Meet my quilting fairy godmother!

 

 

This is Thimblena, my own personal quilting fairy godmother.  (Why does she have green skin, you ask?  Because the instructions challenged us to be creative.  And because I needed two values of the same colour, not too textured or printed, and green is what I found.)

Linda at Paper Panache.com regularly posts paper-pieced Mystery Blocks but this time she has outdone herself – every one of the Godmothers is  different!  (I have no idea how she did that!)

 

 

There is a parade of godmothers on the site right now.  Take a look at  http://paperpanache.com/  The results are fantastic – some are young, some are old, some look stern, some are gentle.  And the wonderful variety of fabrics and embellishments will astonish you. 

Until the 10th of September you can vote on your favorites in several categories.  Not only that, the pattern is still available, free of charge, so you can make one of your own. 

A new tote bag

A small challenge group I belong to chose the theme Water.  This gave me an opportunity to play with some curved piecing.  I’m happy with the result (but I’m not quite sure why the waves are running up and down…..)

August UFO -- Hexagons

By the time we got to August, this bag was nearly empty. Back in January it contained my samples from a strip-pieced hexagon class.  But I finished up the lap quilt months ago  when I needed it for a special gift. 

This meant I just had a table runner to complete.  I pinned the layers for quilting and decided that a simple stitch-in-the-ditch would suffice.

But all that open muslin was too tempting to ignore, so I let myself do a little more…..

Harvest time begins

 

We didn’t plant potatoes this year.  But about a dozen plants appeared in the garden and thrived.  Today we decided to see what they had produced.  We have two buckets of lovely spuds, plus these small ones.  I can see oven-roasted baby potatoes, perhaps a touch of garlic, for dinner……

UFO completed for July

 

We are past the halfway point.  It feels great to have worked on more than half of the UFOs selected for the year’s challenge! 

July’s UFO was an easy one to finish.  The baby quilt was made as a sample for a beginning quilting class and the top was complete except for the outer blue border.  This meant all the hard work was done – all the figuring out how to make one small piece of Thomas the Tank Engine fabric stretch far enough for 9 blocks.  If you look carefully you’ll see I cheated a bit and used a few scraps of a green calico that more or less matched.

The quilt has a flannel backing (used up a couple of good sized scraps of green and yellow flannel, getting them out of the stash as well, hooray!). 

I quilted it with the panto “Sprung” from Willow Leaf Studios – it’s a perfect one for little boy quilts.  This quilt is done done!  Except for the label which will wait until a recipient turns up.

Have you ever been tempted….

…to leave out one of the ingredients in a recipe?  Baking soda – the recipe calls for only a teaspoon or so, and the stuff doesn’t even taste good!
I had the first pan of cookies in the oven when I realized what I’d done.  Too late for that batch.  I hurriedly mixed baking soda into the remaining dough.  Was quite amazed at the results!


The duds weren’t wasted.  My son said they tasted fine, and I notice they have all since disappeared. 

Another UFO off the list!

 

June’s UFO bore the title “Ugly Blocks”.  This project began with a challenge on Stashbusters group to make a sampler as a BOM using an ugly fabric from the stash.  My ugly fabric is one of those 36” wide prints from years gone by – nice quality fabric, but I really don’t like the brown!  I made only two blocks before realizing I wasn’t going to keep up with the project, but I kept the blocks and fabrics together.  Then when I needed some samples for a class using the Creative Curves rulers I dipped into the same set of fabrics and added a few more blocks to the collections. 

Six blocks do not make a very large quilt, so I had to increase the size with sashing and borders.  When I saw the cheerful Scrappy Spiderweb over on  Kathy’s Quilts blog I was reminded of much fun a piano keys type border can be.  I think it frames these blocks and brings out the colours nicely.  The top is 46” by 64” now – this would make a respectable lap quilt, or it could be donated to our Prayer Quilts group.  I’m not finishing it at this point, but it will be added to the pile of Useful Tops.