Saturday, April 22, 2017

Fabrics, Books, Cutting and Sewing

Well, it's hard to know where to start. 

Needing binding fabric was a good excuse to travel about an hour south, to visit with my Mum, and spend some quality time shopping during these school holidays.  We had great fun, and bought all sorts of really important things... like new school bags for the kids, and a new dressing gown for Nadia.

I did find some fabric which was suitable for the baby quilt binding, as well as some new fat quarters and some fabric for a new tunic dress pattern I had bought earlier.  Which leads me to the packages that arrived in the post...

I really liked the look of these Tilly and The Buttons patterns and decided that the confident beginner level sounded do-able.


And who can go past these adorable sausage dogs in their jumpers??


So after much ahming and ahing I finally chose this sort of aztec print knit fabric, which will hopefully turn into the longsleeve tunic one day.


And a fat quarter special was like choosing lollies at a candy shop...
Could be the sausage dogs will have spotty jumpers?

 I have no idea whatsoever what I will do with this particular print, but somehow it is fascinating... I'm sure there will be a perfect project somewhere.


And finally the binding fabric, plus a couple of half metres of fabric on special.


Today the binding got machine stitched on... so now I'm all ready to tackle the hand stitching, and attach the label.

I also had a book delivery... so have spent a few hours browsing all the lovely pictures.


I really like Amy Gibsons quilt block cookbook.  The idea being that you add a bit of this... and a bit of that, depending on what you like, just like cooking.  Elements of the blocks are interchangeable, for example, you might not like the corner units on this block... that's OK, choose one of the other layouts.  Easy.

As well as having a range of blocks, there are some suggestions on how to set them.  I really like this one as it used only 6 blocks... and is quite unique.


The By the Bundle book uses fat quarters in all the quilt designs.


Photographs throughout the book highlight the spectacular Australian scenery... and the quilts really do make themselves at home.

This one just took my fancy.


And there are some quite interesting designs inside.  This would be a good scrap challenge wouldn't it?

 I have done some sewing... just in case you were wondering.

Working through the purple scraps I cut some of the hourglass blocks for Tillies Lane.


And finally got a whole block finished!  Although I have started piecing three other units, I didn't have enough fabrics cut to finish them off!  Very poor planning.


And the purple cutting also resulted in another block layout...

Which got sewn together and rotated :o).

And a second multi-coloured block got pieced.  This had 4" cut units.


So yesterday the quilt was starting to look like this...


And today it is looking like this!


Remember, this is the pattern layout:

I know there are still heaps more blocks to sew, but I wasn't sure how it was all going to come together, and now I am much happier with how things are progressing.

I really need to review my goals for this month, as focusing on the baby quilt has meant that other projects have been ignored a bit.  Oops, well, these things happen.  Still, there is another week to go until the end of the month, and never say NEVER!


3 comments:

Susan said...

I do like the look of the black checkerboard pattern you've got happening there! I have my eye on that dogs in sweaters pattern- very cute!

Debbie said...

You got the most important goal met...a baby quilt done in April. Nice quilting in it too! What a nice lot of purchases you made recently. Those quilt books all look wonderful.

The Joyful Quilter said...

Awesome projects on the go!! I particularly like the Grids and Stripes quilt. Off to see if I can find where you mentioned the name of the pattern...