Friday sewing

On Friday I had a half day and I was working at home.  Well it should have been a half day as I had agreed to interview in the afternoon but the morning was free. As always a meeting got put in the diary so my morning was a little disrupted. The good news was that it wasn't enough to affect my sewing plans. I wanted to get to work on my monthly goal so before the meeting I set up my machine and made sure I had bobbins filled and everything was ready to go. The meeting was fun and left me in a great mood for quilting. I had 16 pieces of sashing to quilt. I'm still not sure how I forgot to do these as I went along the blocks. The good thing about quilting the same pattern is that it gets easier as you go on and as a result the sashing was completed very quickly. This quilt is very large and I decided to cut the outside border down to size to make it a little more manageable. I'm not sure why the border was quite so deep or why I wanted such a big quilt but by the time I had finished the border was a more manageable 2 and a half inches wide.

I have gone through stages with this quilt. At the beginning I loved the blocks and the colours and fabrics I'd chosen. As I was stitching it together I decided I disliked it but I was determined to finish it. When I lay it on my bed to check I'd quilted it all I realised I was very happy with it. 

The colours play well together. When I started quilting the sashing I wished I'd chosen a darker green but now I like that it shows up. I was using the quilt as a practice piece for free motion quilting. and I tried to make each block different. I love the different textures quilting creates. Early on with the quilting I tried to do the clam shell pattern. As you can see it's very wonky but I'm really happy I tried it. I used a template to do this but I been practicing since and it's much easier without the template.

I did some straight line quilting on a few blocks and I like the texture it creates

Having checked I'd finished all the quilting I added the binding.

I need to turn it to the back of the quilt so I can start stitching it down. To do that I needed to find my really useful clips, which turned out to be easy. I've now started stitching the binding down but I haven't got very far yet.

Yesterday I decided to work on my dolls house rather than sewing. I'm trying to get all the windows painted and into the window frames. I've finished the four windows in the basement. There are 5 in the main house and 2 dormer windows in the attic. I hoping to have them all done by the end of the week.

I'm taking this coming week off and I'm hoping to get a bit of sewing done. I have a repair to do on Richard's star trek quilt and I want to finish making my cutting board cover/bag. We are also planning on helping Katy and Olly with painting grandson's bedroom.

Finally yesterday was Missy's first birthday. We bought her home when she was 8 weeks old and she has settled in so well as part of the family. Happy birthday Missy.

I'm hoping to get a new photo of her this week.

Take care

Lyndsey