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Ma uka to Ma kai Exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum

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Hello everyone! Today I went to visit the Natural History Museum and Pitt Rivers Museums in Oxford. It was my first time going back there since our move back to Oxfordshire, and I was delighted to discover an exhibition of Hawai ʻ ian Quilts had been added to the Pitt Rivers museum. Hawaiian quilts have a very distinctive, instantly recognisable style. They are characterised by striking appliquéd shapes with 8-fold symmetry. Often the appliquéd part is a single piece of material, with the shape created by folding it in 8 before cutting (much like making paper snowflakes). They traditionally feature shapes inspired by nature, such as breadfruit, pineapples and marine life. They are then often quilted with quite dense echo quilting - concentric shapes following the outline of the design. For those not familiar, the Pitt Rivers Museum is the result of a crazy archeologist/ethnologist called General Augustus Pitt Rivers who collected anything and everything from everywhere in the latter h...
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Focus cutting sewalong 2026 Month 3 roundup

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Hello everybody, Another 4 week block is over in the #focuscuttingsewalong. This month our colour has been orange. I have made 10 blocks in total. As you can see, the weather has finally cooperated enough for me to take some outside pics. Not every week though, I haven't been quite that lucky. This month I have been trying to experiment with creating different shapes with the patterns within the blocks, to some success. So here's the weekly breakdown! Week 9 was Identifiable Motifs. I made three blocks. As is obvious from this particular selection, my orange stash has quite a high proportion of Halloween fabrics in it. This is because many of them were collected for use in my ongoing Halloween La Passacaglia quilt .  First up, these castles. This is actually a Harry Potter licensed fabric, and the castle is specifically Hogwarts. I am a fan of all the turrets in this depiction of it. Next, spiders (you have been warned if you need to scroll past the next pic). These do look lik...
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A Galaxy of bordered stars!

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Hello everybody! I have finally finished sewing all the borders round the blocks from my 2019 #focuscuttingsewalong blocks! It was so long ago that I actually made these blocks, that the sewalong was still called the fussycuttingsewalong (Naomi changed the name, because we are not fussy, we are focussed).  You can see all the posts I managed on the making of these blocks at the time: Jan1   Jan2   Feb Mar Apr   May Jun Jul Sep Oct  . 2019 feels like a very long time ago. So here's what the blocks all look like with their borders! I chose a space fabric for the borders because these blocks (mostly) look like stars. At the time of making them, I called them 'star flowers', although I am aware that term is now being used for a different block design. I am going to call the quilt Focussed Cutting Galaxy, or maybe just Focussed Galaxy. Next step is is to sew them all together. I did initially experiment to see if some sort of colour order was going to work, but...
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Focus cutting sewalong 2026 month 2 roundup

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 Hello everybody! Another four-week block in this year's #focuscuttingsewalong has come to an end. The colour theme for this month was Yellow. It's not the biggest colour area in my stash and I did run into a few issues, as we shall see. But I did succeed in making 9 blocks in total. Week 5 was Identifiable Motifs. I made 2 blocks for this week. I had a definite Disney theme going on here. First up, Mickey. This is actually taken from a fabric that has Mickey on four different coloured backgrounds, but as is the whole point of focus cutting, I just took out the yellow ones to make this block. Secondly, Simba, This is not the only Lion King fabric that is going to feature in this month's round-up, my supply of yellows being somewhat limited. I like the circle effect that the faces make. Week 6 was obscure sections. I struggled a bit this week. I made two blocks with highly differing levels of obscurity. First up, another Lion King fabric: Look there's a cool greeny-blue ...
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