FAL Finish: ET Phone Home Mini Quilt

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, the back shows the quilting better:

I didn't have any of the navy fabric left for binding (I use scraps for test blocks), so I used a facing instead; I don't have a photo of the completed back (and it's now pinned to the wall and I'm not taking it down!) so you'll have to imagine it!

I do have a photo of the front, though:

And here it is on the wall:

I think I'm going to put my lovely banner from Sheila above the clock as it will be the perfect place for it and will hide the rawlplug hole!

I'll be linking up with Adrianne when the time comes (that's from tomorrow, if you need a reminder!):

I haven't made much progress with the 'official' ET blocks (i.e. the blocks for the quilt I hope to have...one day!) as I've only managed two blocks:

I'm making slow progress for a couple of reasons: the first is that it isn't high up on my list of sewing priorities (but will be moving up as I'm soon going to/aim to run out of hand sewing but I'll tell you about that another day) and the second is that it takes ages to prep each block!  I think the main reason for this is that the background shapes are irregular and so don't tessellate - this means that it takes me ages to lay them out to make maximum use of the fabric and that tracing round them is also less efficient than, say, squares.  Also, I'm trying to make this as scrappy as possible so I'm aiming to only use each 'triangle' fabric once in each round, across all the blocks.  I've prepped one of each of the three sizes for all the fabric I'd pulled for this quilt but will need more if I'm going to achieve my aim (I think I'll need 280 different 'triangle' fabrics if I make 35 blocks.  I might make less than that though, or I'll be collecting my pension before I've finished making blocks!) - I'll reassess once most of these triangles have been used:

While I'm busy trying to tick things off my FAL list, Archie continues to live the life of Riley (or Lord Muck, take your pick!):

I hope you don't expect me to move anytime soon...

And he occasionally wonders how many photos of him I actually need:

Oh, it's you and the camera.  Again.

I'm off to finalise my selection of plants to buy with a voucher I won from Thompson and Morgan in a Twitter giveaway (free plants, how marvellous!!) as I need to spend them by tomorrow...

Thanks for popping in!