Its Been a Busy Week.....

 .....with little time for sewing!

Still, amongst other things, like having a walk around the Chihuly exhibtion at  Kew Gardens (well worth visiting) I did have time to make seven more fabric baskets!  Only six shown here as one was a repeat.....

Not bad!

All in blues, all due to be gifted next week!

Used up lots of scrap batting pieces that I'd joined in readiness.  Gotta love a good fabric basket mountain!

Fun Quilt Finish!

 This quilt really deserves better photos!  it's such a bright cheerful quilt, and that really isn't shown here!

Have you come across the Missouri Star Quilting Co.?  A quilt shop, they have great tutorials and lots of help with plenty of excellent YouTube videos too.  Fabulous!

This is one of their patterns - called Pecking Order, as they talk about the triangles that are made being like beaks.

 It's based on a very simple block - a 5" background square with a 2 1/2" feature fabric square placed over one corner and stitched diagonally before being trimmed (covered corners, I think that the technique is called).  They used five packs of charms, I used one pack of Kaffe Fasset fabric charms and a couple of metres of white-on-white background fabric.

Very easy to sew, and a fun pattern.

 This is what an individual motif looks like.  I love how they are offset through the quilt.  Made up of 12 blocks, they are best laid out as a whole quilt layout so that you are left with easy joining of the squares to do.

 My version (10 blocks by 12 blocks) finished at approx 46" x 55".

Backings were a lot easier when I had some 56" wide fabric!  For this one I added a strip of blue about a third of the way across the giraffe fabric.

Bound with some spotty green fabric.

I'm very happy with how this finished!

Hope that you had a happy and productive Easter break too!

Tiny Quilt Fun.

 A tiny quilt finish this week!

At just 8" square, this makes me smile every time that I see it (which is frequently, as I've hung it just above my PC!).

The blocks were fun to make.  Yes, I've made plenty of mistakes, but they are all my own work, not the fault of the pattern at all!  This is my version of the Sew Tiny Sampler by Kitty Wilkin which was released last month.

The blocks had so much going on in them already that I didn't want to overwhelm them with quilting, so I just echo quilted in the sashing.  It would have been more accurate if my sewing machine light was working (do I need to confess that a call to my sewing machine repair guy managed a down-the-phone-line fix when he asked "Have you tried the light switch on the back of the machine?"......who knew?  I've only had the machine (ahem) about ten years!).

Still, a good fun finish, with plenty of room for self improvement if (when!) I give it another go!

Yet another little quilt!

 The final quilt from this batch of donated fabric - I promise! There were only tiny scraps left which I have passed on to Benta for her projects....

But, I managed to get sufficient 5" squares together to make this 'colour fall' quilt, letting the intensity of the colour build from the white at the top to the more saturated colours at the bottom.

 Bound with more of the lime green spots,
backed with those fun cupcakes.

 I wanted the quilting to reflect the vertical rhythm to the quilt, so I did an up and down 'flame' type pattern.

It made up to approximately 38" square.  Not huge, but enough to keep a baby snuggled in.

Destined for Project Linus or similar.

Thanks Benta for leading the charge on these fun projects that germinated with the block bingo game at Richmond and Kew Quilters!

Another week, another quilt again!

 Another quilt born of the scraps from the charity quilt making evening!  I started putting some of the scrap colours that went together well - a mix of greens, browns and pinks - into blocks.  Then I remembered that I had a panel in the same sort of colours that could be used.

The layout wasn't absolutely ideal, but I was in a make do and mend mood, so I made them fit!

 The backing was a challenge too!  At 48" x 54" it was too wide for a normal width of fabric, but as I didn't have anything in the right sort of colours, I had to put together this backing.  It uses two different types of green fabric and a long narrow remnant of pink.  It was a bit touch and go, but I had just enough to make it work.

 Of course, I hadn't thought about the binding, and I didn't have enough of anything to work properly, so I used another green (which I thought was closer to some of the greens in the central panel than it actually was - oops!).

Still, as a 'make do' quilt with hardly any stash shopping at all, let alone actual shopping, it's turned out well!

Thanks to the generous donations of the RKQ quilters!

Another donation quilt complete.  My 10th quilt finish of the year, along with a set of fabric post cards, a couple of fabric buckets, a skirt and some other odd hemming and repairs along the way.

No wonder that my machine is asking for a service!

Sewing will have to slow down a little whilst it is away for a few days.