Archie The Wonder Dog

Yes, I did it!  I've finished my niece's quilt in time for her birthday!  In fact, I've finished it about a fortnight to go so have plenty of time to keep it in the airing cupboard to ensure it's completely dry after being washed and (mostly) tumble dried. I started this quilt in April and wasn't at all sure I'd get it finished in time (there's nothing like deciding to make a quilt for a present when the birthday is fast approaching, is there?!) but thanks to some canny block designing which made the (machine) piecing as quick and simple as possible, as well as putting just about everything else aside, I'd finished piecing the top by the middle of May: As you can see, it's quite a large quilt for a soon-to-be four-year-old (this is a double bed  and hers is a single) but her mam likes quilts which go over the top of the pillows and can be tucked under them, like a bed spread.  It'll make a great quilt fort, I'm sure! The quilting wa...

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 ...

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...

My new FAL list  contains two new items which makes a pleasant change, don't you think?! The first one is a Sakura shawl , using this beautiful alpaca/silk mix: Lynz  and I are knitting in tandem (and holding each other's hands through the tricky bits!) in a very informal knit along which, at the moment, has a lovely slow pace to it!  The yarn was found by Lynz at  Maple Tree Yarns  and was a bit of a bargain as it's no longer going to be stocked - there are a few skeins left in the shop and when it's gone, it's gone!  My yarn is 'Drake' and is gorgeous but hard to photograph, or that's my excuse! After a slightly sticky start (we had to email the designer for help with a couple of things, most particularly where to do a make one left and where to do a make one right and Leila Raabe * couldn't have been more helpful - she emailed back within a few hours and spelt things out for us and didn't make us feel at all daft.  This is one of th...