Follow your own path

I've been following along with Sandra Walker's QAL: "Follow your own Path". 

This is the top of "My path up", ...

... I hope, all our paths up out of the pandemic.

The last set of instructions for the piecing was given yesterday and I chose my layout and finished the piecing this morning. Well, I say finished, but I may add borders, I haven't yet decided. I'm not really a borders person, but this could become an exception.

The coloured fabric all came from my scrap baskets, the two greys from yardage. Initially I bought the Color Weave medium grey (the shadows) to use as background, but when I saw it in reality I found it rather dismal - the problem with ordering fabric online. I had just 0.5metre of the Color Weave light grey, and hoping this would be enough started using that as the background fabric. All that's left from that half metre is 2.5" x WOF.

Half a metre is nothing like the 1.5 yards specified in the pattern, so I reduced the block size to 5" x 3", half that of the pattern size. This has resulted in a wall hanging of 18" x 21". Making the quilt smaller was not my original intention, but a question of "Needs must!"; the alternative would have been waiting even longer for more fabric to be delivered.

I'm linking to:

Click on the buttons to see others' current handwork progress .

Stay safe and healthy,

Happy sewing

Marly.

One Monthly Goal for March

At the beginning of January I assigned a colour to twelve of my UFOs, with the intention on working on each project during the month of that colour in the Rainbow Scrap Challenge. Yesterday Angela announced the colour for March: GREEN. So while all the rainbow challengers are sewing green fabric I'll be making a background for:

my project with the green label, a collage which I started in February last year during a workshop with Elly Prins. I used a design by Laura Heine as the inspiration.

photo: Laura Heine (from pattern booklet)

I have been thinking of creating some sort of landscape as background/frame, but now will have to make a decision. The background is my goal this month.

I also plan on adding embellishments once I have quilted the piece; I have more ideas about how to do that! The real challenge will be her face: not too silly, too mean or too angry; we read so much into faces. But I probably won't get that far this month.

My goal in February has been progressing so well that I really want to continue while I'm on a roll. It requires relatively little work to make it into a top, so I shall probably be working on that too for the next couple of days.

I'm linking to

Click on the button above to see more sewing goals

Keep safe and healthy.

Happy sewing

Marly.

Overlapping Octagons is finished!

Overlapping Octagons is copied from a photograph of a quilt made around 1950 and featured in the book "Unconventional and Unexpected, American quilts under the radar", by Roderick Kiracofe. Making a replica of a quilt in this book was a challenge issued by Sujata Shah about a year ago.
Unlike the original maker I used the sewing machine throughout, although I now think I would have been faster sewing all those y-seams by hand. I chose to use red to meet the criteria of another challenge; about the same time the Ad Hoc Improv Quilters issued the challenge: "Red is the new Neutral"

The Y-seams are not only at the four corners of the red squares but also at the X joins of the string sections.
In this photo the octagons are maybe easier to identify.

Originally I tried using hourglass blocks as cornerstones in the string sashing. That didn't work as the hourglass blocks became too visible as hourglasses and didn't blend into the octagons. The seams also became very bulky as five fabrics came together at one point, as opposed to just three now. In the original the fabric in the "sashing" continues into the "cornerstone" so I went with that, as you can see in the picture above.

I used fabric scraps throughout. I started with red and blue 19th century reproduction fabrics - the ones that have been hanging around the longest - but soon used up that lot (hooray!!) and moved on to the more recent fabrics. Just two colours - red and blue - became very boring, so quite early in the process I introduced small pieces of other colours among the blue strings.

fabrics: scraps from stash
measurements: 38" x 44"
pieced with Aurifil 50 wt light grey
quilted with Aurifil 40 wt dark blue, dark red and bright red

 Although this was intended as a small lap quilt my DH has claimed it for the wall above his desk! 

Finishing this quilt was my goal of the month this month, (and last, and the one before!) but now it really is bound, labelled and all the threads are buried!
It is also the first item on my Q4 list for the 2019 Finish A-Long, hosted by Sandra at Studio sew of course.

I'm linking to: 

              

Click on the buttons to see more scrappy quilts and goals achieved. 

Happy sewing

Marly.

Finish Along 2019 Q3

My list for the FAL in the third quarter is:

1. Crocheted cuddle cloths 

 This looks finished, but only one arm is attached. And then there is the one for her twin brother!

2. Sweater for DH 

 Just needs sleeves and the neck ribbing

3. Clam-up pouch

 I only have to sew a binding down on the inside.

4. Sewing machine cover

using these blocks:

5. Cats and Dogs wall hanging

 - secret sewing -

6. Overlapping Octagons

All the vertical columns are joined, as are columns 3 and 4 to one another. Here is a detail from columns 3 and 4:

I'm linking up to Sandra Jansen at Studio Sew of Course for the FAL Q3 planned finishes link up.

Happy sewing

Marly.

OMG September Plus/minus is finished!

My goal for September was to finish my plus and minus quilt, that should have been finished by the end of August as my response to the Dutch MQG theme challenge for July and August. However, at the end of August it looked like this with just the top right corner quilted:

I'm happy I finished it yesterday, and can post this at the eleventh hour.

 The pluses are improvised blocks joined with filler (background) fabric into four 12" squares and then joined; the minuses I made in the quilting, along with some ghost pluses. My idea was, and still is, plus is visible, grabs the attention while the negative is in the background, less visible, but present nevertheless. The ghost pluses represent a no-man's land, an area of doubt and indecision.

close up showing two ghost pluses and a minus

Now I'd like to ask for some advice. Does anyone know how to remove chalk lines? The photo below shows what's left of my quilting guide-lines in 'Sewline' pink chalk. I have rubbed them with fingers, the eraser on the end of the 'pencil' and a clothes' brush, and still they're there. I don't want to heat or wet them in case that fixes them completely. Any hints or experience with chalk would be most welcome.
 

pink chalk guide-lines still visible after A LOT of rubbing!

Quilting this 24"x24" quilt has been all the sewing I've done this month. The quilting lines are 0.25" apart, and that takes forever! This is the last time that I do straight line quilting with shapes I have to go round, as this was a stop-start exercise from start to finish. But the finish was not the real finish:

burying threads and trimming them took two hours!

Last month I won a $25 voucher for the Fat Quarter Shop and received this package 10 days after ordering.

Thank you, Patty, for pulling my name out of the hat last month and to the Fat Quarter Shop for giving a prize. I chose this bundle because winter is drawing in, and I'm planning on alleviating the pending greyness with some fabric sunshine.


Finally another early morning picture of the plus and minus quilt.

The sun was obliquely to my right and slightly in front and I just couldn't get the exposure right. Of course I was breaking the first rule of photography: "NEVER take a photo into the sun," but rules are made to be broken, aren't they?

 I'm linking up to 

 (A bit late; I missed TGIFF last week)

 To see many more goals achieved click on the buttons above.

Enjoy Autumn (not to forget Spring in the Southern Hemisphere) while you can.

Happy sewing

Marly.