Foundation piecing

Jenny, Lorraine and I had a fun morning doing some foundation piecing. Even though the plan for the Farmers Wife Sampler Quilt at our guild is teach foundation piecing again in March, someone couldn't wait!! Here's my block for today.

94 tall pine tree



I will be taking this project on holiday with me so I hope to have some more photos for you in two weeks time. Meanwhile there'll be more blocks on the Cottonberry blog

Back from the Festival of Quilts

My feet are very sore and my purse a little lighter, mainly due to several trips into Birmingham. The winner of the Festival was a beautiful piece called Octopussy. There was a huge variety of quilts to view, including many hexagons and union jacks. The group winner featured meerkats which was very amusing.



My purchases from the Festival of Quilts comprised of some raffle prizes for Caesarea Quilters and the following for myself:




A jelly roll and layer cake of Ruby by Bonnie and Camille which I have waited for impatiently so I snapped it up on our second visit.
Fusible wadding for some bags
Big reel for rolling binding on
A subscription for Irish Quilt & Craft Magazine. A great size to pop in your handbag and has similarities to Vignette in that it combines garden, cooking and other articles but at a great price. Look out for this one in the CQ raffle in December. They also sell kits for the projects in the magazine which is very useful. This is a quarterly magazine.

I've even used some of the layer cake in some Farmer's Wife Sampler blocks. These three block make 37 blocks done in total - a third of the 111 blocks. Unfortunately they are the easier blocks in the book!! I hope to get to 50 by the end of the school holidays as my sewing machine is coming to France with us.

54 kitchen wood box



95 temperance tree



102 whirlpool

Mini design boards

I have just made some of the design boards shown on Lori Holt's blog To see the instructions on how to make them go to this post.

I have made two small changes to the construction of the mini design boards:
1. Her tutorial calls for foam board which is hard to get and expensive so I used some free mount borad which I got from a local framer and for that reason I also reduced the binding to 2" as the sandwich is thinner; and
2. I am not an expert with a glue gun, so I just used fabric glue and popped it under my cutting mat when finished to dry.




I have made eight boards in all, four for myself with trim to match my Farmer's Wife Sampler Quilt fabric (Bliss by Camille for Moda), one each for Jenny and Lorraine, and two for our guild raffle for September (if they want them).