Puttering in the Sewing Room

I have spent a few evenings in the sewing room during the last couple of weeks.  I made another house for my 30's prints neighbourhood--this is house #3.

I put together the 9th liberated basket quilt for my basket sampler quilt from the workshop I taught in January.  I used selvages for this basket.  If you look closely, you can see that the handle fabric also has scissors on it. I have some machine applique to do on one more block before I can assemble this quilt top.

 

Last week, I celebrated my birthday and my husband gave me a couple of quilting books..."Free Range Triangle Quilts" by Gwen Marston and Cathy Jones, and "Quilt Lovely" by Jen Kingwell.  There are lots of inspiring quilts in both books.  I was drawn to a quilted pillow in Jen's book and decided to make one for myself.  I need 16 paper pieced arcs for this pillow.  These are the first two arcs.

 

 

I have been working on more arcs and have 10 done now.  I need to go digging through my scraps before I make the last 6. They are not very big and will measure 2" in the finished blocks.  There is quite a bit of curved piecing in this pillow...I will get to that when I finish the arcs.

 

 

I have figured out the final layout for the modern wedge quilt.  I took the lighter wedges off the wall and will use them in another project.  I will be hand appliqueing the curvey parts onto the background, perhaps as my slow Sunday stitching project this weekend.

 

 

 

It was cold and frosty on my way to work this morning so I just had to stop the car at the side of a country road and take a few pictures.  Everything looked so sparkly!

 



London Modern Quilt Guild Meeting--paper pieced pincushion.

This morning was the first meeting of 2016 for the London Modern Quilt Guild.  After a very brief business meeting, Kristin led us in a paper piecing workshop to make these pincushions. This dark gray one is the sample that Kristin made to show us.  She had made up kits for each of us to use, trying to fool herself into thinking that she was reducing her stash...

I sorted out my pieces of fabric from light to dark in colour families.

 

 I started with yellow and worked my way through the colour wheel.

This is the first of 4 sections.

I managed to finish 2 sections before the end of the meeting.

Tonight, I made the last 2 sections and sewed them together. It finishes at 4.5" square.  This looks so cool!!!  (There are 18 pieces in each section of this project!)

This weekend's handwork project is removing all of those little pieces of paper!

A couple of years ago, I received these tweezers with a magnifying glass attached.  They are for removing small pieces of paper when paper piecing.  They are perfect for this job!

I hope to finish this pincushion sometime this week.

We had warm weather today... and some rain.  There is no snow.  Very weird weather for this time of year.

I am linking up to Kathy's Slow Sunday Stitching.  Once I get all that paper removed, maybe I will have time to do some hand quilting on my wool applique squirrel project...

Hello

Today, I spent the entire day working on quilting projects! A friend, just recently converted to quilting, came over in the morning and I showed her how to paper piece. I made a star from some new homespun fabric purchased in Pennsylvania while I was on vacation during the March Break with my family. I plan to eventually make some more stars and then make a quilted wall hanging with them. Here is my first star, not trimmed yet...


She made a small pine tree out of scraps but I did not take a picture of it.

While she used the sewing machine, I cut out all of the triangles for a charity quilt. My quilt guild makes these quilts for children who are in foster care.


Next week, my friend and I are going to put all of the triangles together in to these blocks for a baby quilt. The pattern is called "Card Trick".

This afternoon, I worked on my guild challenge quilt. The quilt guild gave out a fat quarter of some fish fabric designed by Laurel Burch to each member for the challenge. After figuring out what I want to make and purchasing co-ordinating fabric, I finally made the first cut today! I will post a picture of the finished project later. I don't want anyone to see it before our May guild meeting when everyone is supposed to bring in their challenge project.