Having fun with Selvages

While I was rooting around for some photos, I came across some hot pads I had finished this summer and realized I had not blogged about these.  

We were invited to a friend's cottage for an overnight stay in July.  Another mutual friend also joined us. We had a fabulous time catching up and enjoying the beautiful weather, swimming, boating, playing Scrabble, etc.  I had to test a few sewing machines and wanted an easy project so cut out some 8" squares of scrap fabric and a square of batting and covered them with selvages quilt as you go style.  That worked slick.  I dug out leftover pieces of binding from other projects and chose selvages to match those colours.  After stitching the selvages onto the batting base, I added a backing and stitched the bindings on.  I joined a couple of friends one evening and hand stitched the bindings down while they worked on their projects.  I got seven of the eight finished and the last one was stitched at the cottage :-).

Found some fun leftover binding strips in my bin :-)

I started with a strip in the middle on the diagonal ones and added selvages to each corner

Half of them were done in straight lines...the navy blue one was not finished yet.

 I gave four of them to each friend at the cottage.  They had a hard time choosing the colours LOL.

Beth's Baby Quilt

Last night we had another shower for one of the young girls in our Church who had her first baby.  We had an enjoyable time with the ladies of our Church, young and old :-).  You know you're getting old when you have to identify 14 different baby foods in jars and there are names that you've never heard of in the mix!!  Needless to say, I didn't win that game LOL.  

I made a quilt for the baby and also finished off a UFO in the process.  I started this quilt 11 or so years ago after I took a class at the Quilt Rack in Ancaster where I worked for two years when my husband went back to school.  The class was called Lemon Braid and was a pattern from the book "Open a Can of Worms" by Debbie Caffrey.  I made a large quilt for my husband and then began experimenting with my scraps to make it in smaller sizes.  I finished the half braids and it languished in a drawer until I found it last year.  It's been waiting for a baby girl so I could finish it.  I used a lot of fun novelty prints so it became a bit of an I spy braid.

I found this great print awhile ago and it was perfect for the back!

The finished quilt

swirly flowers in the sashing...great opportunity to practise them since they are not obvious :-)

The quilting on the braids was just a simple stitch in the ditch and a swirly motif in the braids.