Archie The Wonder Dog

In June last year I went on a Bargello workshop run by my talented friend Beryl at her teaching studio and a month later I added the resulting project to my Finish-Along list.  It's been on every list since, including my current one , and I'm thrilled to be able to say that it's finished! This is how it started: Four FQs and half a metre of Kaffe shot cotton (tip: if you're using this, starch it well - it likes to move and stretch!) After quite a bit of sewing and cutting, I had sets of strips of varying widths (Daddy (wide), Mammy (medium) and Baby (narrow)!): Dreadful photo, sorry!  Still, at least you won't have to see it again after this! Once I got started again (it sat in a bag from July 2014 until last week!), it didn't take me long to get the panel complete, even though I had to unpick three strips (two because I hadn't double-checked my seam allowance when I started and one because I made a daft mistake). The grey pieces towards t...

I've been quite lucky in recent months and have won several giveaways and/or link up prizes and I thought I'd share the luck around a bit.  In March, I won this bundle of Dashwood September Blue from Sew Hot and I'd like to share it with one of you. If you'd like to win a fat eighth bundle of this gorgeous fabric then you have two possible chances: 1.  Leave a comment below telling me what you'd make with the fabric.  (Be warned, I may copy you!) 2.  Leave a second (separate) comment if you live in the UK. The giveaway is open to everyone, no matter where you live.  If you live in the UK then you may get some chocolate/sweeties in your parcel, if you live outside the UK then you probably won't as I think the postage cost is going to be surprisingly high.  (Sorry!) The giveaway closes a fortnight today on 4th June at 7pm BST and I will close comments at that point.  The winner will be announced and notified some time after that. If ...

After what feels like ages (but isn't, I think it's just because I'm on a deadline with this quilt!), I've finally got the fairy quilt top finished.  I'm finding it hard to take a decent photo of it because it's so big (about 68" x 108") so this is the best I can manage at the moment.  I think this photo captures the colours fairly accurately, even if you can't quite see all the top! Yes, it's a rather large for a soon to be four year old but when I made a quilt for her older sister, her mam wanted it to be long enough to go over the top of the pillows so I've done the same with this quilt...and then some!  Here's her older sister's quilt, which also features fairies! As you can see, my photo taking hasn't got any better since I took this five years ago!! As the current fairy quilt is so large, backing fabric was going to be horrifically expensive.  In a fit of  'I'm not paying that!', I decided to piece...

The project I'm concentrating on for the next couple of months is a quilt for my youngest niece; my deadline is her fourth birthday, in July.  In my last post , I showed you the first twelve (of twenty-eight) blocks (which are based on the Stained quilt by Sarah ) and today I'm happy to say that I've (machine) pieced the remaining sixteen (15") blocks: Almost two hours of crawling round sorted the arrangement: Excuse the dire photo, it was night time and, as you can see, well past Archie's bed time! For ease of piecing, none of the 'in block' sashing strips line up with each other and I decided that I wanted to maintain that when joining them up.   (There will be the same  ½"  (finished)  sashing strips separating the blocks.)  I also decided that I didn't want one side of a sashing strip to need to line up with the edge of another strip (i.e. no 'steps' in the sas hing) because I would have to ensure they were aligne...