Cosy blanket - time to tidy up

I have been lazy and not sewn in any ends on this blanket I've been crocheting. I incurred a sports injury on Monday night which my physiotherapist says is a category 1 to 2 tear in my calf muscle. No exercise apart from walking for 4 to 6 weeks. Shame no burpies. I know you want to know what I was doing - we were about 2 minutes into an exercise class and not going for the burn yet and something went awry. Adam thought it would just be a strain, but I  felt it was more and he had a cancellation yesterday afternoon so I jumped at it. Or I would have jumped if I could, just walking down the stairs is a challenge.

Jane gave me permission to put my feet up and crochet the day away so I did. I think I'm about half done, so today it's time to start sewing in those ends. Lucy at Attic24 gives great instructions on how to sew them in which is a boon for novices like me.

 

So at each colour change I'm sewing in at least five ends and it's starting to look much tidier and less like a fringe. I don't want to spend an entire evening just sewing in ends, so I'll crochet a row and then sew in some ends, repeat until finished.

 

Most of my wool came from Black Sheep Wools but they were out of stock of a few colours so I also ordered from Wool Warehouse and I love these giant organza bags that they pack the wool in. So useful to transport your project and protect it.

Siblings Together - June 2015

 

 

I know it's only May, but as some of us are meeting up on 1 June, Jo has been kind enough to send us the instructions for June so that we can hand deliver our blocks. A simple 18" block, which was nice and quick to sew after scouring my stash for suitable fabric that was a large enough piece.

Hooked on crochet

 

 

I thought I'd share my progress on a new project today. I have followed the attic 24 blog since it was recommended to me by Michelle, then Claire bought me a kit for one of her patterns for Christmas. I had a go, but the patterns weren't lining up so I put it aside. Then I won a voucher for Black Sheep Wools and succumbed to some Stylecraft Special DK and got started on my cosy blanket.  Black Sheep Wools didn't have all of the colours I needed so I bought the rest of the wool from Wool Warehouse. I love that the wool comes in lovely big organza bags which are brilliant for storing your projects in. I may have also bought a kit for a second project to take advantage of the free postage.

 

 

All of the wool for my cosy blanket is stored in a basket in order of the stripes. Sad I know, but it makes it easy to grab the next two balls to work on.

 

 

All of my Stylecraft wool is stored in the wardrobe next to my long arm and I have a few random colours for future use or borders.

 

I store the next four colours in the organza bag and return them once used to the basket.  I've now done two stripes of each of the fifteen colours and I'm pleased with my progress. I'm trying to do two stripes every day to make visible progress.

 

 

Farm Girl Friday - Baking day and Butter churn

 

This is week 3 of the Farm Girl Vintage Sew along, and this week's blocks are butter churn and baking day. I thought butter churn would look good as a 12" block and the colours follow the book pretty much.

Love the baking day block. Very retro and I also did a 12" block for this one.

Here they are together so far. I need to make a few more 6" blocks to balance the larger blocks.

Kaffe ST quilt progress

 

When I went to load the quilt on the machine, I found it was smaller than I had expected. Hmm, I hadn't added the final border. Back to the sewing machine. Now it's on the machine and I'm trying out some ruler work. A piano key border and orange peel pattern in the middle. I realise that I need to change the open toed foot to an enclosed foot, but first I have to find it. The quilting isn't perfect and some parts will need to be unpicked as the tension is atrocious, but a charity quilt is perfectly suited for practising on.

 

I've started allocating myself six tasks to do each day and I mark off which days are a win, when all six tasks have been achieved. This week hasn't been full of wins, but making the binding for this quilt was one of today's tasks and it's now done ready for when the quilt is finished.

 

 

Provided byFund-Raising-Ideas-Center.com

 

Quilters are going great guns and I will have three more to add to this total by the end of next week. The labels have arrived so they need to be sewn on.

My small world quilt along - low volume swap

 

I have made a small amount of progress in advance of the start of the sewalong. My hexies are sewn together, but unfortunately they're not required until part 5. I have sent about 8 envelopes of hexies to the UK and USa and I have three more to post tomorrow.

 

 

The quilt requires a yard of mixed low volume fabrics. I started cutting up my scraps and made significant progress. Or so I thought until I worked out we need over 300 1.5" squares. Wow.

You might ask what is low volume fabric. This article on Craftsy describes it as:



"Low-volume fabrics are defined as fabrics that “read” as light fabrics but at the same time have a secondary pattern or design. Just one of these fabrics can be used as the background for an entire quilt, but it’s even more fun to combine many different low-volume fabrics for stunning quilts.
Many fabric collections come with a mix of bold prints along with lighter prints that are perfect low-volume fabrics. Low-volume prints from a single collection can be used, or fabrics from a variety of collections can be combined."

Here are a few that I pulled from my basket of low volume fabrics. Here you'll find text prints too. I have several different white on white fabrics as well as cream on cream. I'm not sure I'd use the numerical fabric on the right hand side. It looks a little bold for me.

 

If like me you don't have a great variety of low volume fabrics for this quilt, I have agreed to organise a swap. You can go to eventbrite to sign up here. Swappers will be sending me up to three bags of ten 1.5" strips at least 18" long. I will swap them out and return them on 1 June when I go to London. Here are the three fabrics I'm planning on using - a cream on cream spot from Bonnie & Camille, a sprigged white on white and gold stars on white.

 

 

Any questions about this swap - just e=-mail me. I know it's a quick deadline, but the sewalong starts very soon.

Siblings Together - Helen's quilt 1

This is the first of three quilts made by Helen (Magpie Cat) and quilted by me. I provided the wadding and backing. My stock of backing is running low so I had to find the best fit that was available.

 

 

The backing is a slightly darker cream than the sashing but works okay for me. It has a small sprig design over the whole backing.

Here's the top - a stunner. Strikingly simple piecing.

 

The quilting is done in a cream thread and an overall meandering butterfly design which picked out the butterfly from the fabric used for the top.

 

 

 

My Small World Quiltalong

I failed miserably with the hand piecing of Jen Kingwell's current Block of the Month, but I spotted pictures of this smaller endeavour a few weeks ago on Instagram. Then a sew along was announced. I'm in!! The lovely Verykerryberry is one of five bloggers leading the sew along.

 

The first task was to locate a copy of the magazine. WH Smith and Superdeals didn't have a copy locally so I took to the internet and soon had a copy winging its way to me from the running chicken. Excellent service and it arrived the following day.

 

 

I even read the instructions from start to finish before diving in. I spotted the little hexagons in part 5. Hmm, 1/2" hexagons, will they match the Sizzix die that I bought last month? They do. I located my Cuttlebug machine and plates and soon had 100 small hexagons cut from freezer paper. If you would like 40 die cut paper hexagons to take part in the sew along, email me with your address and I'll pop them in the post next week.

A quick e-mail to my friend Lorraine and I had borrowed her 3/4" Sizzix die. Apart from two hexagons that I fussy cut , I quickly cut 30 hexagons for myself and a few extra for friends.

 

And I'm so pleased that I bought some refills for my glue pen from Simply Solids last month as they make basting the hexagons a breeze. After dinner, I think I'll settle down in front of the telly and sew these hexagons together.

Farm Girl Friday- autumn star and baby chick

 

This is week 2 of the Farm Girl Vintage Sew along, I'm not sure if I showed you last week's one block called Apron Strings.

 

 

I cut into one of my I Want Her Stash bundles for this block and the next two months have just arrived. This is a 6" block. The blocks are being sewn in alphabetic order, so the next block is Autumn Star.

 



 

I am doing my own thing with sizes as I liked the variety of sizes in the Moda Building Blocks quilt. So I supersized this block to 18". I drew it up in EQ7 and then worked from there. Again the blue, background and green fabrics are from my IWHS bundle.

 

 

I've just bought an A5 planner for my crafty projects to keep track of the projects and their instructions. I cut and paste the schedule for the sew along into Word from the Fat Quarter Shop blog and then printed the six pages on two pages to a sheet of A4 paper. Cut them apart, stuck washi tape down the left hand side of the page to reinforce where the page is punched. The result is I can quickly see my progress at a glance.

 

There are two blocks this week and the second is Baby Chick which I made as 12" square. the book has instructions for both 6" and 12" blocks. I like the chicken wire fabric I used for the body by Katy Jones for Art Gallery Fabrics. The rest of the fabrics were straight out of my scrap bags.

 

Last week I walked into town to complete an assignment and I also bought some 15" squares of mount board to make design boards for the 12" blocks. They were laser cut at the framers and I soon had four boards made. however I have no more diamond glaze glue left, which I find useful for all sorts of sticky situations.

 

 And here are the three blocks so far.

Farmer's Wife quilt for customer

Jane has made this quilt from blocks we made each month at our guild and it's a present for her mother's birthday later this month. My long arm was not doing as it was told so this quilt took longer than I had planned as I left it for a week. However I took it to my morning guild to finish sewing in some ends and was able to drop it off to Jane's work on the way home.

 

I love the pops of blue in some of the blocks, it really makes the quilt. The side triangles and backing were a cream with a hint of green. An unusual colour but it worked very well.

The pantograph is a new one called hickory which isn't dense and apparently Jane's colleagues decided I'd made a good choice. I hope to get my last Siblings Together quilt on my machine tomorrow and do some freehand quilting.

ALYOF - Kaffe quilt for Siblings Together

 

In May, it must definitely be my priority to finish Siblings Together quilts with labels so that they can be posted to the charity in time for this year's camps. Over 50 quilts have been completed so far so 100 quilts for the 2015 camps seems achievable with help. I have three more that are completed but I am waiting for labels before I can consider them finished.

 

 

Provided byFund-Raising-Ideas-Center.com

 

 

I've gone from a pile of Kaffe Fassett fabrics picked up from donations at my Guild UFO day,

To a completed quilt top waiting by my long arm. I finished a customer quilt this morning, so this is next in the list.

 

I have even found time to clear out the cupboard in the room where my long arm sits. I found a couple of backings hidden away too as well as some pantographs on a roll to pass on to a friend. The big scraps of wadding have been bagged up neatly and I can see more quickly what I have. The next job is to clear the table of offcuts from quilts and either giveaway the wadding or bag it up and put away the leftover fabric once I've unpicked some quilting from each piece.

 

UK mini swap - goodies sent

 

I'm not sure if I ever shared with you the parcel of goodies that I sent to my partner in the Instagram UK mini swap. I was satisfied that what I sent matched my brief. No low volume fabrics so I used a plain white for the background.

 

To go with the rainbow theme, I made a sewing case using instructions from Lori Holt on Instagram and I also included some embroidery floss by Aurifil.

 

I love the Clover soft thimbles so included one for my partner along with some knitting needle protectors that Lori Holt uses for the ends of her scissors, which I think is genius.

 

 

And I packed everything into a tote bag that I screen printed in a Lu Summers class, so this is a one of a kind bag.

 

ST2 May 2015 double heart block

Catrin asked us to use her instructions to make two double heart blocks in bright colours. These were fun to make.

 

I just picked fabrics off my desk to make these blocks. The background for this block is from January's I want her Stash bundle from Art Gallery Fabrics. The pink is left over backing from a recent quilt and is from Ikea. The turquoise is from another quilt and is by Tula Pink.

 

 

Catrin did say bright!! The green is also from my January I want Her Stash bundle. The orange on white is Sweetwater and the centre is some scraps from a 2012 UFO that I'm working on slowly.

 

 

I enjoyed making those blocks and finished a Farm Girl Vintage block and some border blocks at the same time.

Sunday Stash - Black Sheep Wools

A week ago I won a giveaway on Lucy Brennan's blog for a £25 voucher for Black Sheep Wools. The card arrived the following day and I soon started browsing, the voucher was burning a hole in my pocket. I have been a follower of the Attic 24 blog since I was recommended it by Michelle. Claire gave me a kit for Xmas for the rain drop pattern which I have started but am not 100% happy with so I decided I'd have a go at the cosy stripe blanket.

 

 

They didn't have all the colours in the pattern, so I may have placed a second order. I don't have the confidence to substitute colours yet. I bought a colour card too but I must have lent that to a friend on Wednesday as I can't find it. I've put the wools in their own basket and they have now been joined by a copy of the pattern and a colour crib sheet to which I'll add samples of each colour. Then I'll laminate the card for ready reference. The wools are now in order of the stripes in the blanket. I just need to find a big needle to add to my tin of tools, so that I can darn in the ends as I go, or at least once a week. The Crabtree & Evelyn bag is in the basket so that if I'm going out I can put the next two balls of wool in the bag along with the tools and blanket and go.

 

 

I also bought two fat quarters of the blue and pink Elizabeth selfie in blue an pink. One of each has already been given to Jane as I knew she was drooling over it online.

 

It's a long weekend in the UK, so I'm a little disappointed that I won't be able to make any more progress with the blanket, but a wool lover friend thinks she has a ball of each of the five remaining colours that I can borrow until my wool arrives, but that won't be until Tuesday. I've also found out that locally, I can buy the wool at Country Wools, but they were low on stock when I popped in yesterday.

 

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