The last of the summer sewing

As the end of February draws near so does the 'official' end of summer.  I spent this last weekend of summer stitching on a number of projects.  I was going to go into the office and catch up on a couple of things (try and clear out my email) but I just couldn't face it when I had lovely quilty projects to play with.

First up a wonky star for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, in the 'proper' February colour way of *Brown with a touch of pink*.   Others will have lots more to show.  You can check out their chocolately goodness at the weekly linkup here.

This week's Project 48 Quilt block is my favourite.  Sometimes fabric combinations come together and you are reminded that this is why you quilt; this is one of those times!  Full credit to background print which I think does all the work here.

 

 I worked on my slightly neglected  Allietare Mystery Quilt.  Working out where I was up to wasn't so hard once I got started.  I stitched together all the 'extra' star blocks, and some of the pieces for the extra alternate blocks. 

And lastly, I worked on what I'm now calling my *Sew Along Sampler*.  I made this very tipsy Arkansas Traveler Block.  It is not meant to look wonky, but something went wrong when I was cutting and sewing 60 degree angles.  This means that is both wonky and small.  But I took Tim Gunn's MAKE IT WORK mantra to heart and this is my Tipsy Traveler.  

I have 10 blocks done now and I fell that they are starting to look a bit more cohesive.  I think that dark border (a coping strip to bring it up to size) might have to be narrowed down because it is very dominant.

My plan is that this will be a donation quilt for Foster Hope, a charity that supports children in foster care by providing all the things they don't have when they move into care.  In many cases they need pretty much everything from a toothbrush to clothes; a teddy bear to a school bag.  Foster Hope is a group that has lots of different ways for people to help, including making quilts.  So because I want this quilt to be for a child, I'm working on moving it away from the kind of weird scrappy look of some of the first blocks I made towards  bright colourful. 

(Hmmm... when I look at this photo, I'm not sure that fan block is square.  I might need to take a look at that.)

So that is my stitching for the last weekend of summer.  I hope that the warm weather continues, and that my productivity does too!

A new project

I just couldn't resist starting a new project.  The Project 48 Quilt is a an epic year long quilt sampler masterminded by Crystal McCann and Linden Vine.  I love that there is a mixture of traditional and improvised (or wonky) blocks. 

I'm trying to resist Pat Sloan's Splendid Sampler.  The idea of a sampler of 100 little 6 inch blocks really appeals.  Hmmmm....  watch this space.  I keep telling myself I still haven't put the RSC2014 Sampler together.  We'll just see how convincing I can be. 

A little scrappy catchup

So (or is that sew?) it has been a while I checked in on my blog and on the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  There are 2 reasons for that.  Firstly life got a little busy as DH and I because caught in in putting my Father-in-Law into care.  As he's in the South Island, that meant some travel and time away from home, and lots of organising and work to be done.

Secondly the colour for February is brown, and I just can't get excited about it so I've been procrastinating.  Today I finally decided to grow and up just sew a block and see what I thought.

I don't love it, and I haven't prepared any fabric to make more.  I still have a lovely wee stash of blue parts and am happily sewing away on blue blocks.  This is last progress photo I took.

I've probably said it before, but these blocks are so much fun to make.  It's quite simple sewing when anything else seems to hard, and after a while I find myself excited about having stitched, and ready to move onto something more challenging which I might not other otherwise have got into.

I hope next month's colour inspires me more than brown though LOL.

You can check out the much more enthusiastic RSC progress of others at SoScrappy's blog here

Sewalittle Saturday

I have to say a *big* thank you to everyone who has left lovely comments about my wonky stars. It is so encouraging to receive them. I only got a couple of whole blocks and a some part blocks made during the week, so I played catch up today and now have have a dozen new blocks to share.  What do you think about the on point look?  It seems to make them look particularly wonky.

Here's my little supply of "star parts" ready to go.  This should be plenty to see me through to the end of the month. I'm not sure I'll be able to stop making blue stars when Angela at Scrap Happy changes the colour for the Rainbow Scrap Challenge for February.  I love seeing all the blue goodness everyone has been sewing on weekly linkup, here.

My Garden House quilt saw some needle time today too and I added three of these blocks.  I photographed all of them because I wanted to see the effects of the different fabric combinations.  I need 17 of these for the quilt.  They seem to take forever to make!  My favourite is the one with the red stripes. 

A little of bit of organisation

Quilting time is down now that I'm back at work.  But it's not going to be gone altogether.  I tried to do 30 minutes each night during the week so that things don't stagnate on my table. 

I added six new wonky stars.  These are great to sew if you don't feel up to anything that requires careful measuring or calculation (eg after a ratty day at work).  I had some fun with these blocks, using white centres which adds a new dimension.  I also tried a string/crumb centre, which I was very excited about in my imagination, but very disappointed about in reality.  It looked very heavy and full of seams in the centre of the stars.   I loved those little crumbs though so I reused the piece as points on a couple of stars.  That was a much more successful effect.  I'm enjoying these blues.  I have always loved tone on tone blues, and have plenty of strips, even though much of my stash is in storage (that's a long story).  Anyway, here are this week's little stars for my Rainbow Scrap Challenge link.  Check out everyone else's blues on Angela's page here

Allietare - I finally gave in an admitted that I was going to have to buy more black fabric to make the additional blocks needed for a larger quilt.  Yesterday I did that, and it allowed me to get my head into the right space to move forward with this.  I've been cutting, cutting, cutting, so that I can get on with making these blocks.  I *think* I have nearly cut everything I need.  I can't believe how long it took to cut the fabrics for the extra blocks.    This is my organised pile of *heedless geese* parts. 

This week I will able to come home at sit at my machine without having to figure out what I need to cut and sift through piles of fabric. 

And sew, it's 2016

So 2015 has been and gone, thank goodness.  I didn't get much quilting done last year but I plan for that to be different in 2016.  I've begun by working on a few different projects because that seems to be the way that I enjoy quilting the most.

Scrappy Stars  - these are inspired by Angela's Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  I love making wonky star blocks and have pieced the around other bits of quilting.  They make me smile.  In 2014 and I did Angela's Rainbow Scrap Sampler which is still blocks, and ideas for sashing, but I learned so much from that project.  You can see the Challenge here along with what others are doing this year. 

Allietare - Bonnie Hunter's latest mystery quilt available for a short time on her blog where you see lots of different versions of this.  I have (just today, whoop whoop) finished all my blocks.  I'm going to square the quilt off by adding an extra row so it will be a while before it all goes together.

Garden House - hmm this is a washed out photo taken back in June when my BFF and I went to the beach for a week of sewing.  These past couple of weeks I've done some more work on these blocks.  I remade the house block to fix the colours and the skewed-ness, made some more blocks, carefully calculated my fabric *ie, did a guesstimate* and I think I have enough to finish it.  I fell in love with this quilt all over again so it  is staying out so that I keep it top-of-mind. 

Quilt Along Sampler - In 2014 I started working on the Classic Meets Modern Quilt Along hosted by Erin at Sew At Home Mommy.  I was excited to use some of my hand dyed fabric, and full of good intentions for this sampler but I run out of steam about half way through the year.  It became another part project in a box and I had some feelings of guilt about the poor neglected blocks that I hadn't got round to making.  The more I thought about it the worse it got.  Hmmmm....  Time to reevaluate.  I had listened to podcast recently about just this very topic... moving on the UFOs.  So I laid out what I had done an assessed where it was at.  Looked at the fabric I had.  Looked through the blocks patterns that were left in the Quilt Along and decided that I didn't want to make those... not that there was anything wrong with them, but I had looked at them too many times thinking "I must...." and I was bored with them.  I chose some new blocks to make from other web based Quilt Along and pattern sites.  I've now made 9/12 blocks.  I've cut pieces for the 10th, have a list of the remaining blocks and the website addresses for them, and have chosen a setting, which I have the fabric for.  This UFO is moving on.  So here is the before photo.... when I've made all the blocks I'll update with an after photo.

I think I could have called this post "Pot Luck" because there's a little bit of everything in here LOL.  It should make for a fun, quilting and creative 2016.

Allietare - Monday Mystery linkup Part 5

Link up time for Part 5 of Bonnie Hunter's Allietare Mystery Quilt. Follow this link back  http://bit.ly/1UdyGZq to see everyone else's progress

I am far from finished this step. I hadn't finished all my Step 1 HST so had to play catch up on those to start this step. So many of the sub units are still on the ironing board waiting to be ironed. The week isn't done yet though, LOL.  

Part 3 with it's gold and neutral 4 patches is completed.  This was where I started the mystery because it was the clue that was live when I came home from holiday

Part 4 (long, oh so long) is completed.  I love these little bow tie type units.  I think they would make a great border for some sampler blocks I have sitting around.

You know when you're making a mystery quilt there's always a fabric choice that you think "hmmmm, I wonder how that's going to work out"?  Well with Allietare mine is the grey.  So because I'm contemplating my choice of grey fabric here's a grey photo from my recent holiday.  It's taken at the Koutu Boulders in the Hokianga Harbour on Northland's west coast.

Off to sew...