I'm back - WIP Wednesday

I'm back to 192 emails, sigh. I had accessed some of them while I was away but it still meant going through all of them to see which needed to be deleted.

I took very few photos.

Had a fabulous time.

I need a day or two to recover.

The Craft and Quilt show was good but my knee wasn't, so I didn't get around to all of it, and I didn't take a single photo there.

Met up with friends including a bloggy friend, hi Suz, it was so good to meet up with all my friends in Melbourne.

The weather was pretty darn good (for Melbourne in the middle of winter, hmmm make that, for Melbourne any time of the year).

Looking forward to going back later in the year. Next post I'll show the very few photos I took.

Now on to crafty things.

I took some hand sewing away with me to work on in quiet times. I really needn't have bothered.  I had too much fun and was way too busy to spend much time on crafty things. However I did finish block 1 from The Circle Game BOM.

Remind me not to do a practice one first, next time. I think my practice one was better than this one.

Since I've been home I also finished the embroidery on the blue Monochromatic Challenge block for the month of July. It's blueberries, in case you couldn't guess. I'm not so happy with this one.
Next month is pink.

I sewed a couple more diamonds to one flower-star. I want to make a few more stars before I start sewing them together. This is going to be a very loooong term project.

I'm really hoping that I will have lots of time this week to catch up on the Flurry quilt top and finish it, and work on some more of the French Roses blocks, because when I was down in Melbourne I picked up, from Amitie, this month's block which happens to be two blocks. Yikes I'm going to have to stop faffing around and get working.

It got a little squished in my suitcase.

Worked On This Week

Circle Game BOM - finished block 1

English Paper Piecing

Monochromatic Block - blue

Sitting On the Sidelines

Spice Boxes - binding fabric arrived yay!

Mystery Quilt 

Floral Bouquet Quilt

French Roses

Flurry Quilt

(oops that's way too many, now I'm starting to hyperventilate, thinking of what I need to do)

Waiting Patiently For Me To Show Some Interest

Same as the last few weeks ( How long is it before they are officially UFO's?)

Tiggly Winks - applique

Plume Quilt Top - backing

Jacobean Flower - mini quilt

Don't Look Now - cushion/mini quilt

Weeks Statistics

New Projects - 0

Completed - 0

Worked On - 3

Hyperventilating Over - 5

Ignoring - 4

Click on the WIP button above to go to Lee at Freshly Pieced to see other WIP's for this week. 

Hopefully next week I'll be able to catch up with a few of my projects and even quite possibly have 1 finished. 

Don't hold your breath though!

Red Monochromatic Block

It's time for the reveal of the block for the month of May, gosh, it's June where has the first half of the year gone?

I love red, I love wearing red shoes, I have a fabulous red handbag that I use a lot, I have red lipstick ( which I love but don't wear often), I have red scarves, red cushions on my bed, but funnily enough not much red in my fabric stash.  When I found out May was going to be red, I thought it would be really easy to find 8 co-ordinating red fabrics. Unfortunately I found a couple of solids, a batik and a couple of left overs from my Strawberries and Champagne quilt but that was it. Luckily for me, Melissa of Clothwork came to my rescue and sent me some pieces of gorgeous red fabrics to help me out.

My daughter also helped me by suggesting I stitch cherries in this bock. I'm really happy with how this turned out.  I'm so pleased I joined this challenge and decided to just do one block each month, it's been easy to continue, I'm really enjoying the process and it's pretty much stress free, as long as I don't leave it to the last minute as I have been known to do. 

I'm definitely going to work on finding some more red fabrics to add to my stash.

Orange

It's the end of the month already, it's time to link up with Judy at Patchwork Times,  which means it's time for me to reveal my Monochromatic Challenge block for this month.

Ta dah!




Here it is, my goldfish (just in case you weren't sure).

Orange for April was another great colour for me, I had quite a few orange fabrics to choose from.  It didn't take me too long to make a decision on what to embroider either.

I am feeling a little weird just doing a block each month when everyone else seems to be able to finish a whole quilt, but if I had attempted to make a Monochromatic quilt each month, I probably wouldn't have even made the first one. At least this way I will have twelve lovely blocks at the end of the year that I can use to make a beautiful quilt.

Some more orange loveliness, photos of amazing orange sunset clouds, taken from my verandah this week.







The colour for May is red, I am worried I won't have enough reds to choose 8 that co-ordinate.  I love red shoes, red handbags, red coats, red lipstick and red scarves but I don't think I have very much red fabric that will go together.

Stay tuned.

Brown Owl

The March Monochromatic Challenge was brown.  I have lots of browns so it wasn't too difficult finding some lovely browns for this block, and of course, I just had to embroider an owl. I found a clipart owl that I thought was extremely cute and this is the result.

I love the French words fabric, most of all as it has the word, Chocolat, my favourite food of all time.

Check out Judy's Patchwork Times for other finishes in the brown challenge.

Friday Night Sew In

Fridat night I stayed home instead of going out partying/clubbing, lol.  Pj's were on, ready for my second ever Friday Night Sew In.

I had been sewing all day to finish this quilt top, so even though I got myself organised (pj's on),  by the evening I had run out of steam.

I had grand plans to attach the binding on this quilt,

but I hadn't trimmed the quilt to size and I wasn't in the mood to get it out and move everything off my large cutting mat.

Instead I pieced a block for the Monochromatic Challenge.

That didn't take long and I was going to join in on the great carrot sew along party, but by then I'd had enough of sewing so I made this instead.

The cat seems to like it.

Then I cut a few of these for the Lily's Quilts Quilt Along.

Not quite as productive an evening as I had planned, but at least I've pieced the block ready to embroider, and I started on cutting out the Dresden blades, so not so many to do today. I caught up with google reader and flickr.  Oh and I started on developing a prototype for a crochet carrot. Hopefully I'll be able to post a crochet carrot tutorial soon.

Friday Night Sew In is over at Handmade By Heidi, so check out all the other (and probably far more productive) posts from everyone else.

Violet Violas - Monochromatic Challenge

Judy at Patchwork Times is hosting a Monochromatic Challenge,  February is violet. I'm making a block with an embroidered centre each month.
I thought this would be easy peasy, my favourite colour is purple,  I should have lots of purple/violet in my stash.
I didn't worry too much about making this block earlier in the month as I tried to finish other projects that I'd started.  So a few days ago when I looked at the calendar and realised that it was almost the end of the month I thought I had better get started. I went to my newly sorted stash, with lots of confidence that this would take a nanosecond, and oh, ummm, not very much purple there at all. I had a few batiks that I had bought years ago but didn't want to use them so I spent ages going through my fabric trying to find eight that went reasonably well together.  It also took me forever to decide what to embroider in the centre. My girlfriend J suggested pansies.

This is the end result.




Hastily made today, the 28th February, despite the fact that I had to drive 100km round trip to take my machine back to where I bought it as I couldn't get it to work properly this morning. Of course, as soon as they started it up and tried sewing, it worked fine.

Lesson learnt - don't leave things to the last minute.

Here it is!

Ta dah, my quilt block for the monochromatic challenge. Surprisingly I had quite a few yellows in my stash. I used some Heather Bailey Nicey Jane, Kafe Fassett, Innocent Crush, and the rosebud one is from my stash from quite a few years ago.

Excuse the loose thread and I think there may have been one of my hairs on one of the other shots!

I was searching wildly for ideas, when I found Little Miss Shabby's Birdie Stitches BOM. I didn't want to participate in that BOM but I used part of the stitch pattern as the centre of the block. A yellow canary was born and I surrounded it with log cabin piecing. Simple but a bit out of my comfort zone as I haven't attempted embroidery for many many many years. I think the bird has a goitre or an "outy" belly button, but other than that I am very pleased with how it turned out. 

I was about 3/4 through the embroidery when I realised I had turned the block on it's side, sigh, so my new design layout will probably have each block in a different orientation. Oh and it's not wonky even though it looks like that in the photo, it was resting on a cushion.

I used a Bella solids white charm square for the centre and the log cabin strips are 2 1/2" wide. 

Tuesday tidbits (and tails)

This is the only photo from Christmas Day, thanks to J who was the only one who took a photo, as we were putting the food on the table.


The weather has finally improved.  We have had a couple of days of sun now, but that means increased humidity.  I'm not complaining though as anything is better than 8 days with no sun and too much rain.
It's hard to believe that all that rain has caused such damaging flooding north of here. The area affected by flooding is equivalent to the combined size of France and Germany and in some places it's 9 1/2 metres above normal river height, that's about 30 feet high, imagine if that was a tsunami! Over 200,000 people are affected but it.


We have had only very minor flooding in this area. On Sunday we had lunch that is adjacent to a canal off the Noosa River, in the photos below it is only a little above the normal height and that was only because it was high tide, you can just see the wall under the surface of the water.

We had a very nice lunch, the restaurant had big windows/doors that were wide open so we had a beautiful breeze to help keep the heat and humidity to a minimum.

I've started on another quilt top, this one is for my dad, the pattern is from Elizabeth Hartman's book, The Practical Guide to Patchwork. 

Some of the blocks ready to be trimmed to size. I'm using Martinique again as my mum asked if I could make a quilt for my dad using the same fabric that I used in my mum's coin quilt.

It's not even a remotely masculine line so I've tried to de-feminize it by only using the non-floral prints and omitting the apricot colour way and most of the red colour way. I'm hoping it will not look girly when it's finished.

In more exciting news I have decided to........... drum roll please, ta dah, join a challenge. A first for me.  Judy over at Patchwork Times is hosting a 12 month MONOCHROMATIC CHALLENGE. I think hope this is within the realms of possibility for me. I am going to make a block a month, not a quilt a month, I'm still debating exactly what kind of block I'm going to make. This month's colour is YELLOW.  Surprisingly I had more yellow in my stash than I thought, so I don't even have to buy any extra for it, yay. This leads me to my next challenge, I'm going to try to make each block with the fabric I have in my stash. 

Stay tuned to see if 

a) I can decide on a block

b) make one

c) I don't buy any more fabric for the challenge, (I probably won't admit to that if I do)

d) last the year and make 12

I'm very lucky, I have my very own Protector of Quilts.

He's good, he can protect two at the same time.

 He's doing a marvellous job on the two that are basted, and ready to quilt.

The Quilt Protector taking a break from his duties. It's very tiring protecting quilts.