Archie The Wonder Dog

My current FAL list had a new item on it this time, which feels quite unusual as I seem to roll over the same projects quarter after quarter: a small quilt/wall hanging which I made when I hadn't been quilting long (the label says I finished it in 2008) and which hung above my stairs.   It's the second quilt I made and is the first one which was machine pieced: The problem with it smacked me between the eyes every time I looked at it (which was at least a dozen times a day!) and slowly but surely drove me batty(/battier).  I'm sure you've already spotted it but, just in case you haven't, I'll tell you: the border was wavy, the corners weren't square and it didn't hang right due to a combination of the aforementioned waviness and me taking notice of a blog post about 'I don't make hanging sleeves for quilts, I put hanging triangles in the corners'.  As someone who detests making hanging sleeves (even back at the beginning of this hobby!...

One of the items on my FAL list was this 12" (finished) hand-pieced ( not EPP!) test block for the ET Phone Home block  (pattern by  Lynne of Lily's Quilts ): The first thing I needed to do was to give it a good press! I'd made the block to test the templates (and work out my stitching sequence) before starting to hand piece enough blocks for a quilt - I haven't made much progress with the quilt but more on that later! I used fusible wadding on the back and then machine quilted (with navy thread) in all the ditches, apart from the four 'squaring up' corner triangles, in an attempt to reinforce the circular appearance of the block: As seems to be usual with me and fusible wadding, I forgot to add a backing fabric!  I think it's because I usually use fusible wadding with cushions or bags/pouches where a backing fabric isn't strictly necessary and so my brain forgets to remind me.  It forgets to remind me about a lot of things... Anyway,...

I've been chained to my sewing machine since my last blog post, desperately trying to finish quilting the fairy quilt (which is based on Sarah's Stained Quilt design ) so that I stand a chance of having it finished by my niece's birthday (mid-July).  This is how it looked at the halfway point: The straight lines (1" apart) are much faster to do than the not-quite-wonky-but-far-from-straight lines I pulled out but the quilting wasn't without its annoyances.  Every now and then (about every 600", I think), I'd get a loop of top thread on the top of the quilt, almost like the bobbin thread wasn't pulling it through properly.  I tried everything I could think of to fix it (new needle, rethreading the top and bobbin thread, altering the top tension, altering the bobbin tension, sewing really slowly, sewing a bit faster) but nothing seemed to work and, as it's such an intermittent fault, I can't replicate it!  It just meant that I had to keep a ...

While I was waiting to get wadding for the fairy quilt (more on that later) and then waiting again for thread to be delivered, I managed to get a few projects from my current Finish-Along list finished.  The first was the Bargello cushion from my last post  and today I'm going to introduce you to Mr Fancy Pants Pouch (or Mr FPP, if you're feeling familiar). Back in March last year (so it's only taken just over a year to finish - I call that good going!), I won a giveaway (sponsored by The Village Haberdashery) on Katy's blog  for the fabric and notions to make a chevron clutch , which designed by her for The Village Haberdashery . Mr Fancy Pants Pouch (my name for him, not Katy's or Annie's!) was supposed to look like this: Image taken, with permission, from  The Daily Stitch (The Village Haberdashery's blog) . Photo credit: Annie Barker, The Village Haberdashery but I knew I'd rarely use a clutch bag (I don't really go out on an e...