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!

One experiment, one giant leap

I've finished my little 2 1/2" checkerboard experimental quilt. 12 strips from the jelly rolls (6 of each colour combo from 2 jelly rolls of the same print) and 12 strips of calico ended up 130cm x 110cm. After going too deep with the original layout making it much too rectangular, I squared it up by laying out the pattern as 8 x 10 blocks (instead of 8 x 12 blocks). The remainder of the rectangle blocks I used for a border. It's now living with my sister as a lap quilt. She was pretty chuffed!

But she couldn't have been as thrilled as I was on Friday night when I accompanied L to an iceskating party for one of his school friends. L has a language disorder and with that comes many sensory integration issues. The last time he'd been to the ice arena he'd been completely overwhelmed with the sheer size of the place and the noise. I primed him all week about giving skating a go but not worrying if it didn't work out.
He was itching to go. He was excited to see his school friends out of school hours. He couldn't wait to get his skates on. He walked with my help across the rubber flooring to the skating place. I organised a 'chair' for him to push around. He pushed it all the way round. The other boys got bored, took their skates off and went to play in the ice pit. He followed and had a ball throwing snow balls at the other kids. The gloves he didn't want to wear were put on. They had their birthday tea. The other boys went back to the pit for some more rough ice play (as boys do!). What did L want to do? Put his skates back on and have another go on the ice. He dispensed with the 'chair'. He walked all around the rail. Then he let go. He moved to the middle. He was skating....all by himself. I'm not talking Torvill and Dean but he was moving his legs and he was doing it. And guess what else? He was singing to the songs playing in the arena. What a boy!

(Look at that little tongue sticking out.....really concentrating!)

The Sew & Sews are off to the WEA this morning for a machine quilting workshop....there's no holding us back!