Sewing room progress

My daughter and daughters in law gave me some great additions for my sewing room. Jannyne gave me this wonderful clock. I hung it up in the sewing room, above the yard sale cabinet I picked up last year. This clock keeps us all on time for classes :-).

Heather made this cool wooden button from a cheese board bottom. It was featured on a decorating blog and I fell in love with it. Fortunately, I hadn't found a cheese board at a yard sale yet so Heather painted it black and put a black check X in the middle. It found a perfect spot on the coat rack that Jake made out of an old piano years ago. The Chocolate sign says: "Warning, may cause clothing to shrink" and was a gift from my daughter Amanda last year.

Closeup of the button:

President's Challenge at the LFQG

The London Friendship Quilt Guild had a President's Challenge due for the month of May to celebrate 30 years as a guild. The rules were simple. We received two Fat Quarters in the guild colours; one gold with little stripes and one solid blue which had to be visible on the front of the quilt. One of the dimensions had to be 30". The focus fabric is shown in the photo below and was used in the top and right side of the cubes.



I had a Japanese fabric that I picked up at The Marsh Store in the sale bin and thought it would be great for a Spinning Four Patch. I bought 4 repeats and added half a yard or so to possibly use as borders. I happened to throw the two FQ's for the challenge on my sewing table and it landed on that Japanese fabric and the colours blended beautifully! I've been having so much fun with the One Block Wonder quilts and then the light bulb went on! Could I do a One Block Wonder with this Japanese Fabric? But, I only bought four repeats and needed six. I remembered buying extra and wondered if possibly there was a sixth repeat. I managed to squeeze one 2" strip for a sixth repeat and I figured it would be fun to see how small you could go on these hexagons. Here is the original fabric:

I sewed the hexagons together and began experimenting with them. My first idea was to use 30 hexagons. Here are a few layouts and ideas that I tossed around:


Using 30 hexagons would be difficult, so I decided to make one dimension 30" instead and added some cubes in the focus fabrics:

I found some wonderful navy blue that matched beautifully and added that for borders:

I used the rest of the yellow focus FQ to add a small 'lippy' between the quilt and the binding.

If you click on the photo above of the focus fabrics, you can see the quilting in the blocks and the photo below shows the feather quilting in the borders.

At the guild meeting last week, each entry was assigned a number and we all voted for our favourite. I was very excited that my little quilt won 1st prize!! Here is our President, Rose B. holding up the quilt while I had to tell everyone why I chose this design and where the 30" dimension was. I'm saving my prize money to spend at the big quilt shows in our area next week :-).

Thread Catcher

I made another thread catcher this weekend and finished stuffing the pin cushion today. I found enough Kaffe Fasset selvedges in my collection and had solid lime green to go with this fun print.

This snippet catcher will be donated to the Canadian Quilter's Association Committee for the Quilt show being held here in a few weeks.

Jasmine and Richard's Log Cabin Quilt

My niece, Jasmine got married today in a lovely outdoor wedding in the park. The weather was perfect. I made a log cabin quilt completely from my stash of beiges and greens. I used up the leftover strips to make a piano key border. The only thing I had to buy was the batting. I even had the backing, a Debbie Mumm garden print I've had in the house for years. It was the perfect colour for this quilt. I forgot to take a picture of the backing. Here is the finished quilt:

A closeup of the quilting. I used a Bernina 817 that is a little stiff from sitting around for years...I gave it a good workout meandering across the whole quilt. It made a perfect stitch and passed the free motion quilting test with flying colours :-).