My niece, Alice, in the UK is expecting a baby in August and as my husband is planning a trip back there in May I have to get a move on to get a quilt made for her so that he can deliver it. I found lots of lovely quilts on The Red Boot Quilt Co website and asked my husband which one he liked best. Jim chose the Counting Sheep one because it reminded him of when Alice was young and they enjoyed Shaun the Sheep together. I purchased the pattern and realised it's a large quilt so my options were to make the blocks smaller or just make fewer blocks. I'm not completely daft so I went with the fewer blocks option.
Then I used Word to plan my new smaller quilt. It was at this point I wondered why I'd paid for a pattern ;-)
I bought my fabrics when Judy and I went on retreat. I decided to make my sheep using wool felt. Once I'd bought the felt I then matched the fabrics and luckily Spotlight were doing a deal on fat quatres woo!
Here are my fabrics. This is the exciting part when nothing has gone wrong. Yet.
I bought all the wool felt in those colours that the shop had in stock so I thought I'd just make sheep until it ran out. I actually had enough felt to make the amount in my Word plan but I realised there would be 13 sheep and that's no good! So I made 12. I decided not to add the stars.
After working out how many I had of what I coloured in my plan.
I tried to stick to my plan after that beautiful colouring in job but I did have to change some. I was getting very confused so I had to lay the bodies out onto the background squares so that I could see what was what. It didn't help that it took me a while to remember that all the sheep facing one way (A) were now (B) after I'd traced them onto appliqué paper, stuck them onto the felt then cut them out.
I got as far as this and gave up. When is May?
I did have a little giggle to myself when I was prepping these wool felt shapes remembering another quilt I made with wool felt. I made a Hat Creek Quilts quilt and the designer, Dierdre Bond-Abel, had instructions for carefully cutting out the felt and lovingly hand stitching it to the background. Yeah, not going to happen. So I used appliqué paper and steam ironed the living daylights out of that felt before machine stitching it onto my background. I later ran into Dierdre at a quilt show and she winced when I described the machine stitching part of my (her?) quilt so the naughty part of me then went into great detail about the ironing just to see if she'd faint. She didn't but it was close I think!
I think once I have the shapes stuck onto the fabrics I'll be able to move more quickly. And there's nothing quite like a deadline to get you moving!
I've been attempting to do some exercise recently and bought myself a yoga mat. I unrolled it, got my exercise book ready and when I turned around this is what I found. So a quick shout out to all you Yoga experts out there...THIS is the downward dog position. You've been doing it wrong your whole lives! And no, I didn't have the heart to disturb her so I did my exercise right beside her on the floor. I bet you thought I was going to say I gave the exercise a miss! I was tempted...
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