July #focuscuttingsewalong roundup

Hello everybody!

I have caught up on this sewalong for July. I am not that far behind, but I do think if it hadn't been for the wedding I would have made quite a few more blocks on this theme. Which was animals. If I need more blocks for however I decide to join these together, this is a theme I will want to revisit. I made 5 blocks in total for the 4 weeks.

The first week was identifiable motifs. I made two quite different blocks. 

The first one was this bright toucan block. 

I liked how I could fit a pair of toucans into each half hexie. Also, I am not sure what noise toucans make, but I am pretty sure it is covered somewhere in the central hexie. 

For the second block, I went a lot more delicate with these butterflies. 

The central hexie is a flower cut from my Kaffe Fasset fabric squares, that has also featured in my April post. It felt like the sort of flower that butterflies would flutter around. 

The second week was sections from the upper half of an animal. Obscurity was not required for the sections, but I wanted to do that anyway. 

This is my favourite block that I have made this month, I love the circle effect and the saturated colours. As indicated by the central hexie, showing The Monster Book of Monsters, this is a mythical creature, the three-headed dog Fluffy from the first Harry Potter Book.  Here's the fabric before I cut into it.

My eldest is very much enjoying reading the Harry Potter books at the moment, and Aldi is being very helpful in providing me with licensed HP fabrics. I am going to have to make him a quilt with it sooner or later, if for no other reason than to clear the stacks of fabric from my sewing table. Not that I have time/headspace to start another project right now. 

Next up, we had sections from the bottom half of an animal, a.k.a #buttweek (don't go sticking that into Google. You have been warned). I used foxtail (and fox butts).

This grey fabric was the one I had earmarked for last year's #buttweek, but that turned out to be a bad idea. Fortunately, that issue didn't apply to the half hexie shape.

The yellow fox in the middle is another leftover from my Rainbow Hexie Quilt. I had wanted to use another fox hexie I had, but despite the nice match of the grey colour, it didn't really look right when I put the pieces next to each other. 

Somehow the yellow I went with just popped better. And also fits with January's Pantone colours of the year theme. 

And the final week was pattern matching. 

The two cute kangaroos are a very old fabric leftover from when my Mum was making kids stuff in the 80s. The yellow flower fabric is a much more recent acquisition, that I think was part of an Aldi FQ bundle. Something about it screams Australia to me, though I can't quite place what. Anyway, it co-ordinates really nicely. 

So that's July! The theme for August is Human. I am going to find this one difficult, not only are the summer holidays not conducive to sewing time, but I have relatively few fabrics in my stash featuring actual humans. But it's only a 3-week month in the sewalong, so I have pulled a couple of fabric candidates, and I do have a few ideas starting to form. 

Thanks for reading!