Progress on a few projects....

I made some progress in the sewing room in the last two days. I had the blocks on the design wall for the selvage cubes and the One Block Wonder. I had bought an audio book last week and plugged that into the computer and listened to it as I sewed the rows and background together. That made a somewhat boring job a lot more enjoyable. Here is the selvage cube top so far. I decided to go a little bright with the background since it's going to hang in my sewing room. The next step is to make a selvage piano key style border around it and then a 2 1/2" orange border and then I can get it quilted and hung up!  Update:  The finished quilt can be seen here.

My daughter in law came over Tuesday afternoon and we did the final arrangement on the One Block Wonder. As soon as she left, I started sewing the hexagons and cubes together in rows then started sewing the rows together. This morning I finished sewing the last few rows and trimmed the bottom edges. I'm really liking this project. I hope to pick up some of the navy blue on Friday for a border around the whole quilt. I'm thinking of a gold lippy between the navy border and navy binding. I think that would frame it nicely.

Indian Orange Peel class - part 2

On Saturday, we got together for our second class on the Indian Orange Peel taught by Heather Stewart. You can read other posts on this class by clicking on the tab on the right to see progress to date. We had a great time and crammed a lot of information into our brains in short order. You can see how focused we are as we listen to Heather (second from left) giving us instructions on how to sew the arcs to the four patch blocks:

Aren't we a serious bunch eh?

The first thing we had to do was pair off with another quilter and lay out our four patch blocks on the table alternating warm and cool colours. Then the arcs had to be arranged in a pleasing colour order, paying attention to lights and darks and creating a movement for the eye to follow and watching warm and cool colours! Deb and I worked together and there were times that we were wondering if we were going crazy, but we did manage to get it all laid out in good order.


After laying out my quilt, we carefully transferred it to the floor with the four of us:

Now there is room on the table for Deb's quilt :-). Joanne, Marylou and Roxene can be seen in the background working on their quilts. Here we are getting ready to arrange Deb's warm and cool 4 patches:

All the arcs were labeled on the back with numbers corresponding to a diagram just in case we get mixed up:

That does really explain my major muscle pain this weekend lol:

Pat and Marylou are busily sewing:

Chris and I were nice and cozy as we forgot to bring an extension cord and borrowed a short one that someone else had as an extra. Thanks Anne for letting us use your cord. I took my new to me Centennial Featherweight along and she sewed like a charm once again. We had a lovely bright room in a local Church.

Here are my blocks and arcs ready to sew together:

Here is Kathy's layout...she also chose bright colours in batiks. It was interesting how many shared prints we all had in our stashes! We did trade strips, but there were a lot of fabrics that several of us had in our quilts.

Yvonne was sitting on the other side of me and did a really scrappy one with some really fun novelty prints.

Chris, Pat and Anne's quilts:

Another angle of the same quilts. The colours really look awesome when you take a picture:
We also had to sew one block together to make sure we were doing it correctly. These were a challenge to get just right and most of us were making liberal use of our Best Friends (aka a stitch ripper :-). Heather assured us that these would get easier and easier, the more we did them.

One block finished, 24 to go:

Gail has more photos on her blog. We need to reconvene our support group to keep sewing these blocks together and paper piece the border. The arcs were a piece of cake compared to the shapes of the border pieces lol.

Shattered Angles class that wasn't :-(

I was supposed to go to our guild's workshop on Friday, called Shattered Angles, taught by Susan Purney Mark. She spoke at our guild meeting on Thursday evening and I was really looking forward to taking that workshop. I was all packed up and ready to go. However, when I woke up on Friday morning, there was a major snowstorm and I could not get to London for the class :-(. Fortunately, I had purchased the book on Thursday evening and Susan had this sample at the trunk show (it is called Shattered Garden):

Since I had everything packed up to take the class, I set up in my sewing room and figured I'd see if I could figure it out. I studied the photograph of the sample on the webpage and had the basic cutting instructions. I used the new to me FW that my hubby fixed up just for me!

I chose colourful strips 1 1/2", 2 1/2" and 3 1/2" as per instructions from my drawers under my sewing table. I cut and sort my leftover fabrics as Bonnie Hunter of www.quiltville.com has on her website and just had to pick out colours that would fit my plan. I didn't have to buy any fabrics so it was a great stash buster.

I sewed the strips together with varying widths totally 6 1/2". They are then cut on a 45 degree angle in various widths and black strips sewn between.

Here are the 42 blocks that I have finished so far. I'm still debating if I want to make it bigger, or add a black border and then a piano key border with the leftover strips. It was a really fun project and I love the stained glass effect. I still have to rearrange the blocks to balance them properly.

More hexagons

Just realized that I haven't posted anything on my blog for awhile!

I've been playing around with some more hexagons this evening and thought I'd try cutting some from this bug print...the repeat is only about 9" so can't get too many blocks out of it. But, there should be enough to make a baby quilt, perhaps with a few cubes added into the mix. I bought some colours to go with this print last week. Here is the original fabric:

The cubes that I have put together so far...the center seam is not yet sewn together as that is done when assembling the half hexagons in rows to avoid inset seams :-)

Some close ups of some of the blocks:




I could get addicted to these fun blocks :-). I have some hot air balloon fabric to try too someday.

Hexagon madness

We've lived in our new house almost two years and I still hadn't found a picture to hang above our bed. My daughter in law, Jannyne, gave me one of the One Block Wonder books for Christmas and loved the designs. She said if I wanted to make one, she'd help :-). The light bulb finally went on and the brainstorm hit to make one of these into a wall hanging for my bedroom. I took Jannyne to one of my favourite quilt shops, The Marsh Store, taking along a piece of the border fabric of my bed quilt and we came across this Laurel Burch fabric with exactly the right colours! So, some of that came home with me :-).

On Tuesday, Jannyne came over for the day and we cut out the triangles and started playing with the options. Here is Jannyne having fun laying out the blocks on the design wall:

We thought we'd add a few cubes into the mix possibly, so we bought some FQ's that blended nicely with the dancing horses. There was a lot of sun in the sewing room when I took this picture so the left is a little dark...there's a black, a burgundy and a navy blue FQ in there. At the top is the border of the bed quit and I also spotted some perfect King Tut variegated thread spools.


I got two cubes made while Jannyne laid out blocks. I will make more of these cubes in various colours and we'll have some options to play with:

Here are all the blocks so far on the wall. The instructions in the book were to sew the half hexagons together with the straight grain of the triangles to the outside. Since the fabric design is so linear, I took the triangles of the last strip and started sewing them differently to provide more variation. The three separated hexagons on the right side are done in the different orientation. One third of the blocks will be different. This is a really fun project to work on.

Jannyne is the one with the artistic eye, so she'll help me decide on the final layout. I tend to lay everything out symmetrical, so we're on a learning curve here LOL.

I'm up to 97!

I hosted a mini retreat at my place on Friday and Saturday and we accomplished a lot! Here are 12 of the arcs I started on Saturday and completed tonight.

I am now up to 97...only 23 to go!

Block of the Month

Our local small quilt guild is doing a block of the month for charity quilts. We choose a colour each month and everyone makes a block and brings it to the next meeting. One of the members takes the blocks home and puts them into a top and it is quilted and presented to the chemo unit at our local hospital. This was my November block for the red and white theme:

The December colour was blue and white. I didn't get mine finished in December so just finished it this week :-)


January's colours are red, black and white. I decided to add a black background to these red and white batiks since the white seemed to really wash them out.