Something pleasant to come back to....

When I arrived home from camp I had a lovely parcel from Heather Bailey's shop waiting for me which softened the prospect of the 3 loads of washing that was also awaiting my attention not to mention that the housework fairy hadn't been around while I was away. 

Anyway a week or so beforehand I had ordered some laminated cotton to make a new swim bag for Catilin to take to school. I let her choose the fabric design and then thought I should make the most of the postage cost and order some more Nicey Jane prints to add to my collection that will be put to good use in my Farmers Wife sampler quilt.

So earlier this week I whipped up Caitlin's new swim bag fairly quickly except I got stuck a little with the buttonholes for the drawstring to go through. I've done heaps of buttonholes before of course but not since I've had my new machine. I read and re-read the instructions and was still stumped until I finally figured out the 'buttonhole lever' that they were referring to was on the machine not the buttonhole foot! Duh!

 I lined the bag with some pale blue toweling that I had leftover from a previous project, to soak up the moisture from a wet towel and swimsuit and to make it a bit more sturdier. The recipient is pleased with it but I don't think she will get much more use out of it until next summer as it certainly feels like autumn has arrived this week.

And I have also finally gotten around to printing out some templates for the first 10 blocks of the Farmers wife sampler quilt. I am feeling quite eager to start this quilt and use some of those pretty Nicey Jane fabrics. This Saturday promises to be wet, windy and wild so the perfect day for hunkering down in my Sewing Attic and working on these blocks. I love a good storm, don't you? :-)

For my inspiration mosaic this week I've put together a few of my favorite FWS blocks from the flickr group here.

1. Farmer's Wife , 2. 02.26.12 135, 3. Farmer's Wife Quilt, 4. Farmer's Puzzle, 5. Farmer's Wife Quilt - finished, 6. Farmer's wife quilt sampler, 7. so far, 8. blocks, 9. Weekend blocks (33), 10. Farmers Wife Quilt-a-long, 11. Farmer's Wife Quilt Top Complete, 12. Corn and Beans

Wishing you all a lovely weekend!

Keeping it real here....

A quick progress shot of my machine quilting. I haven't done a lot of free-motion quilting so I still feel as if I have 'learners plates' on my sewing machine this week. I decided on a squiggly lines diagonally across the actual coloured string blocks. I'm using coordinating machine embroidery threads some are just one colour and some are variegated. With all this practice I can actually see some progress and when my lines are nice and straight and my stitches are a more even size my confidence grows. It's hard work though man handling a large-ish quilt while trying to keep my lines straight and my curves nice and smooth. Free-motion quilting is definitely much easier on little pieces like cushion covers but I'm getting there :-)

And this pretty stack of Nicey Jane fabrics is keeping me motivated to finish quilting my string quilt sooner rather than later. I've had these fabrics quite a while now just waiting for that perfect project but when I bought a copy of  " The Farmers Wife" last September I decided they would be perfect for this quilt along. This is going to be one of my long term projects this year and I think it will be nice to have something that I can work on at my leisure with no deadlines.

New additions...

Every year my Mum and I have a girls day out at the Hamilton Quilt and Craft fair. It's a great day out looking and talking about things we both like, inspired by new products, seeing fabrics in person rather than online, and gazing at the beautiful featured craft displays. This years display from  'Creative fibres New Zealand ' really wowed us and left us in awe wondering how they create their hand woven and felted garments and art pieces. The quilt exhibitions also included some stunning work and again we were impressed with the details on the quilts and the beautiful machine quilting. Unfortunately I did not remember to take my camera with me so can share no photos with you. The only disappointment for me was that I only saw one quilt that included some hand quilting on it. I certainly know it is not a dying skill because I see many hand quilted quilts online but very rarely do I see them in local exhibitions.

While my budget didn't extend to buying yet more fabric I did add to my button and ribbon collection. And yes hidden under the buttons and ribbon is a copy of "The Farmers wife Sampler Quilt". I have been admiring the blocks being made in this Quilt along for a while now like Camille's here,  Kristyne's here and Jodi's here, but was on the fence about joining in since I hadn't seen the actual book. This particular copy was reduced from $45 down to $30 due to very minor dog-eared corners so how could I not resist :-). Now I just need to find some suitably pretty fabrics!

Starting new projects!

With my crochet blanket coming to an end I've been itching to pull out some fabrics for a new project or 2. Firstly I've decided to join the Amy Butler sew along over on Sara's blog Sew Sweetness. I love both Amy Butler's fabric designs and patterns so this was an easy decision for me to make and of course there's the added incentive of some prizes involved :) I've already have 2 Amy Butler bags but they are both in blues so I think I need a pink one for this coming spring/summer season. The pattern I've decided on is the Blossom bag which is a free pattern that can be found here. 

I'm also looking forward to finally starting on my yo-yo project for Penny's sew along that I signed up for a while back. I'm not sure how big I'm going to make this quilt yet but I have decided to use the above collection of fabrics because they are mostly small scale prints which I think would be nice made up in yo-yo's. I've had a lot of these fabrics for absolutely way too long just waiting for the perfect project. Some are vintage given to me from an Auntie, some were brought by my husband on a business trip to Portugal and some are Liberty prints and of course some I just bought on whim as you do when you like fabric :)

So looking forward to starting both these projects!

Yoyo-ing along......

Source: decoreblablabla.blogspot.com via Catherine on Pinterest

Inspired by this beautiful wall hanging found on Pinterest last week I signed up to join Penny's yoyo quilt along. Penny has assured us that this will be a long slow quilt-along finishing in Octoberish which is the perfect time frame for me at the moment since I have lots of projects I want to complete over the next few months. Penny will be making a single sized coverlet but I'm not sure whether I can commit to 1008 yoyo's so I'm thinking  something like the above wall hanging might be more achievable :) 

The quilt along is due to start this week so if your keen to yo-yo along with us go check out the details here I think this would be a great way to use up those fabric scraps that get accumulated from previous quilt projects.
Edited to add: Part one is up on Penny's blog now.

A finish!!

As you can see it has the royal seal of approval! Finished it yesterday but we had heavy rain all day so was unable to take a decent photo. Today was fine and sunny so I have some lovely shots taken outside in my garden. I think her highness likes this quilt as she followed me around trying her best to get in each shot. She won in the end! Perhaps she just wanted to feature on my blog!

Here it is in all its technicolour beauty! I used most of the leftover strips from my string quilt but still have a few left for another quilt that I've designed myself this time.

I machine quilted along each seam line and tied the centre of each block with matching embroidery floss using 3 shades of the block colour and also tied where corners intersect.

And this is the back. I know, quite dull after the front but hey its made up of old fabrics from my stash that needed to be used up to make way for some fresh modern ones!  The green check binding was leftover from a previous quilt although I had to make more for this quilt. For now this quilt is going to hang out in our lounge to snuggle under on cold winter evenings. If you want to make a  'quilt as you go quilt' you can find the instructions over on Penny's blog. Thanks Penny for great instructions and hosting this quilt along.

Nearly there....

This is the backing side of my 'quilt-as-you-go' quilt all pinned and ready to quilt in the ditch of the seams but can you see my mistake? So... um.... yeah those pins should be on the right side of the quilt shouldn't they. Great! I thought I was being clever by laying down the backing first so I could make sure it was nice and flat then the quilted quilt top on top. Not a major mistake but before I started quilting I had to take out the pins and put them on the right side.

The actual quilting didn't take too long as it was just long straight rows down all the seams. I have the binding all ready to go so hope to have nice show and tell tomorrow.

Working on the quilt backing....

Have finished my quilt as you go blocks and manged to get them all sewn together on Sunday. I knew I wouldn't have enough of one fabric or even two to make a quilt back so I chose about a dozen fabrics from my stash that all go together but I no longer like and needed to use them up. I was going to go for horizontal stripes but that was going to end up too 'random' looking ( to use my daughters current favourite phrase), so I cut up 14 1/2 " squares from the larger pieces to match up with the 14 1/2 " blocks on the quilt top. Then I cut smaller squares from the smaller fabric pieces that when pieced together 4x4 make up a 14 1/2 square as in the photo below. When I first cut these smaller squares I made a wee calculation error and made them too big which I guess is better than too small, so had to trim them all (128) to the correct size. I tried to get Amelia on to it yesterday but she found it all a little boring.

I know these fabrics aren't very inspiring but the colours go together nicely and it has made a nice dent in my fabric stash which I can now fill with prettier more modern looking fabrics.

8 down 12 to go...

Nearly halfway there with my 'quilt as you go' blocks. I need to do 2 more like these ones with the pale centres then the other 10 blocks will be opposite with dark centres. I'm really liking these blocks now that I have made a few more. They do take a bit longer, actually quite a bit longer than a normal block but I won't have a huge quilt to quilt at the end. I'm just hoping I have enough scraps left to complete it otherwise I will just have to cut into fabrics in my stash which is probably a good thing because then I'll have room for some 'new' fabrics. You can check out all the other 'quilt as you go quilts' over here.

Today's craft activity....

Book marked this site a while back thinking that we  might try some the cool activities on it some day. All the activities are free to download and are fairly quick and simple. Quite a few of the activities would be suitable for younger children too.Today we made 'spinners' which are made of paper with a different part of a picture on each side with string in the middle. Hard to explain but when you spin the string the two bits of pictures mix together to make one cool picture.  Hopefully my photos will demonstrate better than I can explain.

When you spin this one you get the face on the cat.

Here are the 6 spinners we made and ...

....the other 'half' of the pictures.

I have managed to get a little sewing done today. These blocks are for Penny's "Quilt as you go quilt-along". I started off with the random placed coloured one on the right but really wasn't liking it so decided to go with the one colour per block which works better for me.

Still more scraps...

So after finishing my string quilt top I didn't expect to still have so many fabrics strips leftover but I have enough to make at least one more largish quilt. I was wondering what pattern to go for when Penny at Sewtakeahike decided to lead a quilt along for her current project which is using a "quilt-as-you-go method" I have always wanted to have a go at this method and as I have the strips all ready to sew, this was really a no brainer. There is a flickr group to show everyone's progress and if your keen to join along too check out Penny's post on it here.