I haven't done much but I did have a great time at retreat!  The quilt shops were lovely to browse in as usual and we had a delicious lunch before heading to our accommodation.  I took my Christmas cross stitch and some crochet and worked on those a fair bit.  Kay learned how to do foundation paper piecing so that she can finish a quilt, Kate didn't seem to do a lot and Judy, as usual, worked solidly!  I have no pictures!!

This is where I'm up to with Santa.  There's still a lot to do!

 

When I left for retreat I still hadn't decided on a final border for the star quilt for my bedroom.  I auditioned the dark and light greens and ruled out the light but the dark takes the focus off the star too much.

So I put it on my bed to see if it even needs another border and, to be honest, it doesn't but I kind of want it bigger.  Would cream work I wonder?  It doesn't really show because it'll be down the sides of the bed but it'll be good if it does go down the sides of the bed to cover what's underneath. If it doesn't work I won't put another border on it.

    

Decisions, decisions!

Borders YAWN

I was supposed to be flying to sunny Cairns for a couple of nights today but life decided that after the flu that knocked me down I needed a cold.  "Oh it's just a cold!" they say.  JUST a cold?!! I feel like I've been run over by a bus, picked back up and run over again just for good measure.  Still, the good thing about colds is that they only last a few days and that means I should be fighting fit for my retreat this weekend.

So my husband has gone to Cairns alone and I'm at home trying to keep myself busy.  I stitched my quilt into 9 large blocks...

Then sewed blocks together to make three large strips...

Ta da!  All sewn together.  Oh except for the boringders!

Sewing long strips of fabric together bores me silly so I'm not a fan of doing borders.  I don't mind so much if it's just one border but the idiot that designed this quilt wanted three borders.  That's 12 loooooong booooring strips of fabric.  Arghhh!  Whoever she is she needs a stern talking to!  Oh wait...I remember the designer now.  Whatever was I thinking?!

It actually made sense at the time because I wanted the pink/red to feature more in the quilt but still, 12 strips of fabric!!!

I pinned the first border the opposite way to how I normally do it with the thinner border strip underneath the larger fabric.  I would usually put the thinner strip on top as it's easier to then keep the two edges flush.

With the thinner strip on the bottom I could see where the seams intersected so I had a guide to keep my points pointy.

And it worked!  Nice pointy points.  In fact, I was pretty happy with all of the points in this quilt.

I've sewn half of the borders and two more strips are ready waiting for me to find some enthusiasm and sew them on.  I did cut wider strips out of the dark green for the final border but I'm not sure about it now.  I'll finish the pink/red and then put it back on my design wall and audition the fabric.  I hope to finish the top before I go to retreat and then I won't have to think about it while I'm away.

It's coming along

 I  fixed all of the green and cream HSTs so that the pattern on the fabric was facing in the same direction as the rest of the quilt.  I put them up on my design wall and noticed that I'd also sewn the green and pink HSTs incorrectly!  Arghhh! Two out of the eight were correct!  I hadn't cut any of these so they were easily unpicked and resewn. The good news was that I found the missing lighter green HSTs underneath my mess so at least they didn't need to be redone.

It still looks a mess!

All of my blocks are correct.  I've sewn a lot of them into pairs and they just need to be sewn together to make bigger chunks to match the corner chunks.  In order to get my points nice and neat I stitched the middle part in pairs going across instead of down like in the corners which has caused a pressing issue.  I think I'll get away with it if I press these seams open.  We shall see...

There's still a lot of sewing to do but it looks like it's coming together nicely now.

In a pickle

I've been putting off making my bedroom quilt with the big star for ages because I wasn't happy with how I made the HSTs.  You'd have to click on the pictures to open them up and enlarge to really see what I was talking about but I didn't pay enough attention to the direction of the printed pattern when I stitched my HSTs.  Basically I stitched all of my HSTs so the diagonal line was going in the same direction which I thought was perfect.  But once you spin the HSTs around in different directions the pattern in the fabric faces all kinds of directions I don't want it to go!  

In this picture you can (just about!) see that in all the blocks the pattern faces a completely different direction.  Because the pattern is so small I ummed and ahhed about it for ages wondering if I would really notice once the quilt is finished and on my bed but in the end I was fairly certain I'd notice so I have to fix some of those blocks. 

So my next issue was that whilst trying to work out what blocks were correct as I put them up on my design wall I was just getting all confused.  I was turning blocks this way and that and some were falling off the wall which was not helpful! In the end I decided to start sewing the top in chunks.  This way I'd have some parts finished and I'd have a better idea of where I was missing parts.

Here's my first chunk before sewing together.  The pattern in all blocks is facing the correct way.

Here it is sewn up.  Having larger blocks to move around the design wall makes life a lot easier too.

I sewed as much as I could and then checked to see what HST blocks were missing.  I've ended up with six going the wrong way so I'll be unpicking those and restitching the green triangles onto new squares so I get the patterns correct.

It was at this point I realised I'd only sewn half of the lighter green HSTs that are along the edges of the quilt so I have more to do to fix that error.

It doesn't look like much right now does it?  Hopefully it'll get better!

Sick and tired

Of being sick and tired!  Although I've started to get bored now so hopefully that means I'm on the mend!

I've done a little bit of the cross stitch Santa I've been working on for ages.  It might even be finished for this Christmas!

Although now that I'm looking at all that empty space on the back of the cross stitch perhaps I shouldn't be so hopeful of it being completed by Christmas!

I've been quilting.  Just one quilt for a friend.  The ones I made at my living room retreat have been shoved into a cupboard!

This poor quilt top has been sitting on my frame for almost 3 weeks because I've had a disaster after disaster with the tablets and programs I use to run the machine.  It's all sorted now, fingers crossed, and I've managed to finish the quilting.

I used a free pattern from Urban Elementz called Pansies which are nice and simple and I thought went well with the style of this quilt.  It's a sampler made up of a mixture of pieced blocks, appliqués and embroideries.  Peta will now be adding some details which had to be put on after the quilting was completed.

Here's the quilting design on the back.  I asked my husband to take the picture as I was holding it up so I wouldn't get dog hair all over it and the photo isn't the best.

        

I'm going to retreat in Ballarat in a couple of weeks time and I'm wondering what to take with me. I have so many projects to choose from!

All packed up

But not put away.  I came down with some kind of flu and I don't have the energy to put it all away.  The sewing machine was headed to my bedroom to encourage me to hem the curtains at last.  So I'm not sure if this flu has done me a favour haha!

In the last post I had some strips leftover that I wasn't sure what to do with.  I tried out a couple of options.  This one where I rotated each alternate block was what I had in my head to do but it just looked too messy.

So I tried just stacking the blocks and liked it.

Ta da!

I used up all the purple strips to make a baby quilt the same way as the pinks I'd previously made.

After all of that sewing I STILL had a pile of scraps!  There were a lot of pinks so I removed most of those.

And made this quilt which is bigger than the usual stillborn baby size but I figured there would be babies that need it anyway.

I did consider putting all the pinks into one quilt but they just didn't seem to match.

So I added white fabric and made five stillborn baby quilts.

It was a very productive living room retreat.  I made 10 quilt tops of different sizes, 11 stillborn baby quilt tops and two cushion panels.  Now I need to quilt it all but would you believe it?  My tablet that runs the quilting machine has died and I'm continually playing catch up with the US company because of the time zones between us which is very frustrating!

5 days left at living room retreat

 My furry four legged grandchildren left today.  It's going to be quieter, cleaner, more relaxing lonely without them.  But I got my design floor back!

I'm not sure what Debbie was going to do with these cats and they didn't come with any additional fabric which would have helped me think of a design.  In the end I kept it fairly simple and raided my stash for plain homespun.

I needed to make circles and this bowl was the perfect size.  The trouble with it is that I couldn't see through the bowl so I marked the quarters with masking tape.

Then when I put it on the fabric I wanted to mark the lines on the masking tape matched up with the quarter marked creases on my block and I managed to centre the circle perfectly.

I cut a hole 1/4 inch smaller than the marked circle and made small slits all around it before pressing on the marked circle line.  Ta da!  A perfect hole in the fabric.

I laid it out to check out the arrangement and then stitched the holes to the cat circles just along the very edge of the hole.  That sounds more confusing to read than it was to do.

I stitched it together and made binding.

I then used up all the pink rectangles from Debbie's box of rectangles to make this little pink and white quilt top.  I have some purple strips I might use to do the same design.

 

I sewed most of the rest of the strips into pairs.

      

The box is almost empty!  There's the purple strips I was just talking about, some strips not quite the right size and some batiks.  I'm not sure what to do with the batiks.  They might end up in my stash.  I haven't decided what to do with the paired strips yet but I don't really want to make another staggered brick quilt so watch this space!