Fussy cutting sewalong May roundup

Hello everyone!

After all my enthusiasm in April, I seemed to have much less energy for this sewalong in May. I am not sure why. The theme of animals is a nice, concrete one to work with and I had been looking forward to it. However, even with the downturn in mood I still made 5 blocks in a 4-week month.

Week one was whole animal motifs. This was an easy start - I had these fabrics picked out in my head as soon as the prompt details were up.

The pairing of cats and milk appealed to my sense of humour.

Next up is this Mickey Mouse block. I basically made this one because I had noticed the fabric would work well and I wanted an excuse to make it. And fictional animals were explicitly allowed in the prompt details.

Week 2 was mystery sections from the top half of an animal. I really struggled with this one. I played around with my templates on lots of fabrics to find one that would even work. The trouble was if the motif was big enough to isolate a section, then I wouldn't have six repeats I could use. Or the motifs were so close together that the mystery idea didn't work or it just looked messy. I had also used several good animal sections already in previous months and I didn't want to repeat the same section.

Eventually I pulled this fabric, where the motifs are far apart and I had a half metre rather than a fat quarter.

I isolated the tip of the owls' heads and put them together to make a circle pattern. After all the effort that took, I didn't want to fussy cut the partner fabric, so I went with a very simple polka dot.

Next up was butt week! Or mystery sections from the bottom half of an animal. Again I struggled with the fabric picks, for the same reasons as the previous week. I had originally planned to use a lovely Rashida Coleman Hale lemur fabric, and select the tails. But then I saw someone else had used that fabric and they had done the tail section much better than I was planning to. And with my general lack of enthusiasm I found that quite disheartening. So I decided to go with my Plan B and do frogs legs.

I played around a lot with different possible layouts for this one, but settled on the layout I had intended while cutting out.

The final week of the month was animal freestyle. I was feeling distinctly uninspired during this week, despite an IG feed full of great ideas from the other members of the sewalong. In the end I chose these cute Winnie the Pooh fabrics.

I felt it was a nice partner to the first one I did this month, with a different animal and their food.

I have done so many of these blocks now, that I have run out of paper pieces. So, in order to reclaim the pieces, I have started on my plan to turn these into a quilt.

I am framing all the blocks with trapezia in a space fabric. I will then join them all together as large hexagons, but I am going to wait and see how many I end up with before deciding the exact layout. Here are the first three framed blocks:

This is an idea I have been considering for a while, but I was unsure how to cut the pieces accurately. Fortunately, I got a trapezoid ruler as a free gift with a magazine and it is perfect for cutting these out. So I just cut strips and use the ruler to make angled cuts, creating the right shape.

I really love the space fabric! And the quilt has a working title. This is going to be Fussy In The Sky With Diamonds. It is going to be big, certainly by my standards.

Thanks for reading!

Linking up to Can I Get a Whoop Whoop and the Peacock Party and Clever Chameleon.