A Busy Week / Disappearing 9 Patch Tutorial No. 2

First of all, I must tell you all to try to visit The Hepworth in Wakefield.  Fabulous art, fabulous building, fabulous access to lots of Barbara Hepworth's work.  Hard to believe that it is free - although I'd recommend that if you can afford it you make a donation / buy a book / spend time and money at the café in order to help fund it.  I was blown away by the whole museum, but the Hepworth and Moore galleries in particular.  Visit if you can (and if you are in that area, the Yorkshire Sculpture Park too - lots of lovely art in the fresh air). 

 Now on to the main part of my week - starting a new quilt!

Time for me to try a different disappearing hour glass pattern.

Start with an hour glass block and cut into thirds in each direction.  (once more I started with two 10" squares, sewn right sides together around all four edges, cut on both diagonals, opened out and resewn into the hour glass, which gives me a 12 3/4" block to start from.

 Now rotate the centre block 90 degrees.

 Next turn all four corners by 180 degrees, so that the little triangles are on the outside corners.

 The final stage on the re-arrangement is to turn the middle blocks from each edge 180 degrees, so that the 'arrows' are pointing in to the centre.  This is the only step that is in addition to what you would have done on the previous Disappearing Hour Glass tutorial.

 Now resew your 'nine patch' together, and you will get a block that looks like this, with a counter change star in the middle of it.

I can't show you a full quilt top yet (I've only managed to complete a couple of these blocks this week) but already I'm excited about how it is going to look!

 Other sewing was to make another fabric 'bucket' gift.  I love that they are completely reversible!

A chance to use the tiny Dresden that I made a couple of weeks ago.

 My last sewing was to make a set of postcards - the final set for a swap group that I've been part of for several years, but which is winding up.

This  was a final experiment for me - turning printed paper into 'fabric' and then sewing it.  I did this by applying it to a fine muslin with dilute PVA.  A number of tutorials online then recommend adding another layer of something on top, like coloured tissue paper, again with PVA.  Nice idea, but I wanted to keep the print a little clearer, so I just coloured the fabric paper with Inktense pencils and added machine and hand sewing to complete them.  Something that I'll try again in the future, when I'm less concerned about retaining the printed text, perhaps.

I also managed to make a crochet bowl (no wonder I'm tired, it's been a full on week!).  Using a ball of t-shirt yarn from Tiger for only £3, I was quite pleased with this, although it might have been nice to have bought another ball of yarn and made it a little deeper.  It's roughly 6" across and 1.5" deep.

Off for a nap before enjoying some more half term fun with my lovely family!