Archie The Wonder Dog

In October 2015, I made a trug to keep bits and pieces in (it's really handy if you're taking a project to someone's house/a workshop as you can fit lots in it!) and in the following months, I made a rotary cutter pouch, a needle book, a scissor holder and a Lola pouch from the leftovers (I started with a yard of the black and white print and a metre of the turquoise solid).  That left this little lot: I decided that I'd make a mat for my sewing machine to sit on when it's on the table, as it's a bit awkward to push away from/pull towards me when I'm working.  And it would be a handy place to stick the odd pin or place a reel of thread on and not have it roll off the edge of the table.  As you can see, there's not an awful lot left, particularly not in large pieces, so I decided to add some bright pink solid (to reflect the pink trim on the inside of the trug and the pink quilting and pandas on the pouch) and the remnants of orange sketch I had le...

In May last year, I took part in a blog hop for Oakshott and made a table runner from their gorgeous Lipari range, which was being relaunched.  Before I launched into making the blocks for the runner, I needed to piece a test block to check the templates worked.  Here it is mid assembly: I couldn't leave it on its own, so let it choose some potential friends: I decided to stick with the fabrics from Monico Solorio-Snow 's Sew Yummy collection for Cloud 9 fabrics , so out went that multi dot and in came some tomato pin cushions.  I made an exception for the bead lines second down as that would make an ideal binding. I pieced these blocks in fits and starts in between other projects as I found that having made sixteen whole blocks and four half blocks, my enthusiasm was somewhat lacking.  To think that when I made the test block I thought I might up the size a bit and make a big quilt!  I think not! At some point I had three blocks: Then I ha...

Me again! (I know, no posts for months and then loads in one week.  I'm going to try to be better next quarter!  Crowd (off):  mutters We've heard that before...) Way back in October, I started work on a tutorial for the 2016 FAL and chose to demonstrate how to accurately insert narrow (1/4") strips into a piece of fabric and, of course, I needed a project to demonstrate it on. I decided to make a table runner from pale grey Oakshott, with strips of darker grey inserted (and with blocks of turquoise inserted into those).  I didn't manage to get the runner quilted, so at the start of this quarter, it looked like this: And here's a closer look at those inserted strips: I spent a while puzzling how to quilt it until I took it to show a friend and we puzzled together and eventually decided that echoing the strips down the length of the runner would look quite nice. I measured the width of the inserted section (11 x 0.25" = 2.75") so I knew ho...

I'm back again with another finish!  (I have seven in total this quarter so expect a flurry of posts from me as I catch up with myself.) Following on from yesterday's post about the blue and white quilt , today's post is about the two cushions I made to go with the quilt, which were made from the 'bonus' HSTs created when I made the snowball blocks (although I'm not sure 'bonus' and '508 1" HSTs' should be seen in the same sentence). Back in August 2015, while I watched many episodes of something on DVD (I know not what, I suspect I've blanked it out in order to blank out the reason I was watching them, namely...), I set the seams on, and then pressed open, 508 HST units.  They then needed trimming to a uniform size (1.5" square), which I did over many (many!) evenings while watching telly.  I had a nice little system sorted with a mini cutting board on an old Next catalogue on my knee, a box for the trimmed units on one side ...

*gropes around for light switch*   *gasps in horror at the dust*  *flicks around a tickle stick*  *shows age* Hello! Today the Q1 finishes link opens for the 2017 Finish-Along and I thought it was high time I started catching up on blogging about my (sort of) recent finishes. My Q1 FAL list can be found here , and this blog is all about item one, the big blue and white quilt. I started the quarter in my usual manner: like a greyhound out of the traps.  I then continued in my usual manner: having a lie down about quarter of the way round.  This time, it was more pronounced because I wanted this quilt finished in time for my mam's birthday in early January. At the start of the quarter, the project looked like this: I don't know what that ball of perle is doing there, I certainly didn't use it to sew down the binding! and I just needed to sew down the binding to the back. Here's how it looked when I finished it: I started this project in ...