Thursday, June 20, 2024
Counting On Santa To Keep Me Cool
Friday, June 14, 2024
A Blue & Yellow Lozenge Flimsy
To be honest, I had a little lunch bag letdown with this one after it was started, which surprised me because the blue accent fabric is beautiful, almost a deep periwinkle; but it was looking pretty drab down in the sewing cave. That lighting wasn't doing it any favours.
After bringing it up into the natural light everything changed. All of the colours just came to life and once it was pressed I was impressed. So happy because I did enjoy making it and there's nothing worse than finishing a flimsy and all you feel is 'meh'.
I hit a bit of a slow patch trying to figure out the sizes for the border pieces. In the end, I just made more full blocks and then trimmed them half the size of the block plus a seam allowance. So much quicker, and it was a much better finish (you can see how the blue one in the upper right is starting to do it's own thing...Trimming was a breeze,and there was much less waste than I had imagined, so that was a bonus.And, I was thrilled to have just enough blue for a narrow border, similar to my inspiration photo. I did lots of calcs before making the first cut because my piece was only about 16" x 39" and I wanted that border to be as wide as possible. It's cut at 2.75" so it will finish off at 2.25", which will be nice. A border will also help corral all of those bias edges. So, with the exception of a 2" strip, that piece is all used up.
Sunday, June 09, 2024
Gingham Zen
Sunday, June 02, 2024
My Latest QFS Quilt
It's based on Pat Sloan's Oh My Charming Stars pattern, with a few modifications. You will recognize it because it seems to be a frequent visitor to my TO DO list, sometimes as a quilt and other times as table runners.
It's such an easy pattern and it always produces a lovely result. And I never seem to tire of making those stars.It also proved to be a great excuse to try out my new Folded Corner Clipper ruler (say that fast three times!). Initially, I wasn't convinced that I had actually needed to buy it, but once I got into it I was very happy that I had.You simply place your large and small blocks right sides together, as usual, line up the block size that you want to cut - in this case 3.5" - and trim the corner; then you sew your seam. Easy, peasy.
And you still end up with a beautiful pile of HST made from the trimmings (sometimes I just eyeball my trimming with scissors so my seam allowances can vary a bit). It makes for very, very little trimming to get them squared up to use in another project.I didn't know what I was going to do for borders so you can see with the top star that I opted not to run my stars into the first border, as suggested in the pattern, though I do like that look.
In the end, my first border became a narrow white and blue stripe and then I finished it off with a large yellow floral. Love that fabric. There are now only a few scraps of it left. The butterscotch check made for a nice backing....M