Holiday finishes....(for lack of a better title!)

The extra long Easter and Anzac Day combined public holiday gave me a wonderful opportunity to finish up a couple of projects. We were heading down south to the shack and that gave me the drive I needed to finish a few things to hand finishing stage. The first was my Munki-Munki Network quilt. I actually had this one quilted the week before last. The quilting is horizontal lines set about 1" or 2cm apart. I met my then self imposed Sunday night quilting deadline and thought I'd give machine binding a go. However, I was really disappointed with the result, it wasn't straight and didn't stay even on both sides so I spent all day at work on Monday worrying about it, so I unpicked it that night. It left little bits of cotton everywhere....on the quilt, on the floor, on the binding....argh! Once off, I re-stitched it back onto the front side on Monday night, ready for the hand stitched finishing. I have to say, I love the look of hand stitched binding and I really love the process of sitting down and stitching it. It gives me that feeling of getting to the end and finally wrapping up the production. The binding is Sandi Henderson's from her Ginger Blossom range. And the back is pieced from a piece of pink spotty fabric picked up from Spotlight ages ago and some solids to match.During the week whilst blog hopping I spied this quilt and fell completely in love. I couldn't stop staring at it and I decided to recreate one of my own using the little triangles cut from binding and set into 2 1/2" squares of fabric in a bow tie design. Like Jolene from Blue Elephant Stitches, I've used left overs and this resulted in different coloured blocks of pink, ash, snow, white, celery, kahki and stone. The blocks are only 4" and the quilt is 28" square and quilted in straight lines either side of the seams. The binding is also scrappy and uses all the bits that get left over from bigger projects that end up being stored in zip lock plastic bags. The back is totally pieced from the scrap bag. Again, a little 'use what you have in the scrap bin' project that has resulted in something really quite delightful. I should call this one the zip lock stash bow tie quilt...but that's a bit too long for such a little quilt. I just love looking at this quilt as it reminds me of all the projects I've worked on so it may end up as a quilt for the wall to admire for a long time to come!

On the design floor....

The design floor. That makes me laugh! It's the patch of floor in the lounge room that's large enough to take on bits of fabric to form quilt tops, bottoms and basting activity once the rug is rolled up and the coffee table is pushed back. It's not near my sewing machine and periodically piecing mistakes are made as I've generally forgotten which side I'm meant to stitch by the time I get to the machine. Oh well....if I win the lottery....!

This quilt is a pattern from Patchwork at Central Park and was displayed at the recent Australasian Quilt Convention and also appeared in the May edition of Better Homes and Gardens. Silly me didn't buy a copy of the magazine when it was available, not even from AQC. When I got home the next day, the June issue was out and after a failed attempt to buy a back order (who ever heard of a Better Homes and Gardens not being availalbe on back order?), I managed to score it from my local library.

It uses a combination of prints and solids. The pattern recommends fat quarters but equally, you could use metreage as repeating a print or two pulls it together. The squares are huge. I cut them to 18" (not 17 7/8ths) to compensate for cutting inaccuracy in the first instance and have trimmed them back to 17". I found I did get some slippage joining the 1/2 square triangles. Smaller ones are way simpler to piece accurately. I'm using some of Sandi Henderson's Ginger Blossom fabrics and a few fat quarters I've picked up along the way from Spotlight.

I'm intending on giving this quilt to my sister in law who has a birthday coming up very soon. The top should come together quickly but I seem to be doing a couple of other things at the same time and that's slowing down the process. Nothing new there!

Squaring up....

Working on another quilt started a few weeks back. Squaring up giant (well 17") 1/2 square triangles. The pattern was created by Patchwork on Central Park and appeared in the May edition of Better Homes & Gardens (Australian edition). Mine features some long time stashed Ginger Blossom by Sandi Henderson.