Pyjama Party Sunday

Come and join in Pyjama Party Sunday. You don't need to have been in your pyjamas to participate, it's just that Pyjama Party Sunday sounds a whole lot better than Tracky Dacks Sunday (translation for non Aussies: tracksuit pants) or T-shirt and Jeans Party Sunday or Saturday.  I'd love you to join in and link up so we can all share in the love of PJ PS.

I was hoping to have this finished by this afternoon. Didn't happen.

I waged a war with the sewing machine and finally won, and had it fmqing for me without it changing the tension every 5 mins. Until then, my stitching was not exactly show standard, lol.

Just sneak peek photos today as I worked on the Red Monochromatic Block  today too, but can't show you the whole thing until it's finished. A huge thank you to Melissa for sending me some gorgeous snippets of red fabric to help me with this month's challenge.  A colour I love but for some very strange reason I don't have very much red in my stash. I will have to change that, I can feel a shopping spree in my future!

We had a lazy start to the day, Bitchypoo cooked pancakes but didn't quite read the recipe correctly.

Melt the butter before adding it to the mix!
Check out:
a) the large lumps of butter in the mix
b) how grotty the pan is, and
c) the smallest pancake, it has eyes and ears, should we try and sell it on ebay?  I could use the funds for my red shopping spree, lol!


Hope you all had and are having a lovely weekend,  and especially if you have an extra day this weekend for Memorial Day.

Friday Night Sew In

Check out Handmade By Heidi for other FNSI participants.

Friday night, and I sat down with my seam ripper, a pair of tweezers and a pin, to start unpicking  10 "circles of doom" on the Champagne and Strawberries quilt.

It's the raw edge circle quilt, pattern from Cluck Cluck Sew that I started some time ago and began free motion quilting a few weeks ago. The original plan was for a circle pattern on the circles but after I started I didn't like it because I quilted it too heavily and I think I'm going to change the pattern to circles/bubbles within the circles, after all the quilt is called Strawberries and Champagne. The pic below is probably one of the better ones, I'm too embarrassed to show the worst ones.

I unpicked one on Thursday night and it took me an hour, that's why they are now nicknamed the circles of doom.  So Friday evening, four hours later, I had unpicked three more circles. I really really dislike doing this, but I'll dislike the quilt even more if I don't do it. As someone pointed out to me, now that I've unpicked four, I'm over 33% of the way through. At least I can do it sitting in front of the tv, not that I can watch the tv as I'm too scared that I'll cut a hole in the quilt top, but I can listen to the programme.

I took a break from unpicking and went through my stash to find eight orange fabrics for the next block in the Monochromatic Challenge. I've also picked out the embroidery pic for the centre of the block, sorry,  you will have to wait for that to be unveiled at the end of the month.

So not much sewing, in fact no sewing, but I made a dent in the number of circles to be unpicked and I'm that much closer to it being finished.

Tuesday Tidbits (and tails)

Design Seeds

I found this site after my usual net surfing instead of doing anything like housework or crafty stuff. It's a great colour tool. Design Seeds, have a look at the lovely colour combinations that appear each day, they are great if you need some colour inspration.

I was planning to sew on the weekend but it was very hot, too hot to sit and sew even with the aircon on.
Saturday morning I went to a rotary cutting class at Patchwork Angel hoping to learn something extra as sometimes my rotary cutting is a bit hit and miss. It was quite a good class and there were some lovely ladies there. I learnt a couple of things and it reinforced that a lot of what I already do is correct. I'm really glad that I'm on the right track and by just adjusting a couple of things I should be able to cut more accurately on a consistent basis.
I was supposed to go to a FMQ class Monday morning, but I woke up feeling quite unwell and missed out on the class. I was disappointed not to go but I think I accomplished quite a bit of FMQing at home, I practiced on a fat quarter that I made into a quilt sandwich just getting used to the whole free motion thing, then I tried the pieces that I had prepared for the class.
I was very pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable it was and I'm going to have a go at quilting the raw edge circle quilt.

My first attempt on Monday - I just outlined around some bold flowers on a fat quarter, once I felt a little more confident I tried picking out details in the flowers and the leaves.

 The first photo I had just started trying to outline.

 Second photo, outline and detailing.

 Third photo, trying to stay on the line, hmm.

Trying to sew inside the line, hmmmm again.

This was a great exercise which I really enjoyed. I think I could spend hours outlining fabrics to practice. After I had filled in most of the details, I practiced stippling the background which I found not too stressful.

Later in the day I tried FMQ on some more traditional patterns that I had traced on to calico, I didn't find that as interesting and it was more stressful as every teensy tiny mistake showed up. I'm not showing photos of that as frankly it was rubbish! Great experience though and now I know to never use a plain fabric with contrasting thread if I'm going to quilt it, at least until I am a superstar quilter!

I think I'm really going to enjoy thread drawing, I'm still not sure whether I'm going to love stippling an entire quilt. I might have to try a few more mug rugs and doll quilts first.

My Keeper of the Quilts has been hard at work again, he takes special care of my rolls of binding.

A Wedge Tailed Eagle that visited on the weekend, the two birds at the top of the photo are crows that were harassing him/her as it was in their territory, one even landed on it's wing whilst in flight.

 The view on Sunday, just look at that beautiful blue summer sky.