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Showing posts from December, 2018

December #fussycuttingsewalong

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I now have a subscribe button on this blog! If you would like an email when there is a new post, click on it. I promise not to spam you. I finished the last month of the 2018 #fussycuttingsoalong! I officially made all 52 hexie flowers. Well done me! Here's a roundup of the final month. The theme was Christmas/Winter, so I chose to make things quite Christmassy. Here are the four December hexie flowers displayed on my Christmas Tree. The first week was central motifs with a solid/blender centre. Here is my flower. This one was nice and simple. The white and red snowflake fabric is from Aldi. I am loving Aldi's fat quarter bundles. The central hexie is a sparkly scrap from my stash. Week 2, sections with a plain/blender centre, is I think my favourite hexie flower from this whole year. Look how perfect that circle is! What makes me really proud is I looked at the fabric and knew I could cut sections to get a circle. Here's what the fabric looked like be

Bright and Shady Mosaic Contest

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Rachel at Stitch ed in Color is holding a mosaic contest. I love these. She picks a colour theme, and you look at the fabrics from her sponsor and pick 9 that represent the theme for you. Then arrange them in a 3x3 grid and link up. Rachel then picks a shortlist and we vote on the winner. The prize is usually the fabrics you picked. I have been shortlisted twice before but I have never won. This time the theme is Bright and Shady and the sponsor is Quilt Sandwich fabrics. Looking through their selections, I was struck by an animal theme among the brighter fabrics. I chose this as the theme for my first mosaic. Bright and Shady animals Lots of fun, bright, clashy fabrics! I arranged them to have a diagonal effect with the 'shadier' fabrics, and a cross effect with warm colours. It includes some Halloween type fabrics which I think fit the concept of Bright and Shady very well (and would be useful for my Halloween La Passacaglia quilt). For my second mosaic, I

Sketching Log Cabins

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I have joined a mini quilt swap! It's making quilts based on log cabin blocks. Everyone involved makes a mini quilt and sends it to another person in the group. The fun part is you don't know who is making for you. Part of the challenge is trying to make something that suits someone else's tastes rather than your own. We don't know who our partners are yet, but I am feeling excited and have lots of ideas swimming around in my head so I thought I would try and get some down on paper. Also, my kids generally let me.sketch, even if they don't always let me sew. I started by seeing if I could actually draw a circle effect log cabin design. Short answer is yes! These feature in a lot of people's inspiration mosaics for the swap, and if I can draw it, I can make myself a pattern to sew it, so it's good to know this is an option, even if I don't go with exactly this design. I was going for an overlapping effect, but these colours don't show tha

Fussy Cutting Forest begins

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Hello everyone! Yesterday, I bought some brown fabric and started basting and stitching the triangle joining pieces for my Fussy Cutting Forest quilt. There are going to be over 300 of the little 1 inch equilateral triangles. It's going to take a while. I decided to start by adding the triangles to the blocks I did in January. It's been interesting looking at those first hexie flowers I did and seeing how far I have come, especially in terms of creativity. I thought I would take this opportunity to go back over those hexie flowers Here's the first hexie flower I made. The theme in January was purple, in honour of the Pantone colour of the year, Ultraviolet. I thought back then this would be a good way of using up some of my hexies from the #100days100hexies2017 sewalong, so the central hexie is one of them. And I tjink it's quite cute and cheeky. The blender I used for the petals was the closest match I had to the Pantone colour. This one in particular look

November #fussycuttingsewalong

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I have been participating in a year-long sewalong on Instagram, hosted by the lovely Naomi Clarke. Every week, we make one hexie flower, with a monthly theme and weekly prompts of different kinds of fussy cutting. November's theme was Thankfulness. Honestly, I struggled for inspiration this month. I don't work well with very abstract themes, I prefer something more concrete. The first week's was freestyle for Armistice Day. I chose to do a sunset scene, inspired by the poem that goes 'at the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them'. I fussy cut birds in.the sky to represent freedom and spirits soaring free. The next three are more personal things I am thankful for. For central motifs week, I chose baby clothes to represent my three kids.  For pattern matching week, I did Spidey as a tribute to the late, great Stan Lee. And finally for framed motif week, I did a flower dedicated to my Dad, a maths professor, who helped us buy our own