Making butterflys

Last week I decided I needed to get work back under control, after all I'm only paid to do 4 days work i.e. 30 hours. Recently it has regularly exceeded that time. All week I tried to make sure that I got home at a reasonable time so I had time to relax before cooking dinner and I had time for some sewing. For the baby quilt I'm making I needed 17 butterfly blocks. I'd already made 5 and over the week I completed 7 more.

Yesterday I made the final 5 and added their antennae using fabric pens.

Completing the butterfly blocks was my monthly goal for May. Having finished them I'm having a little celebration. Now I need to make 18 9 patch blocks!
 

Yesterday I also needed to do some housework and a mountain of laundry and so this was the sum of my sewing. John and I also had some errands to run. We are about to decorate our bedroom and so we needed paint and some patching plaster to fill the holes where we'd moved a radiator. We also stopped in at the garden centre where I bought a new clematis to replace the one that got damaged by foxes.

I might not have done any more sewing yesterday but I did pull out the instructions for the tuffet. The instructions come in a booklet with quite a lot of writing and some pictures. Here's page 1 

Before starting the top for the tuffet I needed to read all the instructions. I might never have bought it if I'd realised the instructions were in small print and quite densely written. I spent the evening reading them and got my head round what I needed to do. There is quite a bit of prep before I can start stitching plus I need to buy some muslin for the foundation piecing and the shop isn't open until Tuesday. However I pulled out my jelly roll and started sorting the strips.

I started by sorting them into colour groups. This morning I trimmed the strips. They needed to be 2 inches by 20 - 21 inches and I needed 64 strips. This meant I got 2 pieces from each strip of jelly roll. Cutting half an inch off each strip took time but in the end they were all done. To start with I kept them in their colour groups.

Then I put them into 8 groups with one strip from each colour group. The top is stitched in 8 sections and i want consistency of the colour pattern. 

Finally I labelled the groups A to D. I had two sets with identical fabric in each letter group. As soon as I get the muslin I'm ready to start sewing. That's rather daunting as I haven't done foundation piecing before but if I take it slowly I'm sure it will all work out well and I'll have learnt a new technique.

The weather in London is very warm but it keeps on trying to rain. Rain would be good as it's been some time since we had anything very much. The garden is looking quite dry. When it's very hot we haven't been taking Scamp out for a long walk as he needs to be clipped. His coat is long and curly so he gets very hot. Today since there was a chance of rain we took him for his favourite walk. He's one happy dog and is now curled up asleep reliving all the running he did on the common. 

Today is slow stitching Sunday but I can't continue work on my Bunny garden as I've left it at work. A group of us try to go to the park to eat lunch during the summer and I decided I could fit in some hand stitching while we talked. I was in a hurry to leave work at the end of last week and left my stitching on my desk. That means I need to pick some hand stitching to work on today. I think this is going to be my millennium sampler. Last time I picked this up I was working on the border but I didn't complete it. We have a couple of programmes recorded to watch this evening so I should get some stitching done.

I'm linking this post with Kathy from Kathy's quilts for her Slow Sunday Stitching Why not pop over and see what everyone is working on. This is as far as I got last time I stitched on this project. I did put a few more stitches in but had to take them out again as I used the wrong thread colour. Hopefully this evening I'll manage to get the right thread.

I'm linking this post with Elm Street Quilts for May One Monthly Goal Link up

Tomorrow is a bank holiday so no work. Yipee!  I'm not sure what I'll be doing tomorrow but I will fit in some sewing.

Lyndsey