2022 Round up

 This year has been a rather fragmented one for me: a lot of health issues, a couple of stays in hospital, lots of appointments and the death of my sister so not as much sewing has been done.

I have continued to participate in the monthly RSC project and have added to various block stashes and made quilts from other block stashes I had accumulated. I also made a small wall hanging quilt in the Ukrainian flag colours for a family who came to live with Ukrainian relatives in our town.

I completed 12 quilts this year including 5 which will be donated to the Linus Project and 4 which will be donated to the Maternity Unit at our local hospital.

The Linus Project ones, all around 40” square.

These are the Maternity Unit quilts, all measuring around 24” square.

I am working on a lap sized quilt using most of the RSC Twinkler blocks I had stored away. I’m now hand quilting with Off white Perle threads around the stars in the centre of the blocks. It will be a gift for a young member of the family.

Last year I chose a Word for the Year which was Consider. I found this useful as it did encourage me to consider my answers before I committed myself to a new thing. I realised at the beginning of 2022 that I was starting to run out of steam and tire more quickly so at the beginning of February I thought long and hard about the Visually Impaired Group I had been leading and doing all sorts of jobs for (including treasurer) and decided that I would finish at the end of July when we broke up for the summer holiday. The best decision I made because by the end of June I started all my health problems.

I used my Word Consider in lots of other situations, teaching myself not to immediately say Yes and not to straight away to offer to help with something. In the past I have always done this but now realise that it’s time for me to take on less, not more!

This year the Word I have chosen is Energy. I don’t have much energy these days so it is important that I use it wisely. Also I hope to be able to build up my energy, trying to walk a little and have more energy for meeting up with friends. I am still not allowed to drive so that means they have to visit me or my husband drives me to their houses so more arrangements have to be made ahead of time.

So, I’m hoping for a happier and healthier 2023 and wish everyone a Happy New Year.

Joining up with Angela’s So Scrappy blog and the RSC Project.

RSC 2022 Quilt finish

 I have been making Wonky Star blocks most months for two or three years as part of the RSC project.

I’ve already used some blocks in several quilts  but decided to use a whole lot more to make this Project Linus quilt:

It measures 40” square and uses 36 Wonky Stars. I used a piece of leftover fabric for the border and joined leftover pieces of yellow and cream fabrics for the binding.

A couple of years ago when I needed to replenish my stash of backing fabrics I got 3 metres of this lovely autumn leaf fabric which I love:

A close up of some of the blocks:

My niece and two nephews have started the sad task of getting my sister’s house ready for sale and asked if there was anything I would like to keep. One of the items that I wished to have was a little quilt I made for Pat’s birthday in April 2005. It was designed to hang on her kitchen wall where it’s had pride of place ever since. Pat was a wonderful gardener hence the design I chose had that theme. It was from a book of Australian quilts which I’m sure I still have in my Quilting bookcase. Here it is on the wall of my landing, opposite my Sewing Room so every time I go in and out of there I shall think of my lovely big sister.

Light not the best today, well it’s early December, only 4C out there and dark and dreary.

Linking up with Angela’s So scrappy blog.

The embroidered words say “Planters Patch”.

RSC Flimsy completed

 I saw an idea on Cathy’s Sane Crazy Crumby Quilting blog several years ago, Friendship star blocks which she called Twinklers. I’ve been making them ever since as part of the RSC Challenge and have made 2 quilts from them before, one in 2017 and another in 2021. A week or so ago I decided I would like to make a quilt for Etta,  one of the younger members of our family and hopefully in time for Christmas.

I knew I had a bag of Twinklers so got them out and decided to make 3 more purple blocks. Quick to make from my box of 2.5” squares and a bag of already cut out muslin centre squares and even smaller squares for the star points. I discovered I had 76 blocks and could use 72 of them in an 8  x 9 setting.

I finished sewing the rows together yesterday and now need to make a pieced backing and get it basted.

Lighting is not the best as we have a very grey morning today. 

A little close up of a section of the blocks:

I wrote my Christmas 2022 Letter on Friday so now I can photocopy it lots of times to add in with the annual Christmas Card to friends and family. I always find writing Christmas cards rather daunting - it seems to take me longer and longer each year but I really should start to write them this afternoon, unless I get sidetracked making the backing for my Twinkler Stars flimsy!

Linking up with Angela’s So Scrappy blog.

18th birthday gift

 One of my Great nieces, Lily, celebrated her 18th birthday last Saturday. She had a party for her friends but tomorrow there is an Afternoon tea party at her house for the family. I’ve just realised that since I lost my dear big sister Pat (Lily’s grandmother) two months ago I am the eldest member of the family. A sobering thought. 

We will be giving Lily money as a gift so she can put it towards a gift of her choice but I also decided to make a pretty cushion. All finished and ready to be wrapped up.

Everything came from stash including the cushion pad which I had previously made from spare stuffing. A few years ago I had a phase of making cushions for gifts and bought the pads from a local shop. However I felt they were always stuffed too much and used to open up one of the seams and take out a few handfuls of stuffing. Every now and then I made these into my homemade cushion pads. It appealed to my frugal nature!

I tried  a new (to me) way to make an envelope back for the cushion. I had always made the envelope opening lie horizontally across the cushion but a few days ago I watched  the daily Pat Sloan YouTube video where she made a cushion and made the opening go vertically. I tried this method and I like it. I don’t think the cushion will gape like my others tended to do. I’d be interested to know which method you use - horizontal or vertical? That is the question!

Oh my stars!

 Lots of star blocks this week. 

Firstly some Wonky Stars:

Then a few more Twinkler blocks:

I counted my Twinkler blocks and I now have 72. Need a lot more brown and purple ones to even up the colours.

I finished ofF the 24 padded heart Christmas decorations my Granddaughter and I made:

Linking up with Angela’s SoScrappy blog for the 2022 RSC Project.

October RSC Round up

 I made a few more Twinkler Stars this week. I have a box of ones left over from the last RSC quilt I made with these fabulous blocks and would like to add to those as I have an idea to make a quilt for a young relation. I sorted through my box of 2.5” squares and found piles of colours to use. 

Here are the blocks I made:

I will continue to make a few more of these next week.

I also finished quilting and binding the Maternity Ward Wonky Stars quilt I started quite recently:

It measures 24” square and looks so cheerful. When I showed it to my husband he immediately said he loved it!

This was made from my stash of  RSC Wonky Stars blocks. 

The backing I used goes so well with the reds and yellows in the stars and is a piece of fabric I bought years ago. I think it was 3 yards - I don’t usually buy any larger when I purchase larger pieces of fabric. I have used this delicious Strawberry fabric in several quilts or in backing several baby quilts. A real favourite of mine and I’ll be sad when it’s all used up. Still a bit left!

The rest of my sewing time was taken with making lavender bags and stuffed fabric hearts in Christmas fabric for Christmas  tree ornaments with my lovely granddaughter. We’ve made a lot. We also intend to make some Christmas gift bags for her to sell for her Girl Guides stall, to help with funds for a special camping trip happening next Easter. Great excuse to spend time together and talk about every thunder the sun. 🤗

Linking up with Angela’s So Scrappy RSC blog.

These are my favourite things - in the quilting world, of course!

 I was busy getting things ready in my Sewing Room for my granddaughter this morning when I suddenly thought about my favourite things in there. 

So I took a picture of them!

From left to right.

1. My cylindrical tin of plastic binding clips. I love these as when I used straight pins to hold binding I always stabbed myself many times over. As I take blood thinners this is not good! Got tired of sponging blood spots out of fabric by dabbing with rags dipped in cold water.😢

2. Back row: One of my many labelled tins and plastic boxes now labelled clearly so I know exactly what’s inside. Spent a long time doing this when I reorganised my newly refurbished  Sewing Room last year but so worth it.

3. A Clover thimble, a soft rubbery one with a dimpled metal top with a ridge around the top to stop my needle skidding off. It sticks to my finger and doesn’t drop off too often when I’m hand quilting whereas my old silver ones did.

4. My wonderful wooden poker which I use when turning things inside out and poking out the seams and for stuffing with kapok.  This was a found item I picked up when I passed a building site in New Zealand. Houses are framed out with wood and I think these might be used instead of nails. I have found it so useful over the years and each time it reminds me of happy times living in that wonderful country.

5. Pair of Singer scissors which I’ve had for years but have managed to keep them solely for cutting fabric so they still cut like cutting through butter.

6. My collection of different sized rulers, so useful and quick when trimming blocks. Very precise.

And last but not least, my revamped Sewing room.

Please note my lovely double strip light behind my sewing machine. So easy to use, you just tap each end 4 times to get the brightest light setting and one tap to turn it off. Made my sewing corner so much brighter.

Also I love that I now have my cutting mat on top of my sewing table. I used to cut all my fabrics downstairs, either on the kitchen table or dining table. It made such a mess with bits of lint and threads  and tiny scraps all over the place. Less vacuuming now. Win win!

And a view of some of the labelled boxes. The top one came from New Zealand too!

So, my favourite things. Care to join me in the song?

More RSC scrappy blocks

 I basted and machine quilted my Wonky Stars RSC quilt but I want to add some hand quilting around the stars. That’s a nice project to have for Patchwork meetings.

I have made some Windmill blocks after seeing them on Cathy’s Sane crazy quilting blog. I just used pairs of 2.5” strips , whatever colours I found.

Then I made three Wonky Stars, again using whatever colour that was to hand.

And 4 green and 5 blue String blocks. That’s pretty much all the strings in those colours I had in my bag of strings.

The light was starting to go when I took this photo, the actual blocks look much brighter.

Linking up with Angela’s SoScrappy RSC blog.

A baby quilt gifted to Freddie.

A while ago I made a lovely baby quilt using  some blue scraps and RSC Wonky Stars which I put aside to gift to my Great niece Becky’s baby boy expected mid October. As I said, my sister Pat died a month ago and baby Freddie would have been her first Great Great Grandson. Pat knew Becky and Max were intending to call their son Freddie and I showed Pat the quilt I had made for him. Freddie was born on 8th October and my niece gave the gift to Becky and Max yesterday. Becky was thrilled with the quilt and especially happy that her Nannie had seen it before she died.

I’ve called the quilt “A Star is Born”. Little Freddie is a star who has come into our family at a time of sadness so he is a new focus for our family.

I have really depleted my stash of Wonky Stars so when I have some leftover scraps I’m turning them into new Wonky Stars.

I made these the other day:

2 RSC flimsies made

 I’ve had a more productive week, sewing two Wonky Stars flimsies using a lot of blocks made over the past couple of years during the Rainbow Scrap Challenges. I love making these blocks and will continue to use my 2” scraps and bonus triangles to make more. I’ve used several in borders on two Medallion quilts completed this year and this week I created two Wonky Stars flimsies.

This quilt will measure 24” square when it’s finished and will be donated to our local hospital’s Maternity Unit. Our Patchwork Group has donated lots of small quilts over the years but recently the hospital asked for larger ones ( 24” square instead of the 15” x 20” they used to prefer) I don’t know why they have changed the size, perhaps they have bought bigger cribs?

I also put together a 40” square flimsy which will be a Project Linus donation quilt.

My stack of Project Linus quilts is steadily growing and this week I added another Crumb Coins quilt to my stash . It measures 43” x  45”.

 A close up of some of the blocks:

And the pieced backing:

All the RSC projects are using lots of my scraps and so far I have managed to bind three Project Linus donation quilts with pieced leftover bindings. They look great.

I enjoyed arranging the three finishes for this photograph:

So, onward and upward!

Walking foot - Found!

 Found my Walking foot yesterday! Before I tried to use the Ditch foot to quit my String Quilt I decided to have one last look for my Walking foot. I had quickly looked for a replacement one on Amazon and was horrified at the price - over £54! My intention was to phone my Sewing Machine repairer today and see if he could find me one at a cheaper price. The one I couldn’t find cost me just over £11 in 2011!

About seven years ago I was gifted another Janome machine that had belonged to my friend Margaret’s sister who had died and Margaret was sorting out her belongings. It has been my emergency machine for when my other one was being serviced and I have used it a few times. When I found the empty Walking foot box on Saturday I read the note inside, written by me, which said the Walking foot was on Mary’s machine. I discarded the message because it didn’t make sense to me, I couldn’t ever remember putting it on Mary’s machine! Although I did remember thinking about doing that and keeping it permanently on Mary’s machine to save me the trouble of struggling to fit it on my machine every time I want to do some machine quilting. Anyway, yesterday, as one final attempt to find the Walking foot I looked at Mary’s machine and lo and behold, there it was!

So I swapped out the machines and happily quilted my String Quilt.

Senior moments and Blue RSC round up

 September has been a difficult month for me: health issues for me and ongoing investigations and sudden decline of my dear sister who so sadly died ten days ago. At odd times I have done some sewing, not much, but it is a distraction from thoughts whirling around my head.

Today I decided I was going to do a round up of blue RSC projects.

Firstly, the blue Crumb Coin Quilt flimsy never got basted. I did make a pieced backing and laid them aside.

But I did revisit Cathy ( Crazy by Design blog) and found an idea for using my blue String blocks - not all of them though.  I had a pretty chunk of elephant fabric bought years ago at Spotlight in Nelson, New Zealand which needed to be used. So I cut it into 5.5” squares the same size as the String blocks, added a few yellow String blocks for added zing and I’m happy with the flimsy which measures 36” x 40”.  Just one elephant square leftover for scrap stash. 

A few days later I sewed together two leftover pieces of a great backing fabric ( only scraps left now). It’s an all over pattern so I just sewed, didn’t even think of trying to match. This afternoon I basted it and hope to machine quilt it tomorrow. I also made a scrappy binding from leftover strips of blue and green binding pieces.

A couple of days ago I joined a lot of leftover strips of blue binding ready to bind the blue Crumb Coins flimsy. I had already made the pieced backing so my next job was to baste that one.

Enter Senior Moment.......... could I find the flimsy???? I remembered ironing it and laying it on the bed in my Sewing room but the only thing there was the backing folded carefully in half so it didn’t trail on the carpet. Well I hunted for ages and then  for some unknown reason picked up the backing. There was the flimsy, carefully laid on top of the backing and folded inside it! I have cut the wadding but that’s now on hold. I had lost patience.

Next job was to sew the scrappy blue binding onto the finished Zebra and elephant Medallion quilt.  Decided to use the long blue scrappy binding strip for this too. Now I needed to fix the Walking Foot to my machine, a job I hate as it’s so fiddly, sometimes I do it straight away, sometimes takes half an hour of frustration. 

I keep this in a bag in the bottom drawer of my sewing table. Enter second Senior Moment.

Bag was there, empty Walking foot box was there, no Walking foot. I spent ages searching and then decided I would just order another from Amazon - life’s too short - but I did want to get that binding on so I risked using the ordinary machine foot and it seems OK. Phew!

Final thing done this afternoon was to baste the blue String quilt so that’s ready for machine quilting. As I can’t find my Walking foot I’ve decided to quilt this in the ditch with a Ditch quilting foot I bought a few years ago and wasn’t a hit with me. So that’s tomorrow’s  potential frustration! Off to order that replacement Walking foot from Amazon!

Linking up with Angela’s so Scrappy RSC 2022 blog. 

A blue RSC flimsy and more String blocks

 Blue is the September colour for RSC so I have taken the opportunity to make a Coin Crumb flimsy from finished 4.5”  Boyish Crumb blocks alternated with blue fabrics. I used a blue check fabric I bought on sale years ago for all the sashing and in the process finished every scrap of it! 

There are some interesting snippets of fabrics in the top, good for I Spy.

I sorted out all my small strings and scraps and made 8 more Blue 5.5” String blocks. 

My box of string blocks is very full so I sorted them into colours and discovered I now have 38 Blue ones so I’m going to look back over some photos I have of String blocks quilts designs and perhaps next week I can put together another flimsy? Cathy at Crazy by Design has made lots of lovely String Quilts so I’m going to have a look through her blog posts for some ideas!

Hoping to baste the Coin Crumb flimsy this afternoon.

Linking up with Angela’s SoScrappy RSC 2022 blog.

Some Orange RSC blocks

 Again, not much sewing has happened here this month. I haven’t been well - 2 emergency trips to A& E and a one night’s stay have rather put paid to sewing.

However I have managed to make 9 Wonky Star blocks, using up some bonus triangles for the points:

I don’t have many orange scraps but I did find enough to make 2 Twinkler blocks. I like to make each square of the nine patch from a different fabric.

And one 4.5” Crumb block which contained a couple of orange strips.

I’m also one step ahead of September’s colour Blue as I have started to put together another Child’s  Crumb Quilt and they happen to be Blue. 

Linking up with Angela’s Soscrappy RSC.

RSC July 2022 Round up & Gifting a quilt

 Not much sewing has happened here during July.

Here’s a Round up of RSC projects this month:

                                7 blue String blocks and one purple( hardly had any purple scraps)

A few HSTs made from Bonus triangles created whilst making Sawtooth Stars blocks, trimmed to 1.75”

  

                                            Sawtooth Stars blocks, one with some purple fabric. 

I continued to make the Elephants and Zebras Medallion style quilt, it’s basted and I’ve done some machine quilting. It will now be a hand project to take to Patchwork meetings when I will hand quilt with Perle threads.

I now have a home for a Baby quilt I made in September 2006! I named it Little Boy Fishing and I loved this quilt - there’s a lot of work in it, all hand quilted with Perle threads and all the appliqué is blanket stitched by hand. I didn’t have a home for is at the time but when our daughter was pregnant in 2009/10 I decided to gift it if we had a Grandson. At that time  I made a similar one in pinks and lilacs with Sunbonnet Sues in case we had a Granddaughter. Our Granddaughter was born on 2nd February 2010 so Little Boy Fishing was put away.

Several times over the years I have considered gifting but then didn’t. Finally this week we received great news from New Zealand. Good friends of ours have a Grandson, Hugo Christopher William, born on 26th July in Wellington, NZ. 

This is the perfect home for Little Boy Fishing! 

It measures 47” square and the label is made, just need to sew that on tomorrow and parcel it up ready to mail on Monday. 

It’s a grey cloudy day here so this isn’t a true colour, much brighter in real life. 

A couple of close ups.

            And the backing, appropriate anchor designs. I still have a bit of this fabric left in my stash.