#focuscuttinsewalong March 2021 roundup

 Hello everybody!

The theme this month in the focus cutting sewalong was Books.  This was a great theme, I had loads of possibilities spring to mind instantly as soon as it was announced. We own a lot of books. Like a few thousand - no exaggeration. That's what happens when an historian and a publishing professional get married, although we were still students when we married, and we already owned a decent proportion of the books back then. I could have made tons of blocks on this theme, but due to the previously mentioned broken finger, I decided to play it safe, and just make 1 block per week.  It was a 5-week month, so here are my five blocks.


The first week, our prompt was identifiable motifs.  For this one, I decided I had to go with the one fabric I owned that actually had book motifs.


The overall fabric has a beachy motifs, it also features deckchairs and badminton rackets. But the beauty of focus cutting is you pick a single element to highlight to fit your own theme, which is not necessarily the same as the fabric designer's.  I decided to photograph it on the book I was reading at the time: Ready Player Two (I have now finished it, and had read its predecessor, Ready Player One, just beforehand. They are both brilliant, although I am about 5 years too young to get the full benefit of the 80s pop culture nostalgia in them. I would now really like to see the Spielberg film).


The second week, we took a break from the theme to celebrate International Woman's Day. I chose to honour an awesome international woman, my sister, Vanessa Higgins, recently appointed MD of Virgin Records.

Before becoming music executive extraordinaire, Vanessa worked as a touring musician, particularly playing in piano bars, so the piano fabric was a must. The orange flower fabric in the centre represents the California poppies (chosen for her birthplace) she will have in her bouquet this summer, when she becomes Mrs Bosåen. Vanessa is pretty much the coolest person I know, I am so proud of everything she has accomplished. Here's a pic of the two of us taken some years ago, back in the days when popping across the channel with your Mum and sister for the day was a thing people did legally.

The third week, we were back to the theme of books, and the prompt was pattern matching. I chose to do a full 7-piece pattern match.


This fabric was one of the ones that had instantly jumped to mind when the theme was announced, and with me only having a small amount, and the motifs being so large, pattern-matching was clearly the way the fabric wanted to be used. It was slightly tricky, as although I had several full cottages on the fabric, they actually appeared in two slightly different ways, so the sections had to be chosen carefully so that wasn't obvious.  As it depicts Goldilocks and the Three Bears, I decided to photograph it on a beautiful old children's book that originally belonged to my husband. We now read it to our children.



The fourth week, we had an unusual prompt 'set the scene'. This initially stumped me, for the first couple of days in the week I had no inspiration. But once a couple of other people had started posting their blocks, an idea came to me. The caption we included was very much part of the block, so I have copied and posted what I wrote on Insta here.

Night falls over Gotham city. The Bat Signal appears in the sky, and cries for help emanate from the shadows. What will the Caped Crusader face tonight?

Remembering that I had this scrap of world monuments fabric with a Statue of Liberty on it was what really crystallised the concept of this block for me. (Yes I know that Gotham is not actually New York, but there is a Statue of Liberty in some Batman stories. And its the only city-like fabric I have).  


There are 5 different fabrics here: the city, the Bat Signal, Batman, the comic book caption fabric and the plain black.  The caption fabric is the same one I used in the centre of a Marvel themed block last month. I took some pics of this on a couple of our Batman Comic Books: The Killing Joke and Nightfall. Nightfall features the same style Batman as I had used on the fabric. Both books are recommended by me.



The final week was technically a free-style week, to celebrate being a quarter of the way through the sewalong. But I still had book ideas that I wanted to do, in particular, this idea for a Wonder Woman block was another one that had instantly sprung to mind when the theme was announced.


To my shame, I do not own any Wonder Woman comics or other sort of books, but she does feature in some of the more general DC/Justice League/Super Friends books we own. I chose to photograph the block on her page in DC Comics: The Ultimate Character Guide


The word fabric was given to me in a bundle at Christmas. The central hexagon was from a fabric I have used in lots of things, but I originally bought for this baby quilt for a friend a few years ago (I will do a proper post on it someday).


I could have made more, especially with my collection of licensed fabric (I have Marvel comics, Hobbit, Harry Potter and Game of Thrones fabrics that would all have been usable for this theme) and having read so many books that I am not short of inspiration material.  I haven't yet decided how I am going to combine these blocks into a quilt, so if whatever idea I come up with needs more blocks than I end up making, this will definitely be a theme I revisit.

It was particularly interesting seeing everyone else's blocks and the books that inspired them this month. Children's books featured heavily, so I got to revisit disturbing memories of The Magic Faraway Tree and happy memories of the Brambly Hedge books, among many others.

So that was March! April's theme is Gardens and my finger is now sufficiently recovered that I no longer feel the need to take it easy when sewing. I feel like my various insect fabrics will be making an appearance with this one.

Thanks for reading!

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