Partying with The Chookshed and a milestone!

It was fun to join in with Chookyblue for her annual Chookshed birthday party over the weekend. You can catch up with what was happening in the Chookshed here. Many thanks Donna for your invitation and I hope everyone else had fun too.

Unfortunately, a last minute Sunday BBQ lunch plan due to surprisingly good weather, meant that I did not have as much sewing time as I had hoped. It was our first opportunity to entertain outside this year so apart from all the food prep the terrasse needed a good clean as did all the furniture. However, I did manage to get a big job done and dusted over Friday and Saturday evening so that was great.

Having finished last week adding the facing hexies to my swap hexie tablecloth, I was able on Friday afternoon to get it layered up with some backing fabric and pinned in place. For some reason I do not have a photograph of this but never mind. After two evenings hemming, the facing hexies were all stitched in place and now the tablecloth is ready to quilt.

On the subject of quilting, I have been pondering how to go about this all the time that I have been putting this top together and have not been able to come up with a plan. I don't want an allover pattern as I don't want to lose the definition of the flowers. My big hexagon quilt is quilted around the outside of each flower but I have never really been happy with that and of course it is not suitable to ditch quilt because of the opened out seams.
So, I have decided to tie it, or knotting as Averil Colby called it in her Patchwork book. I am going to use a yellow perle thread and knot the centre of each flower first of all and then see if I feel it needs anymore. As I have not used any batting it is not a matter of keeping the batting in place.

The BBQ by the way was a great success!

Yesterday the patchwork ladies came for the afternoon and great progress is being made on their sampler quilts.

All the blocks are completed on the yellow quilt to the right - it just needs the rest of its sashing and a border. One of our group lives in UK and her version is coming along very nicely too.

Hopefully we will get all five finished quilts together for a photoshoot later in the summer.

The wind is building up here and it is very sultry - storms coming our way overnight!

Oh yes, the milestone. This is my 400th post!

Hope you are having a good week.

FNSI for May

Many thanks Wendy for hosting our sew in this month despite being so busy. Lovely to be sewing along with everyone again - you can catch up with what went on here

We were out to lunch on Friday - and very nice it was too! When I got home I spent a happy hour with my sketchbook and paints before settling down to finish basting 90 something yellow hexagons which are going to edge my swap hexies tablecloth.

Managed to get them all done before bedtime so now I am looking forward to start sewing them in place as soon as I finish this post. There is exciting cricket on TV - no, not England v Australia but Somerset v Hampshire in the final of the Royal London one day cup! Come on Somerset!

My sampler quilt is finished - I added the last quilting stitches a couple of nights ago. So here are a few pictures.

And to finish, a few pictures from the garden

Hope you are having a great weekend - happy stitching

Its been a busy week...

….not least for the pair of blue tits nesting in our bird box, who are constantly in and out all day with food for their chicks!

The box is on the pillar holding up our terrasse roof and is somewhere that we are constantly passing or working near by - they get very agitated if we hang around too long!

We had what should be the last frosts of season last weekend so we spent a couple of days putting out summer vegetable plants and potting up pots and window boxes. We then had a few showery days which was good as it means all those new young plants have had a good watering. Meanwhile we have an enormous crop of broad beans this year and I have been busy podding and blanching beans for the freezer. Our tax returns have to be in next week and we have had a couple of visits to the tax office trying to decipher the forms Thankfully all done now for another year.

I have managed to fit in some sewing too and some play in one of my sketchbooks.

My Rainbow Scrap Challenge block is complete for the month - orange.

And my swap hexies are winging their way down under!

 

The quilting of the blocks in the Mystery Quilt is now complete and I have made a start on the borders.

 

 

This is nice, easy quilting to do so I shall enjoy finishing this quilt off.

Well I think that is me up to date for now - have a good week.

May's Friday Night with Friends

It's a month since my last post and that month has whizzed by so quickly! We spent two weeks in UK over Easter which was lovely especially as there was exceptionally good weather over the Easter weekend.

Many thanks to Cheryll for hosting our FNwF's especially as she is only just back from a trip herself. We were a select group - you can see what everyone got up to here.

My first job was to cut out my Dresden pieces for this months RSC block. There is very little orange in my stash so I had to supplement what I had with some golden yellows.

I got the borders attached to this QAYG sampler this week. Looking at it now maybe it would have been better balanced with the spools and the log cabin swapped around! Too late now.

My patchwork group have all been working on the same project and so it will be good to see their projects with borders on next week. As soon as they are all finished I will post pictures because it is so interesting to see how different they all are with different fabric choices.
Anyway, I now need to complete the quilting on the blocks and I am adding ditch quilting around the outside edge of each block to make the sashing stand out. Then I will have to quilt the border.
Last night I was working on the ship block - just the cloud to quilt now.

I am looking forward to seeing what everyone else was working on.

Also this week I have completed another round of my 1797 revisited quilt.

 

Two more complete rounds to do, then I can start squaring it off.

Hope you are having a great weekend.

Friday Night with Friends

Many thanks to Cheryll for getting us all together again this week. You can see what everyone else got up to here

I managed to fit in a hours sewing yesterday afternoon - we have had cooler, damp weather here this week but Friday afternoon was warm and sunny so we spent most of it in the garden. However this is what I was up to in my sewing room.

The sampler quilt I have been working on along with my patchwork group has finally got to the border stage and I was very happy to be machining on the border strips yesterday afternoon.

I am so looking forward to showing you all the completed quilts as everyone has worked hard and made very individual versions. Hopefully next month.

I have been sewing my  1797 revisited quilt along with a facebook group and earlier this week I spotted a gorgeous pincushion on the site and just could not resist having a go. Yesterday evening I was busy sewing the patches together and this afternoon I made up my pincushion. Here is my version.

The hexies are 1 1/8" long and super cute.

My Easter wall hanging is now finished and ready to take with us on our Easter travels.

It is wet here again this afternoon so I am going to get on with my RSC project - more on that next time. Hope you are having a great weekend.

FNwF, happy mail and other news

Many thanks to Cheryll for inviting us to join her again last Friday. For one reason or another Friday was a stitchy non event for me - all I managed were a few bits of quilting on my Pink BOM which seems to be taking me ages to finish!

I received some happy mail last week - these gorgeous Island Batik fabrics which I won in a blog hop from Turid.

At the moment they are still too gorgeous to unwrap but I will soon find a project for them I am sure.

I finished off the little crazy quilting pincushion that I was making

and completed the crazy quilting I was working on for a competition - still no photo's allowed, sorry.

The patchwork girls came last week and started on their next block of the Mystery Quilt. This is what they are making.

A Log Cabin, log cabin! Now, I got the idea for this block from a blog but stupidly did not make a note of whose blog! So if you are reading this then please, please contact me so that I can credit you.

Update May 2019 - I finally found the inspiration for my block! here My thanks to JanineMarie of Quilts from the Little House whose beautiful log cabin block I copied!

And finally, I have completed two more blocks for the RSC - September

and October

I am off to UK again this week but hope to be back in time for FNSI - so see you there.

Applique and some new cushion covers

The patchwork ladies met this week - sadly I completely forgot to take photographs of all their lovely work, especially as we were joined by our UK resident member who was visiting for a few days. The new technique for their sampler quilt is applique and this is the block that I have given them to work on.

 

 

 

I really enjoyed working on this block and hope that they do too. I found the design on the internet and have adapted it to my needs - sadly I can not find now where I got it from so apologies to it's designer as I am unable to credit you!

 

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The cushion on my favourite garden chair was looking distinctly grubby at the beginning of the season and as it is not washable the next best thing was to cover it with some fresh, clean fabric. I remembered some ticking samples that I have been hoarding knowing that 'one day they will come in handy'! So out they came and I used the largest pieces to cover my cushion.

 

 

 

This was a quick and simple project so I was enthused to use some of the remaining fabric to cover a couple of our other garden cushions. Five cushions later and I was very happy with my work and the bright new look my garden chairs were getting.

 

 

 

 At this point I was left with one un-covered cushion and a pile of ticking offcuts. Well I like a challenge and so I was determined to get that other cushion covered to match. First of all I cut as many 5" squares as I could from my offcuts then I started piecing together the oddments and cutting more 5" squares. I must say that the last four squares were a pretty close thing but all I had to add to make the cover complete was this narrow strip of thick cotton shirting.

 

 

 

Voila! - lots of nice new cushions. Perfect for sitting and enjoying our current hot weather. Well, actually, it's too hot to sit outside most of the time!

 

 

So perfect weather for sewing indoors! Have a great weekend.

 

 

It's been a while....

.....but hopefully I am now back on track and will be posting regularly! April has been a busy month with two visits to UK to see family but the suitcases have now been put away until the autumn and we are busy getting the garden tidied and planted up for the summer. I have also some decorating to do before our first visitors of the year at the beginning of June.

There has been sewing time and I have a couple of things to show you. First up, quilting on my pink BOM has continued - only five more blocks to do now.

I am really loving this QAYG - each block is so quick to quilt and it does not seem so daunting as quilting a whole quilt.

I have also finally finished the Winterberry embroidery that was in my winter Craftpod - you can read my post about the Craftpod here
I usually avoid satin stitch like the plague so am really pleased that these little berries do actually look like berries!

The patchwork girls met this afternoon and here are our EPP blocks for the Mystery Quilt.

As you can see they have all done really well. Don't they look effective!

This month their new technique is curved piecing and I am interested to see what they will come up with for this. Here is my block all quilted up so I am ready to start on the next block.

Just noticed that a fly flew into my picture! How annoying.

We had a frost last night - hopefully it will be the last one now until the autumn. Just hoping that it was not hard enough to damage the blossom and our walnuts. A late frost last year did a lot of damage.

It's Friday Night with Friends this week - sign ups are here and I hope to see you there.

Another Mystery Solved

In 2014 I started making a Mystery Quilt from clues given in the four issues of 'The Quilter' that year. You can read about it here although I don't seem to have blogged about it very much. However it did get a mention here a few weeks ago when I layered it up for quilting.
Having decided on a simple wiggly line for the quilting it went very quickly and I soon had a finish - but for some reason it has taken me until now to get it photographed!
So finally, here it is.

The fabrics are all hand dyed and are mostly recycled cotton and linen clothing with some Egyptian cotton sheeting. The curved section is hand pieced, the rest is machine pieced.
This was a budget production using mostly fabrics that I had already in my stash. The border was dyed to work in with the rest of the colours. Sticking with the theme I bought a cheap cotton sheet from the supermarket and dyed it ultramarine for the back.

Being cheap meant that it was quite soft after washing so I starched it to get it to behave during quilting.
A few close ups of the blocks.

And of the quilting.

Great to have another project ticked off my list.