Cautionary tale from the patchwork room

Disaster has struck. I'm lucky enough to be in the scrappy trip around the world bee. I have five blocks to make, I made three dud blocks, at least half an inch too small due to seam error. But I persevered, spent lots of time carefully picking out fabrics my fellow bee members would like. I bought little packets of mother of pearl buttons to put in the packages, lovely postcards with vintage images of edinburgh on them to write a wee note on.
So all done ready to post off. I couldn't be bothered moving sewing machine to set up cutting mat on table so I just trimmed them up on the floor. I went into sewing room to have my lunch on Friday and had a cup of fruit tea with me that I laid down on the floor .... Well I don't really need to tell you want happened next, this picture paints a thousand words, there was not a single block left unruined. Needless to say a lesson has been learned.

Contrasts

These past few weeks have been very contrasty (is that a word? I'm a librarian I should know ...) working mainly on these two projects:
Sew a sampler from Popular Patchwork, I didn't think I was going to like this, really not my style at all but hey I eventually did like it, even though it has to be one of the worst constructed quilts I have made! I hashed up a lot of the rows, but I had fun.

These are the first few rows, I used up so many 2.5 inch squares which was great. The rows I really didnt want to do, the paper pieced houses turned out to be my faves.

With this quilt I fudged, I shoogled, I made a total mess of some of it. But I do love it in all it's wonkiness.



Compare that with the utmost precision needed for the Scrappy trip around the world bee blocks. I always stress about sending things to other people and these blocks need pinpoint accuracy:



Phew! I think I did it ok.

Stuff

At work we are trying to raise the profile of social media and how we librarians can help people navigate this brave new online world.
I've just been reading through my RSS feed of crafty, mainly quilty peeps. Goodness there are people (mainly women it has to be said) coding, building websites from scratch, porting RSS feeds from one reader to the other, using graphics apps to design quilts from scratch.
*sigh* and we crafty and librarian folks get a rep as being old fashioned ...

Favourites

I often post pictures of what I am sewing on twitter, I know I should get more into instagram but twitter is still my main stomping ground. I love seeing what it is people actually like. The two most popular pictures have both been of peeled back piecing, or folded fabric whatever you want to call it. This weekend it was my picture of the finished cathedral windows cushion cover:
This was a class from bearpaw crafts great fun!

A few months ago it was my tulip dance quilt from Southwind desings

I think I will do some more, I bought some more southwind patterns recently so when I clear my feet (hollow laughter) from all the BOMs and sew alongs on the go at the moment I will get cracking ... Watch this space!

A little hand sewing

Just trying out blogger on my mobile. Here is a wee pic of some handsewing, my cathedral windows cushion. Well half of it :-)