Saving the Best Till Last

How good is this? One completed Hexy Flower Quilt top.  I’m so pleased to have it all done.

My wish was to have all the blocks appliquéd in January, and then once that was achieved, it was amended to have all the blocks joined together. I had that done the day after I laid them all out on the design curtain.  Next, I wanted to add a narrow border, just to keep all those seam ends secure.  That happened late this afternoon.  Nothing like leaving things to the last minute, but I really wanted to have the top completed this month.  I have even prepped the binding, ready for whenever I am up to that stage.

While stitching away on my blocks, I was considering how to lay them out. I looked at various similar appliqué hexy quilts on Pinterest and some had all the blocks with the lump of the hexy flower at the top, some had the vee at the top and some were totally random.  Totally random isn’t me.  I also had to take into consideration that several of my background fabrics are directional and I hadn’t taken that into consideration at all when basting the hexy flowers to their blocks.  In the end I decided to alternate each block.  That worked for the backgrounds and also give the quilt a bit of movement, or so I think.  Anyway, I’m happy with what I chose to do.

The next decision is what backing to use.  Everything is from stash up to now, so I have to see what I can find that will be suitable. 

Then to decide how to quilt it.  An all over pantograph is just not going to cut it, considering all the hand work that I have done on it.  I could custom quilt it, but I don’t have the skills yet.  Then, I thought I could hand quilt it, but it is big and hard enough to lug around as a flimsy, let alone as a basted quilt.  Oh, and this would be my first hand quilted quilt.  Mick reckons to do straight lines to outline the blocks.  I may follow Mick’s suggestion and then do big stitch hand quilting around the hexies.  I’m not going to rush into anything at this stage.  It will come to me when it is ready.

Anyway, I am absolutely delighted to have it as a flimsy, as a quilt like this is something that I never thought I would make.

New Starts

Having completed the hand stitching on the hexy flower quilt, I was at a bit of a loss as to what to work on at our patchwork days.  I don’t take my machine, as it is too much hassle.

After a bit of a think, last week, I decided it was time to make the kit that we received at Scrub Stitchin’ last year, as I would like to take the finished project for show and tell in April.

It was all packaged up so nicely that it nearly seemed to be a shame to open it up….but of course I did.

I had everything prepped in time to take along and went to start stitching the pouch and really didn’t like the way my stitches were looking.  I think I want to add some Weaveline interfacing to the back to give it just a little bit of body.  

Now what?

I decided to duck home (fortunately, I only live five minutes away, if that) and get my pretty wool and start to knit the scarf that I would like to have ready to wear once the weather cools down, and let’s face it, that time will be here before we know it.  I had bought the skein of sock wool from the beautiful little wool shop in Rylstone, when we were on our way to Queensland last July.  I have a fabric scarf in similar colours and I wanted to have a warm one.  I had planned to start back then, but those hexies had me hooked.

Well, I just couldn’t get going on it at patchwork.  I dropped stitches, didn’t seem to be able to count and generally made a balls up of it.  That was really frustrating, as I have knitted the pattern twice before, rather successfully.  When I got home I ripped it all out and started again the following day.  You know what?  It really helps if you read the pattern properly.  Who’d have thought.

I have being enjoying knitting a few rows most nights, except when it has been far too hot and sticky and then took it along to my patchwork day on Wednesday this week and got loads done.

I’m now well over halfway there.  You just keep increasing on each row at one end of the scarf and decrease every second row on the other end, with the simple pattern row every few rows.  You keep going until you run out of wool. 

I’m loving the way it is looking and hope to have it completed fairly soon.

Meanwhile, the Scrub Stitchin’ project is waiting patiently for me to get back to it.  That will be the next job after the scarf is finished.

Oh, totally unrelated, but I must report that I have emptied three thread spools this month.

Chookshed Challenge for January

The number selected by Deana for the Chookshed Challenge for January was Number 6.  For me this was:

MAKE SOME CRUMB BLOCKS - No goal as to how many to make.  Just have fun.

That suited me just fine, as I don’t have the headspace for too much just at the moment, and besides, I was having too much fun with my Hexy Flower Quilt.

Looking at the blocks I had already made, I decided that red would be a good colour to work with and I have plenty of scraps in my tub.  It is easier to work on two at a time, as you can chain piece.

A bit later on I decided to get down the blue scrap tub, as it is overflowing.  This is such a fun, messy process.  Not at all quick, as you fiddle around finding the best sized piece to add.

This is what I ended up with.  They all are six and a half inches square.

And that’s all I did.  I had fun, as instructed and there is no project planned for these at the moment, so they will just live in their tin until I feel like having another play.  I may do some as a part of the Rainbow Scrap Challenge, now that I have belatedly decided to join in.  I just didn’t need any more pink ones at this stage.

I’m linking up with Deana.  Pop over to see what the other girls managed to achieve.

Famous Last Words

Remember back when I wrote my “Looking Forward to 2025” post?

Well, one paragraph read:

“I’m also forgoing the Rainbow Scrap Challenge after several years, as I have lots of blocks made, but no completed projects. This year I would like to focus more on getting those older projects finished.”

That rings true in most parts, but having looked at my Split Nine Patch quilt, that I have also listed as Number 8 in the Chookshed Challenge, I reckon it would benefit from another twenty blocks.  The easiest way to do that is to join in on RSC again this year and make a couple of blocks each month.

The colour for January is Pink.

The only downside, is that unless Number 8 comes up at the very end of the year, I will have to switch it out of the Chookshed Challenge.  Now, that is not exactly a problem, as I have plenty of other projects that I can slot in to replace it.  We will just have to see how things pan out.

Anyway, in the meantime, here are my two pink blocks for January.

I will now also add the RSC logo to my side bar.

Rosie Goes Blackberrying

Remember that Mick bought a little Suzuki Sierra about eighteen months ago and named her Rosie?   Well, he had been having a lot of fun getting her up to scratch, but she hasn’t travelled very far as yet.  One of our good mates has a property out of town with a section that can only be described as “goat country”.  It has been the perfect testing ground for Rosie.  

Mick has been out several times, but I went out last week for the first time.  You see, four wheel driving is not really my thing.  However, as there was the prospect of picking blackberries, I went along.

The spot where we picked was rather pretty, beside a small dam.  It is surprisingly green for this time of year.  Once it cools down a bit Mick and my brother hope to go camping here.

We were probably a couple of weeks early to get a good harvest of blackberries, but we were able to fill a small ice cream container.  Just enough to eat some and freeze some for later pancake breakfasts.  Yum.

Well, That Wasn’t Expected

This morning, at breakfast I was reading the comments on my blog post about my hexy quilt.  

One comment suggested that I could make a design wall using flannelette on a rod, suspended over a door using hooks.  Well, my first reaction was, I wish, but I haven’t got a flat surface suitable.  It’s not as though I haven’t thought of every possibility already.

A design wall is something I’ve coveted for some time, but there is no flat surface in my sewing room and all our wardrobes have sliding doors. It is just something that is not possible.

Well, while sitting at the breakfast table, my eyes fell on our large glass display cabinet in the sitting room, just beside my sewing room and the cogs started ticking over.  It wasn’t long and Mick and I had the tape measure out and decided that it could possibly work.  

A trip was then made to Spotlight. We bought a lightweight curtain rod, some flannelette and some plastic over door hooks.

The start.

The curtain rod was 2 metres long, so two widths of fabric would be perfect, with just a seam up the middle and no need for side hems………..except, when I got it home I discovered the fabric was 60 inches wide, not 42.  Blast!  Now there were side hems to sew, as I still wanted a centre seam for lining things up.

After a bit of work it was ready to hang.  

Ta da!  One design curtain.  It only seemed fitting that the last hexy flower that I appliquéd should be the first placed on it.

Then it was time to play.

All done.

This quilt is a biggie, so one row still ended up on the floor.  I love it.

I don’t think I will have a chance to start sewing the blocks together tomorrow, but now that they aren’t on the floor, I doesn’t matter if they stay there for a couple of days.  The best thing is that my sewing room is right next door to this cabinet.

Once the blocks are all together, I can pack everything up.  There is the minor matter that we can’t open the cabinet doors while curtain rod is hanging there.  Mick joked that he can bring a motorcycle into the sitting room and put it on the coffee table to work on, now that I have encroached on the space.  I know that is the last thing he would want to do.  Also, despite what I said in my last post, he would not mind me having the blocks on the floor, as long as he could get around them.

I’m so grateful for the comment that had me thinking again, as now I have a really useful addition to my toolbox.

The Final One and a Revised Goal

Hooray!  On Thursday night I appliquéd the last block for my hexy quilt.

This pile consists of one hundred and eleven one inch hexy flowers and eight two inch hexy flowers.  I started this journey back in May last year.  At that stage I had no plan in mind for them.  It was just some hand stitching to take to my stitching mornings and may tick the Rainbow Scrap Challenge box.  I thought it would a very long term project.  I kind of had in the back of my head that I would appliqué them onto a background before joining them……somehow.

Then, in about August, the quilt “Bigs and Smalls” by Anorina Morris, was published in Homespun Magazine.  The few larger hexy flowers appealed to me. Having seen this quilt, I now had a plan to follow.  I took my blocks to Baradine in September, only to discover that Brenda, one of the other participants, was also making the quilt, but much faster than me.   Now I had the goal to have at least the top made to take for show and tell in April for Scrub Stitchin’.

It has been such a good project to take to my stitching days, take away when we travel, and to meet my 15 minutes goal each day, but to the detriment of other projects.  I now have to think about what hand work to take to my stitching days.  

Having met my self imposed goal to have all the blocks completed in January, I have revised my goal.  Now I want to have the blocks pieced into a quilt top by the end of the month.  I’m itching to get started, but as it is rather large and I don’t have a design wall,  I will leave it until when I can play with them on the “Design Floor” and not annoy anyone (Mick) too much.  

Wish me luck.

Today’s Vege Haul

While much of the country swelters under extreme heatwave conditions, we seem to be having a cool wave today, with temperatures only in the high teens C.  It feels rather autumnal, although we still have about six weeks of hot weather ahead of us.  We have had to hunt out the cardies, which is a bit of a change.  We had temps in the mid 30sC just a couple of days ago, and that is the forecast for next week as well, so we should make the most of this cooler day.

Our vege garden is continuing to produce nicely.  Today I had a little bandicoot around the potatoes in the tyres and found a couple for us to enjoy.  I think they are ready to harvest, but we will leave them a bit longer.  In the mean time, it will be nice to try these little few of our first ever home grown potatoes.  

There was a nice little variety in today’s picking.  As well as our first potatoes, we have our first egg plant, with several more coming along on the plant, and our first cob of corn.  Our corn is a bit of a failure this year.  This cob is rather thin and there aren’t many more coming on.  Oh well, just a small taste will still be nice.  The beans aren’t producing much at the moment, but we don’t mind, as it gives us a bit of a break from freezing them every couple of days.  There are lots of flowers coming on, so there will be plenty more in the near future.

Remember our two zucchinis, one that rocketed away and one that did very little.  Well they were both supposed to be “Black Jack” variety, but the one that had taken off wasn’t.  Initially, it just produced a lot of rather spiky leaves and a few little fruit that mainly shrivelled up.  We seriously considered ripping it out.  Now, all of a sudden, it is producing larger fruit, more like a squash.  I’ll try to pick them while they are fairly small and treat them like zucchinis.

Tonight we have left over chicken and mango curry (yummo), so we won’t be using these veges today.  However, we are looking forward to a meal including lots of fresh veges tomorrow night.

In the meantime, I will make a double batch of Zucchini Slice for the freezer.  A serve is the best thing to take for my lunch on our patchwork days.

The First Two Weeks of Stitching

Now that it is already halfway through the month it is time to see what I have managed on the stitiching front during the first two weeks.

My aim for January was to make some crumb blocks for the Chookshed Challenge and to finish appliquéing the remaining 40 hexy flowers.

In the first week I managed to appliqué a whole two hexy flowers.  Big effort…..not.

One day I decided to have a play with my crumbs.  The result was two red blocks.  Hopefully, I will manage to make some more, but if it doesn’t happen, at least I have something to show for the month.

I did get the twelve inch block completed for our patchwork group’s group quilt.  I’m pleased with how it turned out.  This was achieved during a Zoom sewing session.

In the second week I was somewhat more productive, partly due to the fact that my patchwork group met for the first time in the New Year.

I have made good progress with appliquéing my hexy flowers.  At the end of the second week I had a total of twenty completed.  I have my patchwork group again today, so should be able to get quit a few more stitched.  The goal to get them all done by the end of January is looking very promising.

So far, I have already missed three days of stitching for fifteen minutes.  I’m not worried.  It is what it is.

Despite only minimal machine stitching on the crumb blocks, there is already one empty spool to add to the jar at the end of the month.  That’s a good start.

Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

It’s that time……

The veges are starting to ripen and we have sufficient tomatoes to make some relish.  This is the condiment that we use the most, and we ran out towards the end of last year.  Tragedy, but it did meant that I supported some little craft shops.  However, I know I am biased, but we really do like ours the best.

The recipe says to peel the tomatoes, but I am lazy, so just chop them finely.  This year our pot contains large tomatoes, tiny tomatoes and yellow tomatoes.  They all work.  Also, the onions are from our garden.  You know they are fresh when they are rather juicy and make you cry lots.  Here are the tomatoes and onions sitting in their brine.  That was supposed to be done the night before, but I forgot.  So, it was done in the morning and sat all day, ready for us to make the relish in the evening.

When it came to adding all the other ingredients, after draining off the brine, I discovered that I didn’t have sufficient malt vinegar, which I usually use.  I really didn’t want to have to go to the shops.  No worries, we used the dregs of some apple cider vinegar, the remaining malt vinegar and then made up the rest with white vinegar.  Once again, it doesn’t matter.  The recipe is rather forgiving.

Ta da!  Our yearly supply of Tomato Relish, all ready to go.

If you would like to try the recipe yourself, here it is.  My cousin’s wife gave it to Mum years ago.  I believe it may be a CWA recipe. It says “will keep for years”, but it never lasts long at our house.  Yummy with scrambled eggs.

For metric conversion, I used 3kg tomatoes, 1kg onions, 750g sugar and 250g sultanas.

Trying a New Recipe

I have not made trying a new recipe each month one of my goals this year, but that doesn’t mean that I won’t be trying new recipes.  Last night was my first one for the year.

This came about due to the fact that I had some frozen spinach in the freezer.  This was from the plants when we ripped them out in spring.  It was taking up valuable freezer space which we now need for beans.

The recipe I stumbled across is Beef and Spinach Cannelloni.  I’d never cooked cannelloni.  When it came to stuffing the cannelloni I decided that this will be a one off.  The recipe suggests using a piping bag, but that wasn’t going to work with the filling, so rather fiddly.  Mick came and helped and we had it all put together in not too long a time.  The sauce is really runny, but we figured that is to cook the cannelloni.

Well, it looked the part when it came out of the oven.

When plated up, the sauce had thickened to a really nice thick consistency and the flavour was delicious.  Despite being a bit fiddly, we have decided that I will print out the recipe and it will be made again…although not on high rotation.

Home Grown Veges Are the Best

Our veges are starting to come into full production, so it was time to use as many as I could for dinner last night.

In a baking dish I added a layer of red and yellow mini tomatoes, onion, garlic cloves, zucchini, beans, rosemary, oregano, parsley, basil and thyme, all from our garden. I then added red capsicum and pepper.  the original plan was to add chicken pieces, but when I saw that whole boned chickens were on special, I used that instead.  This one had a herb and garlic marinade, so there was plenty of flavour.

After baking for a bit over an hour, it was looking pretty good.

Simply served with mashed potato, it was delicious.

Guess what’s for dinner tonight?  There’s nothing better than leftovers.

I’ll be making this again and hopefully, next time I will be able to add some home grown baby potatoes to the mix.

My Plans for January

As mentioned in my last post, I intend to wind back my goals this year, but still hope to achieve quite a bit.

Deana has announce the Chookshed Challenge number for January.

But first, I’ve been having a little play.  I now have ten little tubs with their numbered project, ready to pick up and go.  Aren’t I organised!!!

I even pulled out my baggies of blue and green crumbs in readiness for the Sea Glass Mini Quilt.

OK, well one isn’t exactly ready to go.  Hopefully, it will turn up before its number is picked. 

Also, I'm definitely not organised.  As usual, my sewing room is out of control. It doesn’t really look that bad in the photos, but believe me, I can’t find anything, there is no room to put some of those things and I find it somewhat paralysing.  

Back to the challenge.......

The number selected is NUMBER 6.

For me, this is to make some crumb blocks. “No goal as to how many to make.  Just have fun.”  That is perfect for this month, as I have to get a wriggle on with some planning for the church Bicentennial.

This is how many I have already made last year.  Just as well I’m not joining in with Rainbow Scrap Challenge, as the colour is pink and I have sufficient of those for now.

Let’s see if I can fill my pretty little tin.  It’s a good thing I added all those extra scraps to their tubs recently.

I do have one other little project to complete very soon.  Our patchwork group is making a raffle quilt and I need to make one more square.  It will be a two inch hexy flower, similar to what I have been making for my quilt.  These are the colours I will use.  There will be a cream low volume background and the quilt sashing are going to be navy. 

My hand stitching for the month will be continuing with appliquéing my hexies.  All the two inch ones are now completed.  

That was done while I was on Zoom with the girls on New Years Eve.

I have 40 one inch hexies to appliqué.  I am setting myself the goal to have them all done by the end of the month.  That should be doable, as I can get quite a few stitched at my patchwork days.

And here is my way to light for photos, as the ceiling lights create a huge shadow. A bit how’s your uncle, but it works.

Of course, there are other things that I wish to happen, but they will be bonuses.

While I was getting out my hexy papers for the block I need to make I noticed my full cotton reel jar.  I have two of these lolly jars and always add my empty reels.  I’ve no idea why, I just do.

Well, on the spur of the moment I decided that I will see how many reels I can empty this year.  The empty jar is now in position, ready to go.  I’ll try to check in every now and then.  Do you like my cute little silver fish eaten picture?  This was a craft project we made at school when I was in 4th class.  The picture was the cover of a writing pad.  I found it when Mum moved out of her house and couldn’t throw it away.  It suits my sewing room so well, despite showing its age.

Anyway, enough waffle, time to get stitching.