Start to Finish

Last week I continued to "avoid" the larger projects on my list, choosing some more little projects that can be started and finished in a relatively short time.

A number of weeks back my mum surprised me with a little pack of fat quarters she had ordered from a television shopping channel.

Last week I decided they might make cute little cosmetic purses and whipped up a bunch for my mum to gift to her friends.

I find production line sewing a bit tedious normally, so avoid repetition fatigue I varied the designs a little on each one.  I like some better than others, but mum seems to think her friends will like them, so that'll do nicely.

I also snuck in a quick frame purse for myself made up in this lovely Bonnie and Camille fabric - Marmalade on the outside and Scrumptious to line it.

It will replace this tired little box that normally holds my make-up and I think my dresser is looking better already.

I have some more avoidance tactics from the weekend to show you tomorrow when I take pics, but I think that maybe this week I will have to behave myself and get back to that FAL list!

Weekend Update

Nothing big going on around here this weekend on the sewing front but there are some bits and pieces I can share.

First up is this fabulous Bee Blessed Antique Tile quilt top - 

I've been piecing the donated blocks together for the Bee and I think it's so stunning.  Of course, I have a penchant for blue and white quilts so this is right up my street, but I think you'll agree that this block looks great as a quilt.  Thank you so much to all of you who contributed blocks - can you spot yours?  If you don't see yours here, fear not, we have a second Antique Tile top in aquas/blues coming along with the remaining blocks that were sent to us so if yours isn't here, it'll likely be in there in due course.

September brought a return to hours of my week spent waiting poolside during swim training so I've been picking up my crochet again and the chevrons now look like this - 

Would you believe me if I told you there's an hour's work in every chevron stripe?  (Maybe I'm just slow!) This is soft and snuggly, and some days too warm to be working up in a stuffy swimming pool, but I am really enjoying making my waiting time productive again.

Also this week I finally got around to making a zippy cosmetic purse requested by my mum some time ago - bad daughter!

She likes angels, so while the rest of you are having heart attacks over the country angels in brown, I am happy that she will be okay with it!

And, I have finally reached the end of the 572 pieces I've been cutting from shirt scraps for my son's Squares and Strips bed quilt!

What's more, clever me already has 22 of the 88 eventual blocks completed? See ...

Single square blocks

Is that cheating? In any case it means just 66 blocks left to make!

So what have you been up to this weekend?

Zips and a Tin Hat

This weekend had a lot of zips in it.  Some better than others it must be admitted, but these are the fruits of my labour -

pencil cases

coin purses and

cosmetic purses.

All these little bits join my other recent makes and will hopefully make themselves useful in a Bee Blessed fundraising bid later in June.

Feeling the need for some crochet fun this weekend too, I stitched up this 'tin hat' with a view to giving Bertie a makeover.

Much as I love Bertie, I want to smarten up his tin for the sewing room shelves.  Hope to finish his revamp soon.

And also this weekend, my Kaleidoscope quilt (pieced last summer)

has officially moved out of the UFO category and back into WIPs - more on that during the week.


Hope your weekend had some stitchy goodness too!

Progress, procrastination and progress

No more excuses, progress needed to be made, so I manned up, or womanned up I should say, and got stuck into quilting the navy man's quilt.  Here it is all pieced and ready for basting

and this is how it looks now that it's quilted and bound.

Sorry about the light in all these pics!

More wavy line quilting (it's becoming a favourite) - this time on the diagonal.

Just need to finish handstitching the binding and add a label but I can get to that in front of the telly some evening.  It's purpose is to gift to my dad who is retiring at the end of this month, but we are wondering if he'll sit still for long enough to actually make use of it!

Then, after this little bit of progress I looked around and saw these again -

I know I need to start this quilt but I just couldn't bring myself to do it, so there followed a few hours of procrastination during which the following "play" occurred.

Two tea bag wallets

and a zippered pouch

The tea bag wallets are cute, quick and fun.  I kind of went with the flow and just stitched them up as I went along, but if you'd like a wee tutorial for them you'll find one on Karen's blog.

The pouch was a bit of a trial run and as I didn't like these fabrics so much I deliberately chose them to practice the bow effect with. However, as I worked with them they kind of grew on me and I quite like them now.  There are lots of things I'd do differently if I wanted to make this little pouch up again but it's neat, the zip ends are good and it'll be fine.

After this I looked around again and yup, the pinks were still there!  So, what's my problem with the pinks?  What is it that is making me avoid this quilt even though I know I need to make it and actually I do want to make it?

It's all about the pattern.  I have thought and re-thought so many different patterns for this quilt and just could not make up my mind.  Then I'd leave it for a few weeks and find another pattern and think that one to death too.  The thing is, I want this quilt to be right - not too traditional, not too modern, not too plain, not too fussy.  It has to work for its recipient (don't they all), and it has to work for me given the limitations of my fabric budget and my time resources, and I want it to be fun.  I don't want this to be a serious quilt, am I making any sense?

Well, before lunch I did it.  I MADE UP MY MIND!  I enjoyed the pattern of the navy man quilt (see above) and how it came together and then I remember seeing something similar but with angled wedges like windmill blades.  I think they might also be called whirlygigs, but of course now that I want to find them online I can't.  So, it was out with the calculator and the scrap fabrics to stitch up a test block -

For a simple looking block this was a bit of a tester on the old sizing front!

Wee bit more complicated that I thought at first glance, but I liked the finished look, picked up the rotary cutter and went for it.

So now I have windmill wedges like this

I trialled a first layout -

Not so keen on the way the darker windmills seemed to clump together a bit in places, so I tried another diagonal layout

Much better!  And so here we are, my afternoon's piecing is ahead of me and this quilt is officially in progress.

Haaaaaaaaaaaaa! (Big sigh of relief.)

So tell me folks, are you always good at making decisions about your quilts or do you ever/always struggle with things?  Has it ever taken you two months to work out how to make a start like this one?

Mouthy Stitches Swap Pouch

Here it is folks, one zippered pouch for my partner in the Mouthy Stitches Pouch Swap.  Ta da!

Pouch front

As I researched/stalked my partner for inspiration I had an idea to take her love of whimsy and work that through 'my way'.  In other words, when you have no 'whimsy' in your fabric stash, you need to create the whimsy yourself.  Hence the embroidery stitching. Thanks to Aimee Ray's Doodle Stitching book my partner is getting mushrooms, a gnome and a hedgehog that are recognisable as such!

Tricky to get a pic of those wee pleats - hope you get the idea.

Although the current trend seems to be for bright fabric panels or blocks on linen backgrounds, I wanted to switch that around a little. So this pouch has bright fabric background (including a few little co-ordinating pleats) with the linen as the focus panel.  I know from the comments on the flickr group that a few folks would have preferred to keep the linen as the main fabric but if I had tried that then my little stitcheries wouldn't really have worked.  So I hope it was a gamble worth taking (and I haven't ignored anything my partner said to just do my own thing, just in case she's reading and is worried).

Pouch back

I wanted the back to be fun too, so stitched up a wee birdie family to perch there.  Then, because my partner said she might like one, I added a wristlet strap too.  This one's removable so if she changes her mind she can just unclip it.

One zip as per swap requirements.

The little internal pocket is there just in case my partner needs a chocolate hiding place!  (Who doesn't?) The final pouch measures approx 9.5" x 8.5" so it's reasonably roomy and could be used for any number of purposes (lots of chocolate?).

It was great to have a partner who participated and shared her thoughts and opinions so frequently through the swap discussions and photo comments, and hopefully that has resulted in making her something that she truly will like.   So there it is Partner, your Mouthy Stitches Swap Pouch complete with zip and this fq's worth of scraps tucked inside.

I promise the scrap colours are better in reality!

Now, are you wondering whose address gets to go on the envelope on 25th? ......

The World's Most Boring Zippered Pouch

Fear not, my Mouthy Stitches partner (whoever you may be), this reeeeaaaaaaallllllllly boring zippered pouch will not be winging its way to you in February.

But, you might appreciate knowing that I have made this very dull pouch in an attempt to upgrade my zipping skills, obviously in the hope that your pouch, dear partner to be will look half-decent.

And, all in all it's not too bad.  I do need to sort out those corners and was given some very good advice about how to achieve this, but then found myself concentrating so hard on following the tutorial(s) that I forgot to take care of the corners before I stitched them in! Next time, I will do as you said J, promise!

Look - equally boring lining! 

Bit more practice required, but not as scary as I thought it would be.  Now, just to figure out how to make the real thing prettier and partner-approved!




PS - I really should have thought to make this practice pouch up in brown fabric.  I mean, in brown fabrics and with its salmon zip this could have been a beauty that Mouthy Stitch swappers would be fighting over in their droves!!!