My Plans for January

A new year means a fresh slate and time to make plans for the month.

RAINBOW SCRAP CHALLENGE

The obvious one to start with is the Rainbow Scrap Challenge.  The colour nominated for January is blue.  At this stage I have no idea what I will work on, but it will be fun having a look around the interweb for inspiration.  There will be something to share by the end of the month.

MY MAIN MONTHLY GOAL

My main goal for this month was to have the Wensleydale Quilt blocks joined into a quilt top.  Well, that has now been amended to having the quilt completed.  Yes, that means quilting it on Elly May.  I want this quilt to look nice, and I still have very little experience with the new set up, so some practise is required first.

Having said that, if I don’t feel confident enough with how it will turn out, I will be happy with having the quilt top put together.

USING ELLY MAY

I have three quilts that I want to quilt before attempting to quilt the Wensleydale Quilt.  They are:

The Secret Garden Quilt that I pieced at Scrub Stitchin’ last year.

The Five and Dime Quilt that I started to piece at Scrub Stitchin’ last year.  Before this can be quilted I have to finish piecing the top.  That won’t take long.  I will put it up on the Design Curtain while it is still there to see where I’m up to.

The William Morris Quilt that I pieced at Scrub Stitchin’ in 2022.

That should take care of the quilting and work on the sewing machine, but what will I take to my stitching days?

Hopefully, the William Morris and Wensleydale Quilts will be at the stage of needing the binding stitched down by hand.  (The others will be by machine.)

I have quite a few Christmas project kits that have been hanging around for several years.  I would like to work on some of those and they will be ideal to take to stitching days, as some have quite a bit of hand stitching.

KNITTING OR CROCHET

I would like to have one knitting or crochet project on the go, but no more than one.  At the moment the only one on the go is the Spiked Granny Square Rug that I started back in 2024.  All the squares were made and crocheted together, only to find that they wouldn’t sit flat, so I separated them all again.  I have been putting off the rejoining of them, so I think this should be the month to do that, so I can start another project guilt free.  Wish me luck.

15 MINUTES A DAY

Let’s see if I can manage something every day this month, as our calendar is fairly free and I feel inspired with all my grand plans.

NON STITCHING GOALS

There aren’t many.

1. Try a new recipe.

2. Read a book.  I have one half read.  It shouldn’t take too long to finish.

3. Have a fun day out.

4. Finish my jigsaw.  I seem to have been distracted with other things.  It will be good to get it completed and be able to reclaim the dining table.

Fortunately, our calendar is fairly free this month, so there may be a hope of achieving the above.  I will give it a good shot, anyway.

An August Escape

It’s about time that I shared about our recent trip to Baradine to attend Chooky’s second retreat for the year at Camp Cypress.

This was held on the last weekend of August and was a much smaller affair than Scrub Stitchin’.   

Chooky arranges everything for this event, including all the catering, hence it is kept smaller.  We went to the Bowling Club on Thursday night, with all other meals at Camp Cypress.  She did a fantastic job.

The event officially started on Friday, but quite a few arrived on Thursday afternoon, so that they could get stuck into stitching and socialising nice and early on Friday.  Mick and I actually arrived on Wednesday, so that we were there to help set up on Thursday.

There were a few quilts decorating the walls.  The gorgeous one on the top left is a Jen Kingwell pattern completed by Natasha.  The others are mine.

There were lots of industrious sewers and lots of socialising.  Here are just a few random photos.

There were some impressive projects in the works.

The purple one by Linda is a work of art and intricate foundation piecing.  The top completed by Miss Jules was from a fun fat quarter workshop she recently attended.

Natasha is working on using the scraps in her stash and is making this fun and colourful quilt.  Lynda was having fun playing with her Tilda fabrics.  Brenda was busy making prosperity hens.  So sweet and simple to make.

By the way, Brenda was celebrating her birthday in the days following the retreat, so of course there had to be cake…..be it just a weeny teeny one.

So, what did I get up to?  Not much, actually. I didn’t take my sewing machine, as I was still in recovery mode and not to use an iron or rotary cutter.

I did manage to finish the slow stitching on the panel I had started.  The bottom photo shows what it should look like once it is made up into a pouch.  It is currently sitting in its tub waiting for me to work out how I am going to proceed from here.

Once that was done I actually brought out the Anni Downs pouch that was our project at Scrub Stitchin’ in 2024. I had only made a tiny start and wasn’t happy with what I had done.  This time I made a small start on the wool applique.  I do hope to have it completed before Scrub Stitchin’ next year.

In the evenings I did a little of the crochet on my corner to corner rug.  So, for three days, it wasn’t much to show, but that doesn’t matter.  The event is all about friendship and catching up, and I did plenty of that.

Of course there was impressive show and tell.  I will share that in a separate post.

As always, we loved our time at Baradine and  catching up with all the girls.  Now to wait until April next year when we can do it all again.  Bring it on.

I Have a Finish

I was determined to complete the Wisteria coloured Corner to Corner Rug this month and it is done.  Yay!  It’s just a pity that the wisteria isn’t flowering as yet.

I ended up just finishing it with a simple shell border.

This blanket will be donated to Wrap With Love, a charity that provides knitted and crocheted blankets to those in need, with many being shipped overseas.  I attended their annual local knit in back in July, where just over 100 blankets were on display before being sent on their way.

In other crafty news, I had one more play with the design curtain before packing it away.  These drunkard path blocks were made several years ago as yet another Rainbow Scrap Challenge project.  The original plan was to make two cushions, but I really don’t need any more cushions.

I was recently browsing through some old Homespun magazines and noticed this on the cover of one.  The blocks finish at 4 inches, whereas mine finish at 3 inches.  If you look closely, she has them laid out in two settings - a pinwheel style withe low volume centres and then the ones with the coloured centres with the colour in the corners.  I have enough to make the centre of a quilt, or possibly a border to form part of a medallion quilt.  To make that work for a square quilt, which I quite like, would require me to make eight more of the small blocks, which is four colours.  That wouldn’t be too hard.  Anyway, in the meantime, they have gone back into their box to be played with further at a later date.  The magazine is now with them, to provide inspiration.  

I have made a start on the knitted top, but will share a photo when it has progressed a bit further.

Finishing Mum’s UFO

This is a bit of a strange one, as my Mum didn’t have UFOs, she was a finisher.  She would work away on a project, finish it and then move onto the next.  Her daughter did not inherit that trait, and it always surprises me that Mum didn’t encourage me more to finish things off.  

Anyway, I digress.  Back to the UFO.

A couple of years after Mum moved into residential aged care she was looking for a little something to make and we found a cute cross stitch bookmark kit in Big W.  This wasn’t long after she had had a mini stroke and I don’t think any of us realised at the time just how much it was affecting her cognitive functioning.

It never did get finished, and when I started going through her craft tubs I found how far she had got with it.  She had marked the centre line on the pattern and tacked those centre lines on the Aida, although not needed on a project this size.  Then she had threaded a needle with the six strands, rather than the two and progressed no further.  Dear Mum…..  So, is this actually an unfinished object, or an unstarted object?  Who knows.

Well, this serial starter, and often not finisher, of a daughter thought she had better finish off Mum’s bookmark. In the process I tried a few new things.  We recently bought a couple of stable tables at a garage sale and I finally had a brainwave to use it when stitching.  It works really well. Who’d have thought??  I then decided to actually use an embroidery hoop.  I know the centre ring is supposed to be wrapped, but this is just one that will be used for a Christmas decoration.  That worked well too.  Fancy that!!  Then finally, I used my new little magnetic needle minder.  I’m a sucker for green sewing machines.

I started it on Friday at my stitching morning, did a bit more on Saturday and finished it off yesterday.  The weather was even warm enough to sit outside in the sun, down to a t-shirt yesterday, which was rather lovely.

Now, being just a cheapy kit, the Aida band wasn’t as nice as most and the threads, although six stranded, the strands were really thin.  Not as nice as DMC or other well known brands, and there was not felt to back it.  However, I just worked with what there was and found a bit of felt that matched in my stash.  Having said that, the design was super cute.

It’s not the greatest of finish on the back, but I’m going with finished is better than perfect.  The crease in the felt will come out in time.

I’m really pleased to have finished this off for Mum.  Are there any other UFOs?  Yes, just a couple. The only reason these are in existence is that she forgot how to crochet and knit.

While in the nursing home, she crocheted the tops of kitchen towels, while she remembered how to crochet.  There are a couple that have had the row of blanket stitch worked, ready to do the crochet, and a few tea towels, that haven’t been started to be worked on.  There are several tubs of coloured crochet cotton to use on them, so I would like to work them up.  

The other is some knitted squares.  Mum used to knit knee rugs using two strands of wool, one a constant colour and the other all sorts of coloured scraps.  Her last knitted rug ended up rather messy on the second half.  She then tried to just knit ten inch squares using the same colour style.  There are a few squares completed.  I’d like to make some more to make a small knee rug, to honour her last ever knitting.

At Long Last - I Finally Have a Flimsy

Whenever I have started a more detailed quilt I have given myself a two year time frame to complete it.  This has worked fairly well in the past, as once the quilt top was completed I would send it off to my long arm quilter to work her magic and then bind it.

However, my most recent more detailed quilt has been in the works for nearly three years and today, finally, it is a quilt top, so still not completed.

I bought the book shortly after it was released.  There is no date on it, but it was definitely prior to 2019, as I made a wall hanging from the book that year.  I knew I wanted to make the featured quilt and started “quarantining” blue fabrics in my stash for future use.  Natalie Bird was selling the complete set of EPP papers at the Sydney Craft Show one year, so I bought them and added them to the “kit” as well.  I bought a final few fabrics in early 2022.

I made an actual start in June 2022, in readiness to take with me on our three month caravan trip.  While travelling, I worked on the EPP hexies and the next EPP section and did some stitcheries on the appliqué blocks, even though the appliqué had not been stitched down at that stage.

Gradually, I made progress over the next little while.  The hand stitching was great to take along to the two stitching groups I had joined.  The last of the Dresden appliqué on the final border was completed in March last year.  What!  I didn’t realise it had been sitting, waiting patiently, for that long.

It was then that I hit a road block and it has taken me until now to finally get going again.  The problem was that the checkerboard and appliqué round was too long.  I had thought I could ease it and the next border, but it didn’t work.  I wondered why it was out so much, but I now realise it is because I had pressed many of the seams open, rather than to one side.

Finally, last month I removed the offending rounds and this week reduced the length of the checkerboard round. The process wasn’t as bad as I had feared. 

Yesterday, I reattached the checkerboard round with no flaring and today added the final two borders.  To say I am happy to finally get to this stage is an understatement.  It will now sit patiently again, until I work out how I am going to quilt it.

Oh, and it will suit our bed rather nicely, once it is finally completed.

Stitching in December

I just had a look at my goals for this month and think I did rather well.

I’ve already posted about the Three Yard Dog quilt that was my goal for the Chookshed Stitchers and One Monthly Goal, and the Christmas decorations.  

In addition, I completed a long term UFO, being a little quilt to donate to the neo natal unit at the hospital.  I made its matching one a couple of years ago.  Can you spot the boo boo?  I couldn’t until I was in the process of quilting the cross hatch.  I had cut the second row from the right half an inch too wide.  Oh well, it will stay as it is.

I also added the final two borders to the Dr Seuss Quilt.  It is now waiting in the wings to be quilted.

Remember how I sorted out my sewing threads.

Well, at the same time I actually got my overflowing little scrap tub that lives on my cutting table and took it out into the kitchen and sorted the scraps by colour.

The scraps were then put in their designated coloured box.  That looks better.

While on a roll, I went through Mum’s embroidery threads that now live here and pulled out all her DMC threads.  Any that were on cards are now in the containers with mine and any duplicate skeins are put aside, so that, like my sewing threads, when I run out of a colour I can shop the duplicates first.  Add to this, all the odds and sods that Mum has and I think I have a lifetime’s supply.

My final project start for the year is a kit that I purchased at Baradine at Spring in the Scrub.  I made a promise to myself that I would make it between Christmas and New Year.  I’m pleased to report that I succeeded.

My one comment on this make is “What a Cow”.

I had my first go a spray basting.  It went well, but made the machine needle sticky, so had to keep wiping it down.

The bag stiffening is really stiff, like a hard felt.  It was incredibly difficult to manoeuvre under my machine.   Even to quilt it was rather difficult. Maybe, foam such as Soft and Stable would be easier.

Also, when stitching the sides to the base, there were three layers of batting and eight layers of fabric.  My machine really struggled with it.  However, we got there in the end.  It is definitely not my finest work, but finished is better than perfect.  

After all the trials and tribulations of this project, I like it very much.  It is really pretty and will be good for taking my projects to my stitching days.

Lastly, my hexies.  Yes, I did manage to get all the remaining hexy flowers stitched.  A long session on Zoom one day certainly helped.  I then proceeded to get them all glue basted and have already appliquéd lots of the one inch hexies onto their background.  Tomorrow will be a Zoom day for the Chookshed Stitchers, and I plan to have a very long sewing session, so should get quite a few more done.  Getting the quilt top made before Scrub Stitchin’ is looking very promising.