I’ve been working on this one for a while. I started hand quilting it years ago and then went through a period where I stopped hand quilting. I realised a few weeks back I only had a little bit left to go. After a few solid days of quilting and binding, it is finally finished.
Its over 2 metres wide so hard to get a good photo.
Now I need a new project.
Hope you are all having a fantastic holiday period.
My work place closes over Christmas and New Year so I have had the last week off work. Weather wise we have been fluctuating between extreme heat and big storms so aside from Christmas day with family most of the last week has been spent indoors.
I pulled a quilt off my UFO pile, that I started hand quilting many years ago, and decided its time to finish it. So, a lot of quilting, napping and watching tv has happened. Probably more napping than anything else.
I’ve also made some good progress on my quilt group challenge. At my last quilt group meeting of the year we had a slightly different gift exchange. At a previous meeting everyone was given an identical box and a list of what to include (things like a piece of fabric and some thread). The boxes were then exchanged and the challenge is to make something with the contents of the box you received before our first meeting of 2024.
This is what I received and it’s definitely a challenge. I couldn’t think of anything that could have used all of it in one item.
This is what I came up with so far…
I used the Christmas buttons to make a button tree wall hanging.
I put the fabric I received on the back, as the buttons would have disappeared if I had used it on the front.
Then with the elastic I made a pencil roll with the elastic and the pink thread.
I still have the butterfly charms, crochet angel and the blue thread but not sure what to do with them. I might just consider the challenge complete at this point.
I finally finished the disappearing hourglass. I was struggling with how to quilt it and decided in the end to just straight line in a bigger grid because I didn’t want the quilting to distract from the pattern.
Now I just need a new project.
I think I promised last time to show the scrappy quilt I finished. Well here it is… being held up by two volunteers at my craft group.
All from the stash including the backing and binding.
I also managed to find time to make some shopping bags. Awhile back I bought some Australian animal panels thinking I would make some table runners. I pulled them out the other day and realised that of the four I had, two were the same. I wasn’t really in the mood for making table runners as I was a bit over quilting after finishing the above monster quilt and the blocks I posted about last time, but thought that the blocks in the panel were the perfect size for the front for a shopping bag. So…I chopped up one of the duplicates and made 3 bags.
It’s finally hit spring here, and all the grevilleas in my garden have come into bloom. So I thought I would leave you with some pictures of my garden. I’ve always loved grevilleas and would love to work them into a quilt some day, but they are way too spidery for applique, and I am tossing up how else you might best represent them.
The mango tree is also in bloom. Quite prolifically too. However, how much fruit we get depends on the weather between now and Christmas and whether I get to the fruit before the birds and bats do.
Feels like the year is really flying by, I am about to go on a decent break from work in September and hope it doesn’t fly by equally as fast.
I finally got some sewing time in and finished a quilt, which I will show in a separate post, but finishing the quilt got me the machine back to work on my free-motion quilt as you go blocks. I started this project because I have always wanted to be better at free-motion quilting but I look at a finished quilt top and can’t bring myself to ruin it by free-motion quilting it in what I know will be a sub-standard way. So I decided to do 12 practices blocks that could be put together quilt as you go style if I decided I was happy with them. Why 12? Because it also met my quilt groups numbers challenge.
The last couple of days I pulled them out and finished them off. I had already done 5 and the others quilted up pretty fast.
The method I used was drawing the design on press and seal and then sticking to my block. You then quilt over the drawn lines and pull the press and seal off when done. You do need really tight stitches so they don’t pull out when you take the press and seal off. This worked well on small blocks, not sure I would like to do an entire quilt this way given that the press and seal is only 12 inches wide. It would be a lot of press and seal. It would also work better if you were spray basting rather than pinning as I found I had to pin after I had attached the press and seal not before. Again, that would be a pain if you were pinning a big quilt.
I will admit I am better at free motion quilting than when I started, but still need loads more practice before I would feel confident quilting a quilt I wanted to give as a gift. There’s still a noticeable difference in the stitch length depending on the direction I am going in and my lines could be smoother. Don’t get me started on the bits where I tried to echo quilt round the design.
Here are some of my blocks.
The last one still has the press and seal attached.
Not sure these will ever get finished into a quilt but they have been good practice.
Not a lot going on here sewing wise. I have managed to finish and pin 3 more scrappy ufos from my ufo pile. They are sitting ready to quilt…
I have a fair bit of quilting ahead of me and they are all decent size quilts, at least 2m wide.
I’ve kind of made a bit of a promise that my next project after this is going to be something small.
I managed to finish another one from my UFO pile. I know why I left this one so long. I mean I love it but I did no planning for the seams when I put it together and it was a pain to quilt because they were a bit thick in places, so I left the quilting to straight lines in one direction.
Also it is huge. 2 metres by 2 metres (or six foot for you metric folks). For some reason it looks smaller in the photo.
It will go to my brother and his wife when I see them in a few weeks.
Somehow it has been a month almost since I last posted, and I have been busy but not busy enough to justify not posting.
The big news is that I finally finished my online course on computer programming and am coming to the conclusion that I am not sufficiently interested in programming to make anything of it; which is a good thing to know so I am not dismissing it as a total waste of time. Plus, I now have a better understanding of how different things work and I worked my brain a little which is always a good thing as you get older.
I also managed to finish my UFO from my last post. I quilted and faced and it is now hanging on my board while I figure out what to do with it. I think I figured out that it used to be the eagle block from Maggi McCormick Gordon’s 1000 great quilt blocks. It’s a bit more obvious when you look at it straight on.
I also finished another mini quilt from my UFO pile. It had been on the pile for a while and I had already bound it but somehow damaged the binding. I didn’t have enough matching material left to remove and rebind so decided to face this one too. I’m not sure the picture does the colours justice.
Last weekend was a lot of running around. Saturday some of my quilt group went on a road trip to a quilt show on the other side of town, with lots of stops on the way there and the way back at quilt shops and other shops. There were some lovely quilts and a fun day out. On Sunday I went in the other direction and met an old friend for a craft fair at a large country town near here. The fair was quite small, but I did do a lovely class on acrylic ink painting and painted some pears. I bought a fat quarter to match, but still haven’t figured out what I am going to do with them.
The other news is, that back in March I did a pottery wheel turning course. I finally got an email a couple of weeks ago saying I could pick up my pots. Here they are…
Not sure what I am going to do with them. The one with the hole might make a nice little plant pot.
I am slowly working through UFOs on my shelf. I’m not even sure what this one is. I think it started out as a sample block that I didn’t like, so I chopped it up and added the pink. I wasn’t sure what to do with it. It’s a little too big for a cushion cover and I didn’t want to cut it down more. In the end I decided to leave it as is and use it as a free motion quilting practice piece. If it turns out ok I can use it as a table topper.
I don’t mind English paper piecing but I usually lose patience when the bits get to a certain size and my tops usually end up getting repurposed into cushions of bags. However, a few years back I came across some big hexagon papers – 6 inch hexagons. I snapped them up thinking that was a hexagon quilt I might be able to finish. I managed to get it to a finished top stage without a lot of planning, then had the challenge of finding a border fabric that would go with all the different colours. I’m not sure I nailed it with the green but it doesn’t look too bad.
It has been sitting on my UFO pile, pinned and partially quilted for the last couple of years. The main reason for this is that I figured as I’d hand pieced the hexagons I should hand quilt. I’d started a little bit in the corner but never gone much further than that. Anyway, I pulled it off the pile a few weeks back. Unpicked the little bit of hand quilting and then machine quilted it. Finished the binding last night.
Not sure the picture does the colours justice.
Being, Nothingness and 1000 quilt blocks 