Our granddaughter stayed overnight with us last night and was very excited to open the first window in her Advent Calendar after breakfast this morning. She also enjoyed eating the chocolate she found behind the window. I was pleased to find a traditional calendar which tells the Nativity Story day by day as the windows are opened. We are lucky to have a shop/café in town which is run by the churches in the town. It sells Fair Trade gifts and greetings cards and at this time of year Christmas cards, calendars and Advent Calendars.
We had a very Christmassy start to the day, opening the curtains to a light dusting of snow, a little like icing sugar on top of mince tarts. After I had done the school run when the temperature was 1C
I decided I wasn't up for housework so did some sewing instead. Ages ago I re-found a very old UFO, so old I cannot remember how many years ago it was begun. This was obviously the second time it had been found because I had pinned a couple of notes to it saying it needed 3 more blocks and it helpfully had a sticky label telling me the name of the quilt-to-be was Square Dance. There were also 2" x 9.5" strips which I needed to make the extra blocks. Then I laid them out in a 4 x 5 arrangement, finding four blocks were "the wrong way round". The block is made from putting 2 strip blocks (one from lighter fabrics, the other from darker) RST, sewing like an HST to form 2 blocks like these:
These are the blocks I rejected because all the others have the light and dark the other way about. So I will turn these into 12.5" QAYG blocks for Alison's Soy Amardo Project. They only need a colourful border to make them large enough as these blocks finish at 9".
When I found the UFO for the second time I had obviously miscounted the blocks as there were 24 and I only needed 20 for this arrangement.
I am partway through sewing the pieces together but needed a break so I thought I could write a blogpost to show my progress so far:
It's getting dark now, so this photo was taken in the electric light and the colours look washed out.
I'll try to take a better picture in daylight tomorrow.
Back to the sewing machine for another hour's sewing before I prepare our evening meal.
Cute title, square dancing with a UFO. They are very pretty for their age so you must have had good color sense way back then and built on it. I had the same finding last year of the same type of block, got them sewn together but hung up on large angle corner borders. It's on my written list, though. Good work, hope yours gets finished.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you will be spurred on to finish another scrap quilt. I'd love to see a little white Xmas just once... Enjoy your sewing.
ReplyDeleteSo I'm not the only one that finds old things? Nice idea for strings. I'm always looking for new and fun ideas for strings. These blocks might even be fun as pinwheels. They look pretty versatile.
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