Archie The Wonder Dog

...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 ...

Hello! (I know, I'm here again!  I can't quite believe it...) This week has been a week of dithering and hand quilting yet more stars.  I've quilted just over two-thirds of the stars on the blue and white quilt, here are the latest two: I started cutting the hexies for my first Christmas cushion, and discovered I was eight hexies short of a cushion (a phrase I'm hoping passes into common usage!): so I set about trying to work out what to put in the gaps, which is where the dithering started.  First of all I removed the plain hexies: which I liked, but something's going to have to go in the gap so I searched through my stash and found some options: and the only thing that helped me decide was that I'd use the stripy fabric for the binding.  (Thanks, Clare !) I thought that laying the hexies over the options might help (that was less fun than you might think!, but it didn't: but it didn't stop me trying again: Still no dec...

I think we're around halfway through the first quarter of this year's FAL , so I thought I'd write a bit of a progress report on my list, which you'll find here .  I'm just going to share the projects where I've either made progress or have finished and blogged about them, so if an item isn't here then it's either finished and awaiting its moment of glory or, more likely, hasn't been touched. The big blue and white quilt (which I'm making for Mam's spare bed), has been machine quilted.  Here's how it looked at the start of the quarter: And this is how it looks now: I added an awful lot more lines than I thought I would.  I originally planned to do the vertical and horizontal ditches between the blocks and then across each diagonal on the nine patches, but when I'd done that, it didn't look finished and the ditches of the snowballs weren't quilted.  I decided to add four more lines per block and get a four patc...

Back in July 2011, Lynne and Gayle started the Hexalong .  About a month later, I decided to join in and, just over four years later, I've finished the quilt!  (I'm not sure how many other Hexalong quilts have been started and/or finished but there are times when I've felt like the only one still plodding hexing along!) This was my initial fabric pull, bought from various UK shops: Not all of these fabrics made it into the quilt (second, fourth and fifth from left were culled) and lots more stash fabrics were added as I went along.  In the end, I used just over 60 different fabrics. This was the first hexagon I made: I found pieced hexagon patterns from all over (Lynne and Gayle's blogs, traditional quilt block books, my head) and decided what to make as I went along.  I took group photos at various stages to help keep me motivated (although that wasn't really necessary, I loved every minute of piecing these hexagons and was sad when I finished t...