#focuscuttingsewalong February 2021 roundup

Hello everybody!

I am running late on this post, because at the end of February, I managed to break the fourth finger on my right hand.  So even though I managed to make all the blocks on time, typing has been painful, so it wasn't worth the effort of a blog post.  But my finger is recovering quite well now, so I feel up to typing again.

February's theme in the #focuscuttingsewalong was 'Getting to know you'. In general, I don't get on very well with more abstract themes, and I  dislike enforced icebreakers. But as the month went on, I got into it a bit more, and in the end I made 6 blocks during the four weeks of February. 

The prompt for the first week was 'Home'.  I really struggled with this one as I just found the concept so abstract. I eventually settled for a very mixed bag. 

The top 3 half-hexies represent my three children as best I could from my stash. Two of them are perfect, but I need to embroider wings on to the lion to make that one more accurate. The bottom three half-hexies are clearly houses. I move house a lot, for someone who has been in a stable relationship my entire adult life. I have had 17 different street addresses in my 38 years of life so far. The middle hexie is obviously the Union Jack, for the UK which is where I currently live. I had this hexie leftover from a work-in-progress I have yet to write about on here, a rainbow colour gradient I-Spy hexagon quilt. Here's a pretty picture of it.

The second prompt was 'Favourite colour'. This was an easy one for me. My favourite colour is, and always has been, blue. I have a vast selection of focus-cuttable blue fabrics. I could literally do this prompt every week for a year and not repeat a fabric. However, realism crept in, and I made two blocks.

The first used this dragonflies fabric. This is one of my favourite fabrics in my stash, not only is it blue and has cool insects, but there are shiny metallic gold details in it.

I am not 100% happy with my cutting and placement of the dragonflies in the half-hexies, but I do still like it.
I used this fabric previously in my January 2020 #focuscuttingsewalong block, and in a swap item I made back in 2017 - this little clutch bag.

For the second one, I had this rhyme stuck in my head while I was making it, based on the song my own childhood teddy bear plays.

If you go down to the woods today, you'd better not close your eyes
If you go down to the woods today, you'd better go in disguise
For every bear that ever there was
Will gather there for certain because
Today's the day, the teddy bears go to Hogwarts!

These little wizard bears are from a fabric my mother gave me, and they are adorably cute. Cutesy is not usually my thing, but I make an exception for these. I used a hexie of this fabric as a tribute to my daughter when she was first born in 2017, so this feels linked to the first block about 'home' to me.

The third prompt for February was 'thing(s) that you love'. For me, this was an obvious excuse to go geeky. And, apparently, red.

This first block is clearly about my love for Star Wars, which I previously wrote about in this post.

I have quite a bit of this The Force Awakens fabric, and this is the third time I have used it in a block for the fussy/focus cutting sewalong (see my Insta post here for the other two).  

And secondly, I did this representation of my love of Marvel Comics/the MCU.

I have seen pretty much every film featuring Marvel Characters in the cinema since the Tobey Maguire Spiderman film in 2002. I have adored watching Wandavision recently, and I really wish I had the time/money/ability to create some cosplays from the MCU.

This block is actually a half-hexies remake of a diamond block I made in 2019 (featured in this post from the time). When I posted the 2019 block, it blew up on Instagram (by my admittedly not very high standards), and remains to this day my most-liked post of all time (see it here). A couple of blue fabric hexie versions of the characters also appeared in my Stan Lee tribute post here.

There are many more geeky things I could have shown off with my fabrics, again this is a prompt I could have made many, many blocks for.

The final prompt for February was 'your most recent fabric love'.  I haven't bought a lot of new fabrics recently so I didn't have anything very 'new' to showcase. So I instead decided to interpret this a bit differently - I am choosing to love and use the fabric I already have. And what better way to do that with some upcycled fabric.

The fabrics in this block are scraps left over from upcycling thrifted shirts into cushions for my Etsy shop. There are so many positives to using upcycled fabrics. There's the environmental benefits from reducing textile waste. There's the fact that by not limiting yourself to patchwork fabrics you can get fun and interesting textures, like the lace in the central hexagon. And there is also the feeling of connection, not only with the previous makers and wearers of the fabric, but also to Paper Piecers of the past as this technique was very much developed to use up scraps. One of my inspirations for this block was a quilt made in 1904 which currently hangs in the Museum of Oxfordshire in Woodstock. My Insta post (with a pretty picture) on it is here.

Incidentally, here are the two cushions I made from the shirts.

The lace one was a giveaway in a Valentine's contest I ran last year, but the red and blue plaid is actually still available to UK customers in my Etsy shop here.

So, I hope you now know more about me from these blocks! While I found the overall theme challenging, it's been fun making these blocks and drawing the connections between them and my other makes. March has the theme of Books, with a couple of special weeks for International Women's Day and the quarter-way through mark. Books is a much more concrete topic for me to get my head around, and I am enjoying it so far. My broken finger is slowing me down, but I am still on track for the month.

Thanks for reading!