Eight-point snowflake

I have a lot of catching up to do, starting with a Ringo Pie block for Anna.  She wanted snowflake blocks with linen background and lots of white.  I used Eight Point Snowflake from 163 Patterns, I also found a free pattern here  which is constructed in the same way.

 The centre star is pieced first and then the border pieces are added with Y seams.  It is a precision piecing exercise.

 I had another block due for a friend and I fancied seeing the same block in other colours and this is what I came up with.

 More of a Spring snowflake and as we have been forecast chilly weather here until the end of April it feels most apt!

Christmas- not yet

Just finished, ready for Christmas in Hawaii, my Christmas Ringo Pie bee block-an advent tree for Amber.  I found this wooden tree on Flickr and that was my starting point.

The bordered squares are 1.5 inches.  I stamped the words- a line from White Christmas using Versacraft ink as it sets permanently onto the fabric.

The background fabric and stamped squares are Kona Snow.  I have very little Christmas fabric so I dived into the red and green in my vintage and new fabrics so it is an eclectic mix.

You can see the other Christmas blocks which have rolled in so far here as well as the first blocks from Amy's camera theme too here and here.

It might be a while till Christmas but it is the start of stitching time- I am hoping to get some paper pieced patterns ready for sale in the next 2 weeks with Christmas designs ready for stockings, cushions etc.  Keeps me busy x  

September

Thankyou for the birthday wishes!  Giveaway is here and I am finding the comments incredibly helpful.  

September makes...

1. Courthouse Steps Pillow/cushion- started, 2. Cracker Scraps Block for Angela, 3. Mug Rug- how to paper piece tutorial, 4. Girl Bonjour block, 5. Back to school, 6. B for Bonjour!, 7. Quilts on a line for Corey, 8. Sewing Machine Block for Amisha, 9. Ringo Pie preview for Amber

Not so much this month, back to work, Lula starting high school and all the support that entails, a bit of a sore arms flare up situation- better now, it has been a month of blocks and it finished with me working on Amber's Christmas block for Ringo Pie so a little preview for her at the bottom of the mosaic.  There are a couple of Kumiko Fujita blocks from a Japanese magazine  that I hadn't got round to posting about, part of a mystery quilt-a-long in the magazine Patchwork Tsushin.  There is a wonderful piecing video showing Kumiko at work.

Check out the lovely makes of the others taking part at Lynne's Fresh Sewing first of the month meetup.  The weather is beautiful Autumn sun and temperatures that we should have had in August, and I am thinking Christmas sewing whilst wearing a summer voile tunic...

Catch Ups and Shout Outs

 A bit of blog house keeping.  I have been meaning to mention this UK website- a great idea for selling fabric small scale- a little destash perhaps, and bigger scale if you have lots to sell!  The brain child of Emma Thomsen from Its All About the Fabric a great blog full of handy links.  The Fabric Market Place works a bit like Etsy, you register to buy and you can use the same details to register as a seller too if you have sewing related goodies to sell.  It is a great idea, I love Etsy but there is so much on it that you can drown in the results when you are buying or selling, this is so specific, I hope it catches on,  I have put a few bits on to see how it goes.  

I've just had a quick look at the categories- sewing machines, handmade makes, vintage- it just needs a few more people to go over and visit and add it to their bookmarks!  Emma is really helpful with any lisiting queries so if you want to dip your toe in the online selling or buying water, give her a try.  Her email is on her blog.

I have done a couple of Farmer's Wife blocks.  I tend to do these inbetween other projects as a bit of sewing rest and recuperation.  I am still quite new to traditional blocks so I am interested to see how more experienced sewing hands approach these.  Ayumi told me about Lori's blog- Bee in My Bonnet, what a great place to visit and Lori has some great tutorials for some of the Farmer's wife blocks.

80 Single Wedding Star

54 Kitchen Toolbox

couldn't resist the woodgrain (Joel Dewberry)  fabric here!

GO Gadget go!

I have been playing with the Accuquilt Baby Go!   for a week now so I thought it was time to share my findings and my makings.  It has been surprising.  This is an expensive piece of kit, especially in the UK- we don't get the offers the USA customers get- so it really needs to justify itself in my eyes.   I have read a zillion blogger reviews so I knew there were several things I wanted to look out for- cutting and grain, wastage, quality of cutting, and the type of fabrics that can be cut.  

The machine itself is nicely dinky and heavy enough to make it reassuringly stable on a flat surface.  It reminded me of a printing press with its rollers and handle.   As others have said, handle turning is fun, I got Damian and Lula to have a turn too.  I used some less precious fabrics to test out my first die, Drunkard's Path just to get a feel for how the Go! and the die worked.  You do really need to push the sandwich of die/fabric/cutting mat quite hard to engage with the rollers but little effort is needed for the handle turning.   I chose Drunkards Path as this was a pattern I could never attempt without the Go!  My hands are just not up to a lot of scissor work, they hurt way too much after lots of scissor use, plus I can never cut  consistently or accurately enough on a shape like this.  If you want to try this for yourself there are free templates here.   I am making a mini sofa throw to cover the seating area of my couch.   However with any project, I start with a fabric pull!    

I am going for a scrappy but co-ordinated mix and an easy way to do this is to use some fabrics from a patterns.  I then look for other prints in my stash in similar colours- a bit of vintage, a bit of modern, it is the colours that count, to create a scrappy more relaxed mix of fabrics.  The colours are for the circles and the neutrals are for the outer shapes.  I also wanted a mix of neutrals, some patterned, some cream, some linen- you get the idea.   I haven't seen many scrappy accuquilt projects so I thought this would be a good test.  With this die, I needed to do some planning.   I couldn't cut the background shapes and the circle shapes at the same time using this mix of colours, so I used a template of each shape, you can see it below in green flowery fabric, but you could also run a piece of paper through to make a template.  I used the templates to roughly cut fabrics for the circles ready to cut.

As long as the fabric covered the die, I got great results even when it was only covering by 1/8 inch.  I lined up the grain of the fabric with the straight edge of the die and my results were perfect.  When you stack a pile of scraps you need to check they fully cover the die and by gently  pressing the fabric I found you could feel the ridges of the edges of the die- you need a few layers of fabric for this and I must stress to press gently as the dies are super sharp!  I did 6 layers of quilting cotton weight with no problems.  When I used a linen mix I reduced that to 5 layers.

So with a little prep and rough cutting I got 10-12 inner circle pieces at a time with tiny amounts of wastage, less than if I had cut with scissors.  The accuracy is what really impressed me and the notches- I could never have cut those and they are incredibly helpful when joining the pieces!

For the L shapes I found I either had to rough cut scraps into L shapes- using the green templates again- and cut 6 shapes at a time...

Or I doubled up and cut rough cut a T shape.  A 10" layer cake square was good for this- I got 2 folded T pieces and 2 L pieces from one 10" square.   This is a pile of 6 layers of Kona cotton waiting to be cut,

and this is 100% lightweight linen stacked up to be rollered through.  This fabric is a nightmare to cut with scissors or a rotary cutter.  It slips and slides under grippy rulers and is generally badly behaved so has been neglected for the last year.  I really was amazed to see how the Go!  cut this...

these shapes remind me of knickers- rather plain, spartan linen pants!

They are so accurate! I also found with cotton or linen fabrics that I only ever had 1 in 6 of the cuts with a little uncut thread of the fabric to snip.  I was so happy to finally use this linen and to see it cut so neatly.

In an ideal world all my projects would be planned neatly and arranged like this! 

The plan is to make a quilt 3 blocks by 7- each block is 7 inches finished. Twenty one blocks in all and I am just over half way.  It will be a quilt runner for my sofa to lie over the seating bit for cats, dog and 3 people to sit on and be easily slung in the wash.

My adventures will continue as I work my way through the dies- I have the strip cutter and the value die so there is a lot to play with.  I'll report back as I go along.  I am doing a lot of house sewing at the moment, pillows/cushions, throws, curtains etc so I'll see what projects I come up with.  It is a costly item but it does yield amazing results and it really saves on the arm strain.  It would be a great buy for a group of sewers to share- I know guilds are not so prevalent in the UK but sewing groups and  meetings are growing at the moment and with a few people chipping in you could then get a great variety of dies too.   In the meantime, 22 patterns are completely free and can easily be adapted to other cutting methods.  I had a good look through and found a lot of block ideas in there as well as quilt projects. Click here or on the pic below to sign up for free pattern downloads.

One lucky person will get to win a Baby GO! soon plus 3 dies- I will post more but you know a Go!  giveaway is a-coming...

Farmers Dozen (less one)

Twelve blocks finished, not quite the full Farmer's dozen- the numbers kept changing as I counted my completed pile. The nice thing about this type of quilt-a-long is I can do them when I please so I had a little flurry after a gap.  For the moment, I have abandoned templates and I have just been looking at the blocks and working out the size by eye.  I am lucky, my eyes like this kind of thing and quickly chop things up into squares and rectangles.

Box-Lakehouse Drygoods seed catalogue, Cosmo graph paper, Chloe's Closet check and Suzuko Koseki daisies and red polkas.

When I say do it by eye, I look at the blocks and if I can work out how many squares the block is based on, I can then work out the size of the pieces.  In Snowball- this is a 9 patch block so each square is 2 1/2

 inches before sewing.  For half square triangles, these need to be bigger- I cut 2 7/8 inches squares and then cut them diagonally for the triangles.

Snowball- Alexander Henry Farmdale turquoise, Michael Miller big red polkas, Windham's American vintage close together red polkas and vintage mid spaced polkas!

Half square triangles are easy to cut if you do the maths- or math depending on you where you are in the world. Add 7/8 inch to the finished size of the hst block- the square the two triangles make.  These are 2 inches finished so 2 7/8" to cut out.  

Windows Suzuko Koseki brown doodles, Michael Miller Dick and Jane Sentence structure, Sevenberry yellow floral- if you find this anywhere everyone wants it, me included.

For Postage stamps, the cutting was easy!  I am proud of getting my little squares to behave and line up- I sewed these in rows of 3, blocks of 9 and then put the 4 quarters together.  Seams are nestled-they are pressed in alternate directions for each row- for optimum fit.

Postage Stamps- Lakehouse Drygoods seed catalogue, Suzuko Koseki Red recipe print, Kona school bus, Kona aqua

And a blurry group shot so far- forgot to put the postage stamp one out for this but a shot like this helps to show me which colours are missing and what I need to include more/less of.

Next I am starting on a dress before summer disappears.  Dress making is always a bit of a risk- I can do the sewing bit ( with the exception of zips which will always make me squirm at least a little) but there is often a reality gap between what I like the look of and what actually suits me.  I love the drape and fall of the sort of dresses you find in Japanese pattern books but I tend to look drowned in things like that and possibly like I am in maternity wear, not the best look.  I am having a go at the Lisette Portfolio dress, hmm, I'll show you as I go along- I am prepared for it to look good on the hanger and not on me.  It'll be a learning experience.  Baby Go! is on its way too, or so I have been told...

June is Marit's month in Ringo Pie and her theme was 'In the Summertime.'  The bar was raised high at the beginning when Corey posted a super cool traditional electric fan block and it continued from there so it has been a challenging month to come up with something.  Ayumi sent me this  You Tube clip of Kumiko Fujita and it starts off with her stunning Subway quilt and that is where my idea started.

What I like most about summer is the light.  Living in the south west of the UK is good for light , we get a generous amount of sun, and mid summer has such long days.  I can't take lots of heat and my skin is pale and burns easily so I am not a sun worshipper but I love being out in the shade or sewing into the evening with the late orange glow coming through.

This block is quite straight forward, I sketched it out on graph paper first to get the shape and the strip widths.   The cutting that took the longest time in the whole process.  The back is an interesting view with the light streaming through.  I used to make tiffany style glass light catchers and it reminds me of those.

Mid week, hold on in for weekend x

(comments are closed for this post due to spam attack!)

Farmer's twosome

As there are 111 blocks in the Farmer's Wife Quilt-a-long I am not sure if I can think of a sufficient number of blog post names.  Ho hum, two blocks squeezed into this weeks- I am at a very busy time of year work wise and just about to enter the birthday season in our house- not me but Damian and Lula, plus end of term school stuff and lots of meetings for L starting high school in September. 

Basket Weave 

Broken Dishes

I thought I should post an update on Bob, our eldest cat.  He was diagnosed with diabetes in March and I had some great help and support from blog readers, (especially Kath) when I posted about him then.  Unfortunately the vets were not so good which lead to some very difficult visits, and what I can only describe as incompetence on their part.  We sorted the management of his treatment largely by ourselves with internet research and they just supply the insulin.  He has been much, much better and considering his arthritis he is doing well and is a happy cat again.  He did spend the whole of Thursday being repeatedly sick which is very worrying with diabetes and we had honey at the ready incase of a hypo!  He slept it off on Friday- it was a bug I think,  and he is now back to normal.  

Happy UK summer in the rain! 

The wheels on the bus

I had some funny responses to my last post, tales of you wondering around in public covered in pins and threads.  The sacrifices we make for our art!

The second boy block for Christine in Bee (A little bit) Japanese was to be a vehicle.  She had put lots of primary bright Kona solids into the fabrics and I just added the Charlie Brown and ruler measure scraps.  I used Kumiko Fujitas bus block in 318 Patchwork (sadly out of print but Etsy is worth a try)

I free pieced it so no freezer paper for this one.  I blew up the image on the scanner and measured the width of the different sections and cut and pieced and trimmed.

It took me a little while to work out the wheels and then when I did it was so easy.  See how it works below.  So easy that I got the direction of the lines wrong and forgot to put the blue road on the bottom half of the wheels and had to unpick and redo them twice.

It looks slightly like an ice cream van to me but the yellow is a reminder that it is a school bus.

Now I am off to school, though not in a bus.  Have a good week!

Z is for...

I have been using the double holiday weekends  we've been having in the UK to sew, sew sew.  Sometimes I think I've gone feral.  I am surrounded by scissors, cutters and rulers and the floor, my clothes and all available surfaces are covered in threads.  I eat at irregular times- although I always eat, I never skip a meal and my clothing choice is questionable.  I have been known to nip out to the post office only to find threads and fabric clippings hanging off my backside as I am walking along.  One of the things I have been working on is a couple of Bee blocks for Christine in Bee (A Little Bit) Japanese.  The theme is a transport/star quilt for a little boy called Zac.

This is a cheater star from The Sometimes Crafter, a nice quick way of building a star.  Christine said that she would welcome some Zs so I added an applique road style Z.  

I 'm working on the next block now, a yellow school bus, it is on its way....