November #focuscuttingsewalong roundup

Hello everyone!

I did actually keep up with this sewalong for the whole of November! But I have otherwise been so busy that I didn't get around to writing my post about it. So here are my five November blocks on the theme of Fabric.



The first week was 'just because' fabric. 

This was for using fabric that we had bought 'just because' with no clear project or idea for using it in mind. So I went with Angry Birds Star Wars fabric. Because there is never a good reason to buy this, especially as it's a game I never played (I am a Star Wars fan and a gamer, but Angry Birds is not actually my type of game) and yet for some reason I bought two different fat quarters on two separate occasions. It is really cute fabric, though. So I could hardly pass up this opportunity to actually use it.

Next we had fabric from our earliest project. 


My actual earliest projects are from over 30 years ago, so for me this was about finding an earlier project from which I still had some fabric left over (that wasn't at my Mum's house) and that fabric was actually suitable for focus cutting. I went with the focus fabrics from this pair of baby quilts I made for my friends twins, born in 2010.


The third prompt was Fabric from our most recent project. 

I didn't have any recent finishes to work with, so I chose the project I have been working on the most recently, which regular readers will know is my Halloween La Passacaglia. Thanks to some fabrics from siblings for my birthday, this has been chugging along slowly in the background and I have completed another round on this purple rosette, which features the eye fabric from this week's block.


Next up, the prompt was Fabric from our proudest project.


I struggled to know what to do with this one. I am proud of all my projects, but very often the ones I am most proud of don't feature the right sort of fabrics for focus cutting. So in the end, I opted for the Halloween La Passacaglia again, and chose some of the orange fabrics so there would be a contrast with the previous week. You can see where these fabrics feature in this post.

And the final week in the month was a freestyle week. 

I have been looking for an excuse to use this cute ringtail lemur fabric by Rashida Coleman-Hale, and I liked that I could use the lines for a framing effect 

I really struggled for something to go in the middle of this block. I auditioned a lot of things that didn't really work. Plains were too plain, and patterns were too busy.


And my husband was zero help. Apparently he developed an instant and pure loathing for the pink fabric and declared that because he hated it so much, he would instantly hate anything I put with it. I asked what was so bad about it, apparently it's just everything (Also 'That's not a lemur! It's a wineglass with a wiggly stem!'). So that was unhelpful. I guess you can't please all the people all the time. In the end I plumped for a scrap square of purple Libs Elliott fabric. You can't see in the photo, but it does actually have two metallic lightning bolts on it.

So that's November! The theme for December is Winter/Christmas. I am already behind on this, so I don't expect to manage another roundup post this year. The 2022 shape has been announced as well, it's the kite. We will be joining 6 kite shapes together to make a hexagon block. I am quite looking forward to this, as that will be a quick sew, so I am definitely joining in again. I haven't yet decided what size I will be doing - either 1 inch, to make sections easy on myself, or 1.5 inch to have a bigger sized block for turning into an eventual quilt.

Thanks for reading!



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