Stitching Stuff

Here we have Beetlewings. He's looking really good, except that he doesn't photograph very well (at least with my skills). I had hoped to have him finished, but oh well, there is always next month.

I've also started on the gift I planned, but I'm not showing that one off here.

And - don't faint - but I finally pulled out the quilt top I was doing for DD, only she's too old for it now, so I'll do it for my niece instead. Hopefully I'll finish it before she's too old for it too. Although I have got further than I remembered, so there is that :)

I have just found some photos of the quilt top for DD's Castle Quilt - and I don't think I've ever shared them with you. Of course I also haven't worked on the quilt for probably a year. If I don't get a move on soon, she'll be well out of the pink castle stage by the time I finish.

As you can see, all the bits are just pinned on. I honestly cannot remember if that's as far as I got, or if I did start ironing the bits on. I'm pretty sure that I haven't got to the sewing them down stage though.

At long last I show you the pictures of the quilt I completed a couple of weeks ago.

Front:

Back: The light blue wave fabric was going to be the border on the front, but it washed out the quilt too much so I found the dark blue map fabric instead, and pieced lots of leftovers together for the back - I basically started out with the largest pieces I had and went down in size filling in the gaps with as little cutting as possible.

And a gorgeous cat who thinks everything is for her use:

Now I'm working on a 'designer purse' and making changes as usual. It's based on a Simplicity pattern (#9949, view A) and we're adding extra pockets inside, and then I'm making a single cross-body strap as opposed to the shoulder straps that it comes with. Oh ok, I'll show you the current progress.

After this I'll do DD's pink castle quilt - honest :)

I haven't really felt like stitching much since I finished my pilot piece, so I haven't got much to update on, but here is the latest progress on Tree of Stitches:

I also joined a SAL on the HAED board (yes, again) called Siberian Forest and here is what I've done on that so far. I'm stitching over 2 on 40ct, and even with my brilliant light it's easier to stitch on during the day.

Finally - the back of the pirate quilt - the pale blue is waves and was originally going to be the border on the front but it washed out too much so I got the dark blue map fabric instead for that. Then I used as big a pieces as I could from the fabric that was left over for the back so it would be as little work as possible. I have started on the quilting it all together now and hopefully will finish that soon and then I might even have my first quilt. I'm just quilting along the lines of the blocks for this one, but I can already see that a nice decorative stitch along the seams would be more forgiving and hide the bits where I could steer properly.

I've still got quite a lot of fabric from this quilt left over so I'm thinking of doing a baby quilt (like the original kit was for) for the school fund raising auction. I may not get it done for this year though.

I have finished my first quilt top:

Now just to create a back (going for simple large pieces here) and then quilt it all together and bind it. And an update on A Hundred Thousand Welcomes since I've been stitching it during swimming. Hopefully it won't take too long to finish.

See - I said there would be fewer posts.

Although I didn't really stitch much in December I've made really good progress on my pilot piece and hope to finish it shortly which will mean a return to my ordinary stitching and hopefully more frequent blog posts (cos it's really got nothing to do with my procrastination or laziness or anything like that - honest).

Anyhoo...

Quilting - I made this pillow...

... at another Jo-Ann's class, and over the Christmas break my parents were visiting and Mum and I went to a class together and made these table runners:

Mine is the top one - it's a bit hard to tell in the photo but you can just tell that it's got stippling around the edges as well as around the candies which makes that one mine.

One other distraction (sort of) from stitching lately is that I've been making great strides in relieving myself of some of my many magazine pages that I've torn out and kept over the years. I've still got thousands, but I've also put into the recycling bin a very good number and it's such a good feeling to get rid of them even though I'm chucking charts. Gasp, how could I? Actually, very easily it turns out. It was harder when I was thinking that someone else might want them, but now I've cured myself of that notion I don't care anymore and I'm tossing with abandon and it feels great.

Sorry about that. I kept meaning to do a couple of updates but just never got there. Though that means that the good news is that I get to share a finish instead of just WIP pictures :)

This is my latest quilting class (well, actually two as we did the piecing and layering in one and the binding was another class). I'm not showing the back as, well, let's put it this way, it's a learning piece, and one thing I learnt was I need to get a walking foot for my machine (or a whole new machine, but that's another debate I'm having with myself *). I'm also thinking a 1/4" foot would be good too as I make my seams too narrow resulting in squares being bigger than they should be and then points get cut off. So having the quarter inch marking above and below might be beneficial. My current machine is metric so has no inch markings at all.

Anyhoo... the pictures, that's what you really want isn't it?

The finished product:


The squares before I sewed them together:


And just because I'm feeling generous - my latest progress on the pirate quilt - not much more than last time, but I have only stitched one more session on it due to various things (including the above quilt), and now that my machine is in the shop for three weeks and the Friday morning quilting bees are having a break it might be a few weeks before it gets any further either.


Now for those of you who think I have stopped stitching - IT'S NOT TRUE :) And here is proof.

I have been working hard on Serpentine, I was hoping to get it finished before the end of September, but I don't think that's quite going to happen. The reason(s) I wanted it done by then is I have a pilot class to stitch and I promised myself I'd start that at the beginning of October, and also because Serpentine is a class and I'd like to hit the assessment window for it (which is early October).


Now I'm also going to give you a little peek at Tempest since I have been slowly plodding away a few stitches at a time during swimming lessons. Suddenly he feels like he's actually getting somewhere.

I've been thinking about taking the squares in the bottom right corner out as I'm not sure I want them right around the border, I think I'd prefer to leave it with just the single line of stitching. However, they have been there so long I'm a bit afraid of what the fabric will look like if I do. So I'm leaving that decision until I really need to make it.


Oh and I mustn't forget St. Petersburg. I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I've been taking this piece (and O' Jerusalem but you can't really see any change in that so I'm not bothering with a photo) to the first Friday stitch-ins at my LNS since it (they) are nice and portable. It does make me want to stitch more of it.


And lastly - I'm taking another finishing class on Saturday (before heading straight off to an overnight camp with the kids - I feel exhausted already) on stand-ups with Susan Cluck. I've gone through my finished pieces and there aren't really that many that fit the bill. So I'm going to take Charlie's First Landing and Twas the Night Before Christmas (although I think that would be better with the cube or flat method we did last time. I think Charlie is going to be it).

*I'm not thinking of a new machine just because I want the extra feet or the inch markings. It all started because I was making another dress for DD, this one with button holes down the front, and the button holes came out funky so I showed them to my tutor (who also teaches sewing and some other crafts) and she suggested I take the machine into the shop to get looked at. So I took it in and they went 'hmmm' and are assessing it at the moment. They did tell me the basic service will cost around $90, and if there is something that needs fixing it will be more. So I started wondering what a new machine would cost as mine is also a 220V machine which means that I can't take it to classes (I have to use a transformer) and so have to borrow a machine there. I started out looking at a Brother online for ~$150, but when I went back to the shop I think I now want to spend 10x that amount and get a Bernina lol At least I know I have no interest in machine embroidery so that cuts out a lot of the really expensive all singing, all dancing models.

Finally - some progress. I actually started putting blocks together today.

This is a kit for a cot quilt that I picked up at the International Quilt Show last November and have been getting extra material for so I can enlarge it. After much planning and fiddling and help from the nice tutor at Jo-Ann Fabrics I started cutting blocks towards the end of the school year. During the holidays I was unable to go to the weekly sessions so the quilt sat waiting on the windowsill. I hadn't been completely happy with my choice of fabric for the centre block, but I'd been unable to find what I wanted so did the best I could - that was until I visited a friend in June and she just happened to have the perfect fabric that she was willing to pass on to me.

So this week I laid all the blocks out and decided what I'd drawn on paper didn't please the eye (the colours ended up clumped together rather than dispersed throughout) and pretty much rearranged all the small blocks. The larger ones stayed as I'd planned, and then I moved things around until it was more balanced. I had help during this process, and today I put together the first column. I have hopes I may even complete it.

Well, after getting my list down a little I've just started another corrospondence course, this time in a group with the Cyberpointers chapter. Serpentine by Ro Pace - here are my beginnings:

I've also started the pre-stitching for a class I'm taking in June - Daphne Reborn by Michael Boren.

And another project finished as well - my patchwork cushions:

And I also finally started cutting the squares for one of the quilts that I've been gathering supplies for. At my Monday class the tutor said there was a quilting bee I could attend on Friday mornings, so I figure if I do that I may actually get the quilts done (you know, before the kids are too old for pirates and princess castles).

OK - so I picked up a couple of quilt patterns/kits at the Houston show last year. I've been quietly organising them but never actually stitching them. So I thought if I took a basic introduction course at Jo-Anns I could figure out what all these fun bits and pieces I've been buying are actually for. So over the last week I've taken two classes and learnt a bit more about what I'm doing.

The first class was a big square which I immediately decided could be a new cushion to replace the one I made way back in the distant mists of time at intermediate school that is now mostly just the seams holding it together as the rest of the fabric has disintergrated under much use by DS. Of course this meant that DD felt left out so I had to make a second square when I got home and will now have two cushions so they can have one each.

The second class was coasters and so now I have two of those and a DD wanting to make more. Which is fine as I have heaps of the fabric.