Little Bits.....: Our daughter offered

to do her Dad's Christmas shopping. However, when it came time to go to the Village Square Quilt Shop she sent her husband. All 6' of him down to get the gift card and "don't come home without a fat quarter." Diane kindly looked around and thought "Bev would like this" so my gift card came wrapped in it.

It took me until last week to come up with something for this special fabric. I want something for our front porch and I want something I've designed. I sat at EQ and finally had a pattern. I went back to the store and bought more from the line of fabric that Trend-tex has put out for our country's

150th birthday.

I love this. Whoever designed this fabric knows Canada. Our poppy, hockey, lacrosse, wood, our anthem, our leaf, our goose and inukshuk (which is an interesting read).

I thought I could do the leaves by paper piecing, but it proved to be a challenge so all I did was the stem.

I'm going to post the directions for the leaves tomorrow so it won't be such a long, long blog post today.

After a lot of thought, I decided to use my walking foot to quilt this one. I was going to do maple leaves with an all over design, but that would detract from the banner, I was going to free motion, but I changed my mind on that.

I finally thought, why not just use the walking foot on my Sapphire. I sandwiched the three layers one evening and after the "glue" had dried I set about quilting the piece.

I did around the letters first and then added the straight lines on either side.

Then I moved over to the leaves and finally the black. If you look closely you will see I stitched a small maple leaf into the centre of the leaf.

I worked on and off on this for a couple of days.

I even put corner 'hangers' on the back instead of a sleeve. Just to be sure it hung without blowing around too much, I did the same in the bottom. The nice thing about these is, you don't have to sew them down.