Focus Cutting Sewalong - March and April Houses

 Hello everybody!

I have finally started to catch up with my Focus Cutting Sewalong blocks!  I am running very late with these. I already cut myself down from 1 block a week to 1 block a month in the clearly erroneous belief that I would keep up with that. Lockdown and migraines have seriously screwed up all my sewing (and other) plans for this year, but over the past couple of months, with the kids back at school, my sewjo has definitely come back and I feel ready to try and catch up on some of my poor neglected sewalongs.

So, a couple of points to note. Our host, Naomi Clarke, has changed the name from #fussycuttingsewalong to #focuscuttingsewalong. She explains the reasons here. While I am not going to rename my 2018 and 2019 works in progress from the sewalong (Fussy Cutting Forest and Fussy in the Sky with Diamonds) I will be using the term focus cutting for this year's quilt and going forwards.

So, onto the two new blocks! The theme for March was animals. Here is my block. I did an identifiable motifs block.

I had initially intended to do a 'butt week' block - that is mystery sections from the bottom half of an animal. With the large size of blocks I am using (3 inch squares and houses, finishing as a 9-inch block) I don't have a lot of fabrics that would work for this, but I was sure this grey fox fabric would do the trick. I even cut it out back in March.

And well, it was possible to do mystery sections with the tails. But while I was auditioning fabrics for the outer squares, my husband rightly pointed out that the shape created in the centre of the grey fabrics looked like a swastika.

Not a good look. And being discouraged by this, as well as the lockdown is a big reason why I procrastinated over picking it up again. But I am glad I did and these little dogs work great! And I still get a sort of sections effect with the centre.  The outer squares fabric is an Aldi fabric I picked up more recently. If it wasn't for Aldi's quarterly craft special buy fat quarter bundles, I wouldn't be able to afford any new fabric at all at the moment. And lots of them are good for focus cutting.

So, onto April's block!

The theme for this one was gifts. I decided to use some fabric that I won as a free gift in a giveaway on Instagram - it's a layer cake (10-inch squares) of a Kaffe Fasset fabric collection.

Kaffe Fasset's fabrics are always a riot of colour. I like them in small doses, but I find they can get too garish if not treated very sensitively. I chose to centre flowers from two different colourways of the fabric, partly because I couldn't get 4 of the same from the fabric I had. I did audition another fabrics from that bundle for the outer squares, but it was definitely feeling too much.

I wanted something calmer for the squares, but I didn't want to go too plain and my husband thought it needed something floral. Again, an Aldi fabric suggested itself. They are not flowers as such, but do have the feeling of something like a dandelion.

And it is great for focus cutting! I cut them so it looks like a spray bloom coming out of the corners. Here is the finished block. 

I am happy with the overall block. Floral is not a style I think of as being very 'me' but I do like this.

Here are my four blocks so far together. Even though they are all 'identifiable motifs' they do create really quite different shapes and effect from the ways they are cut.

Naomi has now announced next year's Focus Cutting Sewalong shape, and it's going to be half hexagons. I am hoping to join in weekly next year, especially as I know I already have a whole bunch of papers I can use for this - and it's really not hard to just cut hexie papers in half. I do still have a lot of things I need to get finished though, so I will have to see how that goes.

Thanks for reading!