Elizabeth Hartman blocks

I have now finished using the Elizabeth Hartman blocks sewn during Gnome Angel’s sewalong from 2018. The sewalong was cancelled due to illness and I lost the enthusiasm. However Pat Sloan announced UFO Fridays last week so I dug out the last few blocks and put them on my design wall. During the week I added low volume strips to make the blocks into longer strips.

My design wall is so useful and a decent size. By Friday I had the bocks together and just added one last border around the whole piece. A simple swirls and circles design completed the piece on my long arm.

A rainbow stripe was the perfect binding and as the quilt is destined for a new born baby (not yet born), I was happy to use up the scrap of Basic Grey grunge in onyx as the backing.

 I made three other projects from my blocks:

Cat and hedgehog baby quilt

Cactus table runner

Awesome ocean baby quilt

Now that project is finished, I need to get another onto my design wall to make some progress.

Threadology finish

My last finish for the month / quarter was the Threadology BOM. I have been joining in with Amy Ellis's #onethingwithAmy challenge. It's great way to challenge yourself to get one thing done per week, big or small. I decided to finish this quilt last week. I had quilted it earlier in the week but stalled on a choice for the binding.

You can see that I decided not to make the quilt into the lovely spool of thread as I didn't need a bigger quilt. I think I will donate this one to Project Linus. I like a good strip for the binding but I want feeling the love. I used a white Kona together with some FQs from a FQ stack of V & Co's metallic ombre for Moda Fabrics. I ran out of some colours so just added more in. I seemed to end up with lots of pale pink blocks but I distributed them throughout the quilt top which seems to have worked.

A friend suggested gold as a binding on Instagram. I prefer silver to gold so resisted the suggestion, but I new it was a good suggestion. A quick trip down the road to Crafty Quilters and half a metre of Essex metallic linen by Robert Kaufman was in my hands. I wanted to get the binding ready by Saturday so I could hand sew it at a Jersey Modern quilt Group workshop on the Sunday. In the end I had just six inches left to stitch down when we adjourned for afternoon tea in the foyer of the Jersey Museum.

A lovely day spent with friends and I soon had the binding finished when I got home.

The backing is a little random but it was taken from stash so I made it work. 

Q3 Finish along

1. TQS BOM Sedona Star from Jan 2012. Not yet pieced together but progress was made in 2018.

2. Tula Pink butterfly from October 2017. I need to move a few blocks and then quilt it.

3. My small world from 2016 which is pieced and partly quilted. This is the April project to finish for the APQS UFO challenge

4. Five impossible things

5. La Fin du Monde which I started as a quiltalong late 2018, but the background fabric got lost in the post, so progress stopped.

6. Tate Modern quilt which I need to start drafting again. I had made some templates but some were wrong and I might be able to use a circle ruler instead.

7. Miscellaneous Elizabeth Hartman blocks - three mini quilts finished so far from the stack of blocks.

8. Geeta Gamma globe   I have decided not to proceed with this project so I need to wash the background which is all marked up and recycle the pattern

8. #100days100 blocks - yes I had FOMO

9. HST BOM  - I want to keep up with the blocks each month and finish it in December

10. Tula Pink Hex on the beach - this is the project I was working on for the #the100dayproject so I should make good progress on this during the third quarter.

11. Oops I forgot the improv quilt from Poppyprint's class for London MQG.

12. Hoffman Dream Big Panel - I need to load this and practise my free motion quilting.

13. Tall tales sew along. Most of the blocks are made so should be an easyish finish for this quarter.

I have more projects planned on the go than I thought. However I now have no unfinished cross stitch projects, but I seem to have replaced them with knitting WIPs which I will list once this list reduces to under 10.

Holiday crafty projects

I have prepped three projects to take with me this time. I almost took a large shawl project, but that would be ridiculous, even for me. Firstly I have 12 Hex on the Beach blocks ready to stitch. I am not taking pins and instead have a clipboard and washi tape to keep things in place.

The Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery had a 20% Memorial weekend sale so I picked up this cherry blossom pattern. I used some linen that I had in stock and only ha to buy five skeins of floss. Fortunately the local shop that stocks DMC was open today.

Lastly are some DK socks from the Click and Swish Collective by Kay Jones of the Bakery Bears. I might need these on the night flight from Dubai to Beijing. Fingers crossed I get some sleep. I am doing these in one colour from stash. I might try to buy an extra pair of needles in Brighton for the heels. Instead of going into London tomorrow we are heading in the opposite direction to Brighton.

Hears hoping for clear skies for our first flight so that we get off the island on time. we have never flown with Emirates so we are looking forward to seeing if they are as good as their reputation.

#theone100dayproject day 55

Not day 60 I hear you say. No, we are heading to London tomorrow and then on to China and then Japan. So this is as far as I've got this week. My extra green fabric arrived and has been cut. Good service as always from Sewhot.co.uk .  I have however continued to work on some blue units and bagged up some blocks to take on holiday.

I have fixed the incorrect hexagons too which took almost as long as making a whole 12 hexagon unit. There is lots of joining together to be done. That can wait until we return mid June.

Off now to finish packing. I will be back in a few days to share what crafty projects I've packed.

#The100dayproject day 50

Yesterday marked day 50 on the 100 day challenge and the half way point. I should have chosen a quicker project to do each day as one block take about 2 hours. Fine if I have nothing on or wake early, but on busy days I am struggling.

Here is where I was ten days ago on day 40:

I got to day 46 and realised that I was short of one colour of fabric. Hmm. I should have checked the list provided by a shop of Kona equivalents of the Tula Pink solids. So yesterday I ordered two extra greens which arrived today. I have now chosen the green that I want to use and have cut 28 hexagons. Green is not my favourite colour either.

So whilst waiting for the green Kona to arrive, I started stitching some of the blue blocks and putting some packets of hexagons ready for our holiday.

And here are my blocks so far with two random blue blocks. I have sewn a few more blocks into a bigger section and I am starting to get all of my packets of hexagons organised. Great progress has been made so far and I am hoping to make some progress whilst on holiday as we have some long flights and a train journey. It's difficult to know how many packets to take, too many and it's wasted suitcase room and too few and I won't know what to do with myself.

Flora supply case sew along

I have made two of the Flora supply case before and I joined in this sew along to make the larger version. You an purchase the pattern at Clover & Violet There has been a lot going on with family over the last few weeks and I completely missed the finish of the sewalong even though I had finished the case.

I added a personal touch to the pattern by adding a little fabric loop for attaching a key ring or similar.

I used fabric from Tula Pink's Zuma range in lovely aquas, blues and lime green. I particularly love the splashes of neon. The fabric along with the zip came from Tania's Fabric on Facebook. The foldover elastic and the grey mesh were from previous projects. I picked up more of the corduroy premade bias tape from Beyond Measure UK at the Festival of Quilts last year.

 

I really struggled with putting the zipper pull o the zipper tape and I could quite cheerfully have put it in the bin at that stage. I persevered and eventually it slid on. I quickly added the zipper end so as to secure the sipper pull so that it wouldn't be pulled off by accident.