Archie The Wonder Dog

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 ...

Anyone else now got a craving for a chocolate biscuit?! Item eight on my Q4 FAL list (item eight) was a Christmas cushion using the penguin fabric and octagons (surrounded by white frames so they'd look like they were on ice/snow), and it looked like this at the start of the quarter: As I said, my plan was octagons and I'd carefully measured the penguins to check what size octagon they'd fit in without having disembodied flippers appearing in the frame, and that size was 2" x 2  3/8" with 1/2" triangles taken off the corners to create the octagon.  However, when I spread the fabric on the ironing board and started ironing the templates in place, it became apparent that there were three or four sizes of penguin and my original plan wouldn't work.  You can see here how few penguins fitted.  And it's also a lesson in opening up the fabric before making a plan as it's much more obvious from a distance that not all the penguins are the same size...

The last time I mentioned my polar bear cushion (I think), I was having a bit of a dither about what to use to fill the spaces where I didn't have enough polar bears and snowflakes and had decided to start piecing and leave gaps where I thought something might go.  It turns out that piecing gaps is harder than you might think (I kept thinking I'd leave a gap and then finding I'd filled it!) so I decided to scrap all my ideas of using grey or turquoise fabric for the gaps and instead sacrificed part of the remaining polar bear fabric I was (still) hoarding, and cut more polar bears and hexagons. Once the hexagons were pieced, I checked that my plan for the trapezia and triangles round the edge would work (I'd deliberately kept the red snowflakes away from the edges so I wouldn't end up with two prints together):  And hand pieced those in place before choosing a border, which was attached using the machine: I pressed the seams and marvelled at the polar b...

...but I don't know why it's been an odd week so I'm going to blame the clocks going back!  I also don't feel like I've got anything done, so let's see what I can pull out of the hat, eh? I reached a couple of milestones on the blue and white quilt's hand quilting.  Here's Mini Archie helping me celebrate the first one: Three quarters of the way there!!! And here's Archie wondering whether he'll get his tea before I reach the next milestone: I'm sure it's teatime.  Tell me it's teatime.   A while later, after Archie's tea, I hit the milestone! One hundred stars quilted!  (Just 27 to go!) I've even bought the binding fabric, as I had a discount code for Simply Solids and wanted to use it before it ran out.  It arrived yesterday and I think it's going to work well: I'm now aiming to get it finished for either Christmas, or Mam's birthday in early January.  I was doing two stars a day during ...

Somehow, and I don't know how but it seems to keep happening, I volunteered (?) to make Mam a pair of cushion covers for her newly-decorated front room (I left her to make the inners) and so we went to a local quilt shop for a metre of coral fabric (surprisingly hard to find but it goes nicely with the pale green of her new carpet as well as the sandy gold of her settee/chairs), went to another shop and bought half a metre of her new curtain fabric (we even remembered to buy zips and thread) and I got thinking.  I decided to keep it simple, and by the time it came to write my  Q3 FAL list , I had the cushion tops ready to layer and quilt: I layered them and then marked (with a hera marker) straight lines 6" apart (to keep me straight) and then quilted lines 1/2" apart across the cushions using a pale cream Gutermann sulky 30: Not the most interesting thing to do! I then added a contrast zip flap on the back in the curtain fabric and a zip: Adding the zip ...