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.