What I'm up to at the moment

Living in the country we have had all sorts of animals randomly turn up in our back yard.  The other afternoon it was a turkey and it's babies!

This is the view out our bedroom window.  We only own this piece with the fruit trees on it - the surrounding paddocks belong to the neighbours and do occasionally have cows in them.

Progress is being made in "Operation Reorganize the Sewing Cave".

I have a new FMQ area...

And a new setup for piecing.

The stash cupboard is all beautiful and organized again (although I should go through the fat quarters in the bins and make some sort of sense of them...).  The shelves towards the top have pieces larger than a fat quarter, and the bottom shelf holds larger yardage, as well as other substrates.

These are my bulk scrap bins and a shelf of projects waiting to be FMQed, and look... a spare shelf.  Coincidentally I have more projects to add to that FMQ pile so guess what is going to fill this space!

Unfortunately the other side of the sleepout still looks like this - although I have emptied out the dresser, and when it stops raining, it will be moved into Dylan's room, which will go a long way to clearing this room up.

And although I cleared away most of the fabric stash, I still seem to have a whole counter full of other stuff!   I have been transferring WIP's into the fabric boxes held on the white shelf units, and right down the end I have sorted my collection of patterns and assorted bits of paper printed and collected over the years.

My hubby is the best.  He bought home these packing containers that were going to be thrown out (in the background you can see my mini scrap storage containers).

Unfolded they look like this.

And after a little bit of time they turned into a cool shelf!  These are mostly filled with scraps awaiting sorting at the moment, but I'm not planning on this being permanent.  I am also planning to return the freezer to my main cutting zone as it is the perfect height.  Next he is going to make me another shelf - one with more shelves which "we" will attach to the wall above the large bench, to hold a myriad of small objects.

Last year was the year of the Epic Quilt.  And I made really good progress on two massive projects.  I'm wondering if this should be the year of the Sampler Quilt.

Amongst my sorting out - I uncovered this project from a few years ago.  The Friends mystery stitchery by The Country Yard, which came with a relatively simple quilt layout.

Of course, I decided to make a whole heap of other blocks and make it way more confusing... and put it away for another day... or rather... year.

The pieced blocks so far.  I started making these when I was feeling a bit blah about quilting, and found the low commitment of making single blocks was quite therapeutic.

The exciting thing is, is that with my new sewing space layout, the design wall is completely free of clutter - and I had figured out that I needed to lay this quilt out to be able to keep it balanced, but also make sure that the key blocks were going to be towards the centre of the quilt (on the bed top) as opposed to hanging over the edge of the bed.  Part of the reason it sat around for so long.

So I measured out roughly where an 80x80 square would sit - and measured about 10" in on the sides and marked the centre, and started placing the major blocks.  This is also where I figured out I will need a whole heap MORE blocks!

But on the positive side I have now pieced a central panel which is 24x31"!

I altered one of the original stitched blocks to better represent our family at the time (whanau means family in Maori).  [I still have the spotty gumboots, but Dylan now wears the same size as hubby, and Nadia's feet are way bigger than mine and I don't think she would be caught dead with gumboot with flowers on them!]

So this quilt is now our Whanau and Friends Quilt.

Now to make eleventy million other blocks... oh, and finish tidying up :o)