What's on my design wall?

I glanced up at my design wall this morning and realised it was full of things I haven't blogged about yet. There's a post, I thought!

You may remember I was working on this block from Foxley Village. The handwork is complete. Yaay. There are pieced blocks to do but I'm waiting till the end to do those —

And the Ohio star blocks I was making in my last post got finished and joined to form a row for my row-by-row adventure —

And here are three of the rows together —

Ha! I see I miscalculated the width of my star row. Unpicking will happen at
some stage!

Next up, there are a few more leader-ender churndash blocks made for my Omigosh quilt —

Something else I haven't even talked about is this project. Years ago (2011!!!!) I started doing the My Town BOM from the Homespun magazine. I made a couple of blocks and then decided I didn't really care for it so much. There were different contributors to the quilt and they didn't all seem to work so well together (imho). So I stopped. A few years later a wee group of us local friends decided to do a simple round-robin. Starting with a centre block, narrow borders, and ending up with a cushion sized piece or small wall hanging. I decided to use one of the blocks I'd done from My Town. Things happens, people got sick, and the whole swapping thing really slowed down and seemed to disintegrate. I was particularly slow completing a block I was working on, and refused to collect my finished bag until I'd done it...which really wasn't until earlier this year.
Anyway here is what I started with - the Quilt Shop block —

Two others worked on it and here it is now. I think it is pretty much perfect as it is and aim to just quilt it and put it on a wall in The Palace. (Thank you to the ladies who worked on this for me, I adore it!)

The photo's not the best sorry. Believe me, it looks great.

Next on the design wall are a couple of blocks from the grunge club we've been running at work. I'm going to sidetrack and make more of the Broken Wheel block as I've decided I love that one the most and think it will make an effective quilt.

The Owls were a bit of a play before I got sidetracked (in a major way) with my International Sisters blocks. We'd been using the Sew Kind Of Wonderful QCR rulers at work for a class and some samples. I had one (unopened!) at home so wanted to experiment. I'll get back to these One Day!  

(These rulers make curves so easy and fun!)

And last but not least. The Penguin blocks. I love to pattern test for Juliet of Tartankiwi. The Little Blue Penguin I've shared before, but not the Baby Chick. I squeezed him in between feeding calves a month or more ago and had forgotten to share his photo. Another cute pattern!

And speaking of calves (subtle segue?!) here's a pic I took this afternoon. I moved a mob of calves into the paddock next to the house so it's easy to sneak up on them with a zoom lens!

Whew, what a busy design wall full of plenty of things to keep me busy for months! Now that I have photographed and blogged about them I can put them away in their special places :-)

'til next time,

happy stitches, 

Friday Night sewing

Friday night was a chance to sit and stitch with others for Friday Night with Friends. Thank you so much to Cheryll for hosting us all :-)
I worked on my current block of Foxley Village (block five). After making some wee flower dots —

I started appliqueing them to the gaps in the row of flowers —

Just the three to do tonight and then this part of the block will be finished - yaay!
I didn't get much done for FNwF as bed was calling - we'd had a very early start to the day when a possum decided to pay us a visit. We woke at about 3.45am to a very excited little dog making a fuss. Expecting him to be playing with a mouse the cats had brought in, we got quite a fright to see a possum scurrying around the house trying to find a way out! After the complete tour, the MOML managed to shut him in a room with the sliding doors wide open - whew. By the time the wee dog had got over the excitement it was cow time and no point trying to get any more sleep!
Pop on over to Cheryll's blog to see what everyone got up to.

Last week I finished sewing my International Sisters blocks. 50 altogether. I'm now gathering fabric for the sashing and borders so have put it to one side for now. I became quite obsessed with these blocks so it was probably a good thing that I've had to pause....they were taking over my life and nothing else was getting done hehe!

It was so much fun hunting out all the fabrics!

While I'm waiting to get back to my Sisters quilt, I've pulled out my Row by Row quilt. We were doing this as a sewalong through the shop and I've got a little behind.
The next row is Ohio Star blocks, and the challenge fabric is the black script in the block below —

I've made these two and decided on the fabrics for the next ones. They'll be my leader-ender project for the next week. It'll be good to advance this project :-)

I think I have a home week this week so I see some more sewing in my future!

'til next time, 

happy stitching,

Churndashes large and small

(And a few other things)
(Hmm I've just had a thought - I think these are Shoo-fly blocks not Churndash blocks. Never mind!!!)

I had a  couple of quiet days recently that I spent catching up on some sewing. Days like this are few and far between at the moment so I must say I did enjoy myself.

Since my last post, I've made four more Churndash blocks for my scrappy Omigosh quilt (a long term project). I know churn dashes can be whipped out pretty quickly but when they're made up of lots of little units they take a bit longer!

But oh so satisfying!

And because it was too tempting not to, I joined a few blocks. Looking good! Busy but good.

Very scrappy :-)

The next bunch of churn dashes made up even more quickly when I remembered there's an 8-at-a-time method for making the half square triangles. Yaay for google which helps out in times of need!
There's quite a few tutorials if you do a search, here's one for starters.

Two larger squares, two drawn lines; 8 HSTs

Not much to trim, just a few dog ears.

And, pretty quickly, a wee pile of churndashes for my row-by-row QAL.

I'd gotten quite behind on my Row-by-row QAL being run by The Country Yard. Five row ideas have been released and before the weekend I'd done only the first two.
We get a suggested block, a required size and a piece of feature fabric which must be used.
One reason I stalled (aside from a lack of time!) was that I realised I'd become too mitchy match with my fabrics and I was going to end up with a whole lot of samey samey.

Rows One and Two

It took the house row for me to break out of the rut and add some more colour and variety.

The four rows I've done together —

I don't often use a darker background fabric but I'm loving this one! The compulsory fabric is the pastel coloured script you can see in some of the blocks.
Four rows done now - just one more (some stars) to catch up on.

One of the ideas of QALs like this is to use scraps and claim a bit more storage space. I decided to rebel and am trying to create scraps of these fabrics for another fun quilt I've got my eyes on (hehe).

In other news, I've been chipping away at the blocks for my One Monthly Goal of getting Whimsical Woodland to a flimsy state. This is the last of the stitchery blocks that needs assembling.

I'd like to do a shout out to QuiltGranma who has been leaving me some lovely comments recently. Thank you! Sorry that I can't reply as you show up as a 'no-reply commenter' and I don't have your email address. You asked specifically about the possum fur in the yarn I used for the shawl I made for Mum. It's fairly readily available as a mix here in New Zealand, although it is a little more expensive than standard sheep wool. Here's an article that might be of interest and explain New Zealanders' keen use of this fur in our textiles.
The morning has disappeared on me - it's time to go get some firewood in and let my chickens out for a run.

'til next time,

happy stitches,