Working on the frog quilt.

This week has seen high temperatures of 36 degrees celsius in the UK. I know that isn't high compared with some of the temperatures folks across the world are coping with. Missy and Twiglet have got a little grumpy as by the time I'm free to take them out, the pavement is too hot for their paws. The weather forecast for tomorrow is showing lower temperatures so hopefully I can take them for a long walk. Today, we should have been on a trip to a nature reserve in Lincolnshire, however the organisers cancelled the trip because of the heat. The reserve is very open and there is limited shelter from the sun so the decision was very sensible. That meant I had nothing planned for the day.  I quickly decided I was going to try and complete the blocks for the frog quilt. I had two different blocks to make but each block is made in 2 sizes so I needed  4 blocks before I could sew the quilt top together.

The first two blcoks were already cut so I got my machine set up and I started work. It started well but as I started piecing the block I got very confused with what went where. I made a coffee and then spent some time staring at the picture on the pattern and rereading the instructions. It slowly started to make sense and I got the larger block made up. Making the second block was completed really quickly.

I needed to cut the fabric for the second set of blocks. the second set was easier to put together but the cutting out was tedious. I had to do quite a lot of unpicking with this block as I kept making silly mistakes. I was so happy to finish them.

I decided to quit whilst I was ahead. I was convinced I'd make major mistakes if i started to stitch the blocks together. I'm hoping to complete the top tomorrow. Here are the blocks I've got for the quilt. First the stitched blocks. These were a lot of fun to do. The pattern has them all stitched in green but I decided I wanted some additional colour on the blocks. I do need to rinse the blocks to remove my lines when I copied the pattern.

Here are the pieced blocks, two of each design. 

I also have some fun frog fabric. I will use the ribbet for the backing and possibly I'll use the other two as borders in the quilt.

At the moment I can't make up my mind whether to free motion quilt or to hand quilt. I've only hand quilted one quilt so far and it was rather slow but I really enjoyed the experience.  I'll make my final decision once I've got it all stitched together.

I've been doing some work on my goldwork seahorse. Progress is slow but I'm enjoying the process. I'll give an update in my next post.  For now I'm going to have an early night and try to catch up on some sleep. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that we won't have a thunderstorm as I really could do with some good solid sound sleep.

Take care

Lyndsey