Patches of Destruxion

Another month of the #fussycuttingsewalong finished! The theme for March was vintage/retro. I will be honest, I didn't love this theme. I don't really go for vintage/retro fabrics, and those I do have don't lend themselves well to fussy cutting. So this month I did 5 star flowers, as compared to the 11 I did in February. The first week of the month was a Freestyle Special for International Women's Day. This made me realise just how sexist some of my fabrics are. I have Avengers fabric that doesn't feature Black Widow. I have a fabric of athletes running in a race that's all men. So rather than represent women directly, I chose a great woman, the fossil hunter Mary Anning, and represented her contribution to science and paleontology. Here's the pic I put on IG. I chose the dino bones most like the fossils she dug up and colours that felt like the beach at Lyme Regis where she worked. The words are carefully chosen as the best matches to he...

Hello everyone! My lovely husband has a problem. He is starting a new job soon, for which he has to dress very formally.  Unfortunately, due to all the bodybuilding he has been doing, he can't find shirts that fit - anything big enough for his chest is too big for his neck and waist.  Here he is attempting to try on a shirt: You can see the problem. So today I have been altering two of his shirts to fit him properly.  I have never done alterations like this before, although I did already have a good idea in principle of how it needed to be done.  The first shirt was the simpler of the two - the collar fit quite nicely so it just needed darts in the back to fit his waist.  So I pinned (only poked him with a pin once!) and sewed and here is the result. A nice fit! Not the neatest sewing in the world, but it will mostly be covered by his waistcoat (I told you this was going to be formal wear) so that doesn't matter too much right now. The seco...

I made really good progress on a rosette for this yesterday, so I thought this would be a good time to share some details of this work in progress with you. La Passacaglia is a quilt designed and published by Willyne Hammerstein in her book, Millefiore Quilts. La Passacaglia is the cover quilt. It's a massive, complicated quilt with lots of tiny pieces. The design is made up of a series of rosettes of pentagons, diamonds and triangles. The pattern is based on Penrose tilings, which the maths geek in me finds very cool. While the original quilt was made using traditional hand piecing, I, and most others who have made the quilt since, am using English Paper Piecing. When I was first getting into blogs and the social media side of the patchwork community in 2016, one of the first blogs I followed was Wendy's Quilts and More, and at the time she was working on hand quilting her own La Passacaglia . I was absolutely blown away by her use of colour, and the intricate ...

My March Tula Palooza Block is finished. This month we are doing Rocky Mountain Puzzle blocks, using this tutorial . I must admit, I have struggled to like this block. I don't really understand why. I knew I wasn't going to be able to make it exactly like the picture, so I sketched it out and coloured it in differently. This was something I felt I could make. I also decided to set it on point. I worked out a 10 inch block on point would sit about right with my other two 14 inch blocks once I had added triangles to square it up. I decided on a purple and green fabric pull, with a bee framed in the centre. I thought it would be too much purple to use that for the frame as well, so I added one more colour compared to my sketch. To make the HSTs, I followed a method from Kirsty at Bonjour Quilts  that makes two lots at once with no waste. This worked well as there were at least two of each colour combination. These sorts of cutting and sewing multiple ...

Hello everyone! I have been working in a very bitty way this week, making little bits of progress on whatever I feel like doing. First up, a quick finish. I needed a new coin purse so I whipped up this using things in my stash. Here's the front, back and inside. I got half way through a tutorial on Pinterest for it when I took a short break and lost the webpage I was looking. So I guessed what I was meant to do next. I did find the page again and saw that I guessed wrong, but my way worked ok, the lining seam is just not as neat. I'll get it right next time. Next up, quilting my Hexie Hearts. I am quilting the purple/pink heart in little bursts as I get the opportunity. To be honest, it's going very slowly. Up next, Tula Palooza. I won a prize on IG! For a picture of my stash while not being at Quiltcon. Here I am showing off my winnings. That has given me a push to make a start on my March block. The block is called Rocky Mountain Pu...

I may have gone a little overboard making starflowers this month.  I made 11. I found it tricky to get a good photograph of all of them, mostly because the kids kept running off with the blocks. The sewalong only required us to make 4, 1 per week. But I just couldn't stop myself cutting out and sewing more than that. So this is going to be a long post. The theme for February was lines.  We started the month with radiating lines. I made two that definitely met the prompt, and two more for fun. Here are the first two: The top one is an experiment with a colour combination I wouldn't normally go for. And an excuse to use the cute lemur fabric by Rachida Colman-Hale. It got a lot of IG love but I still don't really like the grey flower fabric. The rainbow one feels much more me. The fabric in the inner diamonds was a Festival of Quilts purchase last year. I love the star effect in the centre. The outer fabric I bought a while ago, and is great for fussy cuttin...