Lots of time - Little Progress

It's been a funny old time in the "All the Good Ones" household.  Firstly, we have had road works outside our house over the past week - much to the disgust of the dog (who has barked at each of those cars and trucks creeping along at 30km instead of whizzing past at 100km) and as we already live with quite loud road noise, the extra noise from the new layer of chip seal has made life rather unsettled.  On top of that, Dylan has once again been home sick (although he is now back to his normal self) - and our weather has turned into that headache inducing windy yet muggy that Northland seems so good at.  This month is crazy season at work... let's just say life has been rather busy.

Now enough whining, more sewing.  I have been doing some... although not as much as I would have liked :0)

I've started putting together a few more baskets... playing more with contrast and colour placement, until I hit upon the perfect combination.  I couldn't help myself, I just wanted to give all these ones a try.

And adding the setting strips and triangles for the background sections on the sampler blocks that have already been finished.  It will be a basic alternate block layout... every other block will be a basket set on point with the setting triangles.  The remaining blocks are set straight, and are either 8 or 12" - with the necessary sashing to fatten them up to the desired 14" finished size.  Happy so far!

This is the newest addition to the sampler series:

And I couldn't resist this fabric from Spotlight, even though it was $24.99/m

In other news, I have made another couple of modern cross blocks... still love this block and it's a nice leader and ender.  Not too complicated, although I do need to look at the placements and scratch my head before turning the pieces right the way around before sewing them together!  I was a bit disappointed that the instructions for this block avoided any mention of pressing instructions... it doesn't matter which way you press for most of the seams, as they don't match or intersect; but you really want to make sure that the third log is pressed in the opposite direction to the fourth log, as these ones will meet up when you add the four sections together.  It's really tempting to just press all the seams outwards, as this is the natural way they want to fall.