Oddly enough, this piece wasn’t actually from my collection (yes, I now have a collection) of Canada 150 projects. It was the Fibre Expressions’ (from Sechelt) contribution to the 2016 Row by Row Experience. I’ve never made it into the shop but from the moment I saw the pattern I knew I wanted to make it. By the time the “Experience” was pretty much over for the year I still hadn’t been able to pick the kit up. But the shop was one of our vendors at Hands Across the Water so I made sure she was bringing some for her booth. As it turned out we were in Portland at the time of the event so I missed it again. But after November 1st you were able to purchase the kit without actually being in the shop and that’s when I was able to get mine.

When we started planning for the Cranberry Lake 75 Celebration (with its Canada 150 component to nab some of that funding) I told Pat I would make it to hang in the Hall. When I finally got around to getting it added to my “Must Get At It Now” pile I couldn’t find it anywhere. When I did finally locate it, in a totally unrelated bin, I realized it was too difficult to take to the Island when we had our week there.

So the pressure was on to get it completed in time. The piece was much harder to do than I thought it would be; the tiny letters and getting the staff lines on were challenges. I think I traced the pattern about four times before realizing that if I was using a Frixion pen I couldn’t trace everything and then fuse the pieces in place without losing all my lines and having to trace all over again. Were I to do the pattern again (and I won’t) there are a lot of things I would do differently.

Once it was together I wasn’t sure how to go about quilting it. I needed to use white between the black staff lines but those white patches were interrupted with black stems to the notes. So each white section was done separately. By the time the white quilting was done I noticed the maple leaves were already coming unstuck from the backing so I very carefully used my free-motion stitch to go just inside the borders of each one. The red section was easier but I was concerned about the red quilting over the black letters. I had a black fabric pen that I thought I would use to cover the red stitches but once it was finished I decided the red hardly showed and didn’t bother.

This will hang above the piano in the Cranberry Hall, and probably on the staircase at home.

UPDATE: I gave this to Will. When he was younger and playing mini-sticks hockey at the house we always had to sing O Canada before the games could begin.