Farmers wife and being organised

I seriously need to get organised, use my time more productively. I have stalled with the poor farmers wife quilt along, I have about 35 wee blocks done, not insubstantial but still only about a quarter of the way through. How do I fit these into my already insane schedule? I figure if I can get some cut out, maybe about four cut out at a time then I can use the half hour in the morning when I used to walk Bud to get them done, if I aim to do two a week I could get another 30 done by Christmas, I would be well over half way then. Anyhoo, here are some pictures of my finished blocks to try and inspire me.

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Moving with a purpose

Right, we are getting organised in the patchwork room, farmers wife templates looked out for next three blocks. I was horrified to see that I have only done twenty six blocks instead of the thirty or so I thought I and done ... Not good!
I also want to participate in the It's a mini quilt sew along from Moose on the porch. I was so lucky to win this book in the Hello Sun BOM by April Mae designs.
I have more charm packs than you can shake a stick at so I really want to use up some of the ones which have been languishing at the bottom of my charm pack box.
There is one which I got from the 2010 Birmingham quilt festival, I attended the Fat Quarterly design challenge (at which I was dreadful, can't design at all) anyway I got this charm pack, it is so not my colours, they are dark and very muddy. So this poor charm pack has been feeling very unloved. BUT inspiration hit when I paired it up with this perfect fat quarter, I have decided this will be the first mini I do from the book for the sew along, don't you love it when a plan comes together!
Here is the (now loved) charm pack and it's very own fat quarter.

well that picture was lost, thanks blogsy!


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On point, or not as the case may be

I thought long and hard about going back to my regular patchwork class n a Wednesday evening. I had to stop going while I was having chemo. I hadn't been able to go for a few months before that due to work. I have been thinking long and hard about why I quilt and what direction I want to take with it. I will never sell my quilts, I always want to remain doing them for pleasure, but I don't want to stick doing the same old stuff with different fabric. My illness allowed me the freedom to explore a bit more, be more adventurous. Which I thoroughly enjoyed.
So did I want to go back to a class where we do tend to stick to the more traditional techniques?
Well on balance I would say yes, I had such fun last night, lovely seeing old chums and so relaxing just pootling away at blocks I know well.
Also I realised I still need to work on my accuracy, as these quarter square blocks show:

One on the left I am pleased with, the one on the right, not so, but I'm not going to take it out .... It's not that bad :-)
So roll on class, it is actually quite a clever quilt which uses flying geese units to create the illusion of it being on point. Progress pics will be posted.



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Swapping, lesson learned

So I took the plunge and entered my first ever quilt swap the 3rd round of the Brit quilt swap. After several weeks of frantic sewing quilting and fretting my little baby (literally, the brief was a mini quilt) was posted on Saturday. Sitting mulling over the experience (accompanied by a chilled glass of rose) I wanted to record, mainly for my own benefit, lessons learned from the experience.
So what do I take away from this?
First off, yes I do tend to overcommit but that is not necessarily a bad thing, I was more than able to complete what was a quite complex quilt in the allotted time.
Secondly it's not the quilt itself which tripped me up but the peripherals which I did not consider until it was too late (well almost!)
What do I mean?
Well packaging for posting for a start, standing in Bonnybridge post office with half an hour till closing is not the best place to decide on what packaging to use.
Binding - I need to practice this, I do too much by machine and need to get hand sewn binding cracked.
Label!! Most of my quilts go to Project Linus so I do do much in the way of labels, I need to start, there were some beautiful labels in this swap, i must learn to do better ones.
But my partner loved it (well was polite enough to say she did :-) and I had great fun doing it. Here is the finished result.

 

And because I did two centers, one light and one dark, I had a spare with which to make a mini mini quilt.

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