything that was on my wishlist three years ago, when the closest I could find was my Janome 4900 'quilter's companion'.  

The new machine is called the Horizon - a Janome 7700.  We found a FAB deal and it came today!!!  YAY!  Thanks to Michael for his help.  

No more folding up my art to wedge it under the needle, and no more forcing queen sized quilts into a six inch space.  This machine boasts almost a foot of space to the right of the needle!  YAY!  No more scissors even!  This baby has an auto internal thread cutter! 

Her she is!  Some 7700 owners call her Big Bertha.  lol

See how teeny my hand looks?  lol  I think I'll call her Pretty Penny.  : )  I LOVE the deep red panel.

There... decorated and all snug in the fitted extension table I made.  Beauty.

sigh

~Monika & Pretty Penny : )

SCORE!

I love garage sailing / sale-ing.  I got a dress form that way.  I got fabrics, batting, threads, buttons, crochet cottons, cutting mats, rotary blades, a light box, sewing room furniture, frames, quilt magazines, rulers, templates... Then this weekend, I adopted a quilt!  

"How much?" I asked her.

"Oh... a dollar" she replied.  "It was my mother's childhood quilt."

"Who made it?" I asked.

"I don't know.  It's probably circa 1930 or so," she informed me.

A buck!?  I love it! 

Ain't she pretty!??  If anyone recognizes this block, please let me know.

Yes, those are my toes.  Ha ha.  The quilt is quite tattered & torn & work.  It's machine pieced with white thread, and hand quilted with green thread.  The batt is polyester.

I'm thrilled, but a little concerned that now I'm going to start collecting (or have I already?!?).  Oh my.

~ Monika, mother to many quilts. : )

Mama Bear's Paw update

Maybe it's a good thing I cannot blog from my cell phone.  I tried...  The new phone I have is so amazing.  I am not a phone person.  It actually serves as a mini-laptop and a whopping 8.1 megapixel camera!  It's fabulous.  So, since my back is completely out today, I've spent a lot of time embellishing my blog and facebook and etsy store.  Then I sat up in my balcony and worked on some hand quilting on the paw prints.  I spent more time listening to Tori Amos and photographing my quilt, but oh well.  : )

Quick, take a look before I take a seam ripper to it.  The spiral needs to be bigger.  PS- click on the photo below to see how intense this camera phone is!  god it's fabulous!

 

Well... I mean wider.  the loops are only a quarter inch apart.  I need there to be more space between the rows.  Still... I love this picture because it shows off the variegated thread I'm using.  

So, here's the quilt.  I'm not sure I posted this yet.  It's MINE by the way.  MINE.  Not for sale : )

It's like a mother bear spirit who has waded through a muddy valley of blooms.  I want to hand stitch spirals on all the paw prints, and pinecones on the squares. I love it.

: )

~Monika

mamabear

Highway 51... Google Biggar - done now. : )

So here's the finished product with all the crop line stitching done.  It's stylized of course.  I'm not sure how to display it though.  

I love it.  You know, its' all silk?  (stitched with cotton thread).  I think instead of framing this one, I'll make it into a wallhanging. 

okay now... off to the chiropractor.  Owee!

~Monika K.

New Stitches

Between three kids, a dayhome, and six pets... here's what I did in my spare time!  Oooh I love it!  It was so rewarding!  I'm thrilled about it.

It love the phone lines running along the highway.  Again - it's highway 51.  I'm not sure what to name it.  Any suggestions?

The blue isn't actually a lake.  It's those blue hills you always seen in the distance here in Saskatchewan.  Here's the original photo:

I added that third pole for balance, though I missed it in the photo...  and OOPS - I forgot that I need to add the fence posts.  : )  Out of this photo came my etsy store's new banner!  I love it!

http://www.MySweetPrairie.etsy.com

Have a great summer!

love Monika

xo

Highway 51... Google Biggar

I was googling the earth one day, and while zooming closer into Saskatchewan, my 6 yr old hops into the room to look at the computer screen.  "Wow, nice quilt mama" he said.  I laughed, "No honey, that's your homeland."  Right around Biggar, Saskatchewan, it looks linda like this:

Very pretty!  The rest of the province looks all green and white and grey like a Rough Rider fan club.  lol  But these rusts thrown in are quite gorgeous!  I take out my book of woven silk samplers that my fabulous mother-in-law scored for me at a garage sale in Edmonton...  and select these...

Not a bad match hey!??

But you know me... I changed my mind about colors and left out the blues so far.  I have a lot of embellishing I want to do, but here's the prairie puzzle in it's early stage.

Not all the colors ended up being what I wanted, so I did some tea-staining, onion skin dying and even coffee staining!  I LOVE it now!  I love the textures too.  The field blocks are 4 sections by 2.5 sections square.  Can you make them out?  The pattern of crops in each block are pretty much the way I saw them.  Farmers make amazing quilters!  : )

I did some satin top-stitching to tie it all together with a wheat colored thread.  

~Monika

she spins

she sews

she weaveth she

the morning 

noon 

and night of me

(Goddess chant)

Like Kids in a Candy Store!

What a great experience I had this morning! 

I've been toting my sewing basket around in my minivan on the offchance that I might actually show up at a local sewing store when the owner is in.  My sewing basket is full of fibre art postcards from around the world and from my sewing studio.  I spoke to Lynn from Sew and Home on the phone a couple months ago about the new Janome Horizon that I covet. 

I mentioned that I make postcards during our conversation.  She immediately asked if I would consider teaching a class for them. 

Fast forward to today.... I have my three children in the minivan outside the store, set up with Nintendo DS and a video as well.  I walk up to the counter and open my sewing basket.... and OOOH the reactions!  I had so many questions and oooohs and aaaahs and "come here and see this!" they called to each other.  The postcards came out of the plastic sleeves and were inspected with so much WOW.  If they were edible, they would all be gone.  How thrilling to see first hand the joy my art brought to complete strangers.  I felt like the Ostara bunny.  (haha)

ps- the kids were fine... and much safer parked outside the storefront than if they had been invited in to a show room full of glass and ceramics. 

When I got back to the vehicle, I exhaled a big breath and told my children how much they liked my work.  My middle boy, age 7 says "Congratulations mama!" and I know he really means it.  He's not an overly emotional guy. 

When I go back to pick up my basket, I'm hoping to bring home some fabric sample books that are outdated.  I have a big prairie landscape planned and Lynn mentioned they do have lots in their warehouse.  !!  FUN

~Monika
rollin' right along...

The latest - Highway 7

Here's the photo I took last weekend...

And here's the fibre art piece that it inspired!!

and some detail.... 

Oh come one.. these were horizontal when i uploaded them!!  How do I turn these?

anyhooo

enjoy looking!

~Monika

Highway Seven

Can you believe it?  I went nearly a week without sewing!  Gosh.

My husband and I had a wedding to go to in Calgary, and kids weren't invited.  So for the first time in TWELVE years, he and I went alone and stayed in a hotel.  Imagine that!  It was so worth it, though i missed the kids terribly!

One of the highlights of the trip was the road itself.  I took a gazillion photos down highway seven on the Saskatchewan side.  Most of the following are going into an exhibition.  I've increased the contrast just a bit for some POW.    Other than that, what you see it the way it was - GORGEOUS. 

This IS my sweet prairie.  Our flag colors for the province are yellow and green.  You can see why.

Our liscence plates read, "land of living skies".  You can see why.

My photos were all starting to look the same, so I switched to sepia!!

The one above was taken through the lense of my sunglasses.  The one below is regular sepia.

I love the lines in this one...

This one is SO CUTE.  I like it totally over-exposed like this.  The colors are so HOT.

The flooded prairie of summer 2010.  Water everywhere!!

I LOVE this!! There's a farm in the picture.  It looks teeny under that sky!!

Another one I set over-lit and over-exposed.  It pops that canola and shows off the summer heat well I think!

And the kicker - the DARKEST and spookiest photo I've ever taken:  an abandoned church with a broken off steeple in the shadow of the clouds. 

Isn't that one incredible!!!?  I upped the contrast just a bit, and it really works!  

All that through the window of a vehicle flying down highway 7 at 150 km/hr!  Not bad eh????

~Monika the shutterbug.