Around here

My sewing at the moment seems to be focused on a couple of quilt-a-long projects I've joined.

For a while now I've wanted to use up some of my older scrappy fabrics in a way that made them look a little fresher.  The Square Dance mystery quilt at My Caroline Home seemed like the perfect project to give this a try.   The fabric requirements are quite simple - just dark/light, and best of all I got to use some pre-cut 2&1/2 inch squares for the darks.  For the lights I've thrown in some modern low-volumes, so I'm mixing the old and the new together and I'll see how that works out.

When I bought my new sewing machine my plan was to get better at quilting my own quilts.  As soon as I read about the Free Motion Quilt Along that the Central Jersey Modern Quilt Guild is running this year I was "in".  This is a great way to practice new quilting designs because each month you work on a fat 1/4 sized quilt sandwich  - nice and easy to manipulate.  At the end of the year there's going to be a smart way to join these pieces a-la quilt-as-you-qo.  I'm using up hand-dyes from my stash.  I love love love hand-dyes and I always have a stash of them, though some of the backs are the ones that don't seem to have found loving homes LOL.

See that middle one has a blank 1/4.  Well.... there's a design I haven't got my head, or my hands around yet.  I'm going to have to come back to that one.  I'm enjoying this project.  It's fun and I'm learning as I go.

Linking up with  Sew-Stitch-Snap-Share  a regular meet up where you see what other blogging quilters are up to.

Under the needle

This week I've been tidying up the Quiltery which was looking a bit the worse for wear and working on some nearly finished projects.

First up is this baby quilt for a friend's 4th son which I finished quilting over the Christmas holidays.  I was waiting for my friend to decide on the name for her baby so I could finish up the label for this quilt and gift it.  I made wonky stars in 2016 for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge and have since made a couple of other quilts with those blocks.  For this one I had enough blocks for just a small quilt so to make it a little bigger I sashed the blocks and pieced smaller stars in the intersections.  I love the result. 

The second project I've been working on is a Crosscut quilt.  This was originally a QAL at A Quilters Table.  I fell in love with this design when I made one for a quilt buddy in a swap.  I had some leftovers from that project and decided to put them together into a similar quilt for myself.  This one is special because some of the turquoise strips are from a hanky that was my mum's.  Finishing it hasn't really been a priority though and has been on the back burner until I got my new sewing machine at the end of last year.  It was a good project to try out the machine on because the construction method was quite forgiving and meant my seam allowance wasn't too critical (getting a new machine is a bit like learning to quilt all over again).  After quilting it with lots of straight lines, I parked it again, but now (finally) it is getting facing. 

I just wish these were the only two long term projects lurking the Quiltery. 



Linking up with Sew,Stitch, Snap, SHARE to see what other people are up to. 

Happy New Year and what's on the machine

Happy New Year from the Quiltery!   It would seem that I hardly blogged in 2017, perhaps because I hardly quilted for a big part of the year.  I'm planning this year to do more of both; quilting and blogging.  I think for blogging to work for me I have to keep it simple.  While the Finish A Long (and others like it) encouraged me to set goals, it was all about finishes, so when I didn't finish I got discouraged that I didn't have anything to share.  Really I want my blog to be about what I'm doing, and most of the time that is not finishing.    So I'm going to try and blog once a week about what I'm doing, connect up with Julie and Linda in their Sew, Stitch, Snap, Share get together that embraces blogging and sharing work in progress.

For the past couple of weeks I've been quilting this quilt, made from the Project 48 Quilt blocks I made.  The quilt is square and I'm quilting a continuous spiral on it.  The outer spirals are a long way around but I love the effect.  On the down side, some of my blocks are bit on the big side, and I've had to do some gathering to get them to lay flat.  I must have skipped the step of measuring and trimming the blocks before I put the top together.  It has been a good lesson for me to remember these simple steps, especially with this much quilting. 

Talk next week.