A bit of this and a bit of that

I sewed all of Gail's quilt together and it was still difficult to trim so I stuck it up onto my design wall and used masking tape to mark where I thought the quilt should be trimmed.  I then stay stitched around the markings and cut off 1/8 of an inch past that stitching.

It's as straight as even as I can get it.  I think once it's quilted you won't notice the wobbly edges.

I go to a social crochet class once a fortnight and one of the ladies made this summer poncho in red.  It's a free pattern on the Bendigo woollen mills website. I needed a new project to take along to the classes and I stupidly thought it would be quick because of how holey it is.  

It is not quick!  It would be far quicker if I stopped making so many mistakes!  I'm over making it already and I've only done about 3/4 of the front.  The soul destroying this is that I have to make it all over again for the back!  I did laugh when I was highlighting my size on the pattern because I noticed that the hole for your head changed depending on how big you are.  Because we all know that people living in larger packaging have huuuggge heads!

I'm also busy getting my bedroom ready to be decorated.  I still haven't finished my curtains but that's a minor detail ha ha!  I bought new to me bedside cabinets from Facebook marketplace and they are the inspiration for my new room.  I've decided that the walls will be the same colour as the curtains.  It's pretty dark!  I'm hoping it'll be cosy not depressing.

So I needed fabrics to make new quilts to match my room!  I had some vouchers so I bought these fabrics.

And these!  I have absolutely no idea what I'm going to do with them yet!

You may remember this sheep quilt I made for my niece's baby.  Well, it's time to make another!  I need ideas for a second quilt.  Do I do a sheep theme?  Do a similar quilt with a different animal?  Go in a different direction altogether?  I think I'll be sewing it when I go to retreat in March so I have a bit of time to think about it.

 

I haven't touched my Christmas quilt unless you count shifting it off the cutting table.  My studio is so messy I don't want to even go in there, let alone sew.  Perhaps my next task should be to sort that out?  But that's no fun!

Progress and regress

I've made quite a few half square triangles now.

There's lots of mess!  My mother in law will be pleased to see I didn't just swipe these trimmings onto the floor!

Gail asked me to trim and then quilt her Kaffe diamond quilt top.  For some reason my camera doesn't take a great picture of it because the design is fabulous!

I struggled to work out where to trim the edges and when I looked closely I discovered the culprit.  It's quite difficult matching points in seams when you're sewing diamonds and Gail's points are not working which is probably the reason why the edges aren't in line for me to trim correctly.

I spoke to Gail and she gave me permission to fix the quilt.  I could quilt it and trim it as is but it would be hard work for me and the result wouldn't be great which would be a terrible shame.  So I unpicked the rows!

Wellington rather likes the quilt like this.  Ssh! Don't tell Gail!

I've pressed all the rows with some iron aid so they're all nice and flat and ready to sew back together.  I did notice that a few of the end blocks need to be unpicked and repositioned but I'll do those as I start sewing it all together.  Hopefully it'll be a quick fix and the top will be up on the frame in no time.