Surprise! It's me again and it's not three months later or 2015.

We have another finish at Chez Sunshine. 

Speaking of sunshine, we have had THE most amazing weather here. We have had days and days of beautiful sunshine, although some of the days and a lot of the nights have been freezing cold.  Down to 3 or 4 deg C at night. That's cold, really cold.  It has been good for my sewing productivity though. Cold enough for me to be quite happy to hand quilt with a quilt on my lap. None of that horrible humid, sweaty OMG I'm going to die from heat exhaustion stuff happening here at this time of year. Yay.

I digress, I was talking about a finish. I've finally finished the Red Letter Day quilt top. Unfortunately it's not exactly an award winning photo, but I've realised that if I wait for the perfect light etc to take a photo, the photo never happens. Then the blog post never happens either. So for the rest of this year, you get to see photos, good or bad, and I. will. be. blogging, even if it kills me!

 All 9 blocks completed. Like I said, not a great photo, but you get the idea.  If you follow me on Instagram you know I had a bit of a problem with the lack of grey background fabric. Fortunately with a bit of creative unpicking and re sewing, I had enough to finish the middle block. It is supposed to be the reverse of the rest of the blocks but as usual, I had to do my own thing, so I played around with the fabric in the middle block, and came up with something  a little different. I just noticed the middle block looks like it has measles or chicken pox. Great!  At least it doesn't (I hope) look like that in real life.  I used a variety of fabrics from lots of different lines. Not one piece of fabric was bought for this quilt, it all came from my stash. 

I'm pretty happy with this quilt top even though it hasn't exactly turned out how it was in my mind. Don't you hate that! I always have these visions of amazing quilts, but when I start putting it together, it's often not quite as awesome as I thought it would be.

Here's a close up of the centre block, with some AMH Innocent Crush.

Not my finest sewing skills, but I'm pretty happy with how it's come together.  Don't hold your breath for a complete finish on this one any time soon, as I have a lot of WIP's that I really want to finish first, including the one below.  Gee, hand quilting takes a looooong time, so I'm very slowly quilting Starflowers.

The hand quilting thread is a variegated perle 12 cotton. I love the subtle colours and they work really well with the colours in the blocks. I'm slowly perfecting, ha ha, or at least improving, my stitch length and the ability to quilt in a straight line. Who knew that could be so difficult on such a short distance.

A lot of socialising and enjoying the Noosa weather has been on the agenda too.

This steak was as good as it looks, from Little Humid, Noosaville

We spent a couple of hours at Hasting St in Noosa last week and had lunch in the Sheraton bar. I love the decor in this bar. Even though it was cold enough to be wearing boots, and a cardigan, it was nice to soak up the tropical ambience.

BP and I went to Lake Weyba in the late afternoon last week, just before sunset. How beautiful is this view?  I sometimes take this piece of paradise for granted, I need to get out and about more.

WIP Wednesday

Subtitle :  The week I turned a shower cap into a quilt block.


It's been a while since I joined in on WIP Wednesday. Lots of things have been happening at Chez Sunshine, not much involved sewing.
However this week I'm back into hand sewing, not without dramas. I think we all know by now that just about everything that involves sewing on this blog is usually accompanied by a drama!
In my last post I was less then impressed with my attempt at sewing a block for the Material Obsession BOM.  You can read about it here. Go ahead and read it, I'll wait.
You might need the background for this to make sense, then again, not much I say makes sense.

Fo those of you who already read my last post here's the photo to jog your memory, this was what I finished up with something very closely resembling a shower cap.

Despite wanting to throw it in the corner and forgetting about it, I was given a few helpful hints like running over it with the car to flatten it, using a huge amount of spray starch and ironing it to death or sleeping on it, literally, to flatten it. I had already tried starch and the iron, and I wasn't quite ready to take to it with the car, although I must admit I was very tempted.  Instead I grabbed my trusty seam ripper and worked on the seam between the inner and outer circle as individually they lay flat before I sewed them together. I then took a look at the seams between the aqua and blue triangles. I realised I had used a scant 1/4 inch for the seams rather than a full 1/4 inch, so I sewed over every seam again. I wasn't about to seam rip all of them!!!!!

After doing that I sewed it back together, which also involved more seam rippping as I managed to catch the centre circle in the seam - twice, grrrrrr. Naturally I hadn't managed that amazing feat the first time I sewed it together.

Here's the final result.

Better, not great, but it is better!

This was after lots more spray starch and pressing the crap out of it.

Centre circle

Now it doesn't have a hole in the middle in case I need it as a shower cap.

Growing slowly

More hand sewing.

A few weeks ago I joined in on the Scrappy Swap run by Kat. For my scrappy item I made a scissors case. This was completed a few weeks ago but I couldn't post about it until I knew my partner received it. I drafted my own pattern with the help of a friend and made the first one in pink to see whether it would work and then made the second one in yellow and grey as my partner loves that colour combination. 

Front

Inside

Front

Inside

Back

I'm really happy with both of them, especially the fussy cut bird on the front of the grey/yellow, using Joel Dewberry fabric. 

I forgot to take photos after I had sewed the magnetic catch to them!

Worked On This Week

Starflowers

Material Obsession BOM

If I Ever Work On These It Will Be A Miracle

Mystery Quilt

Floral Bouquet quilt

HST project - finish backing

McFLurry - start making the backing - (I think I should aim for a finish for Xmas 2012)

Circle Game BOM
Hexagon Cushion
Monochromatic Challenge

Weeks Statistics
Worked On - 2
Ignored - 7

Thank you Lee for hosting WIP Wednesday. Pop on over to Lee's blog to see lots of creativity this week.

Friday Night Sew In

I'm linking up with FNSI which is hosted by Heidi from Handmade by Heidi and Bobbi.

I hope you haven't stopped by in the hope of seeing some absolutely stunning project that I whipped up last night, as you are going to be very very disappointed.

Friday night started with an attempt to quilt more Circles of Doom.  I'm not sure whether I jinxed myself calling them that or they really are circles of doom.

If the world ends tonight I'm going to blame them.

I originally quilted them a few weeks ago as they are in the above photo. It didn't work, in fact they looked crap, so I had to unpick them, that's when they were christened The Circles of Doom.

After hours of time spent getting to know my seam ripper, which by the way is a very nice seam ripper, I was finally able to start quilting them in a pebble pattern. It was ok but I wasn't really happy with my Pfaff foot that came with the machine as it was a closed toe foot and gave me a limited view. I ordered an open toe foot and waited for it to arrive. I started quilting with the new foot last night, at first all seemed fine, but the longer I used it the more problems I had. The tension  kept on changing, I broke three needles last night and it just wasn't looking great. After a couple of hours of frustration I gave up in disgust.

I then went on to finish the pinwheel blocks, yay.

All was well until I checked some of them. A few had come out too small and the ones that I had to unpick the other day had slightly stretched out of shape.  Enter an hour of rotary cutter fun (dripping with sarcasm here), cutting them down to size. I still have about half left to trim.

Spice Boxes quilt top

Final attempt at being creative was to start hand quilting the Spice Boxes quilt. I'm not even going to show photos of that disaster.  It's not quite bad enough to stab it repeatedly, set it on fire and then run over it with my car, twice, BUT....................

A summary of my evening: FNSI would stand for a whole lot of other not very nice words if I had my way. There were plenty of those words flying around here last night. 

I hope everyone else had a much "funner" night than me.