October #focuscuttingsewalong roundup

Hello everybody!

I have finally finished my blocks for last month. Naomi gave us a freestyle theme for the month so we could choose to do whatever we needed to make our personal quilt plans work. For a lot of people, me included, that was largely purple blocks, to round out the rainbow. I made 6 blocks in total for this month.

Week 39 was identifiable motifs. I made 2 blocks.

A bit of theme here! Purple is a perfect excuse for pulling out some of the Halloween fabrics I am using on my La Passacaglia quilt.

First up, these mummies.

I like the little mice that appear next to some of the figures. This is my second time using mummies with this shape, as I used some back in March, which was orange month. Which I haven't rounded up yet, due to the fact I still haven't made my International Woman's Day Block. So here is a sneak preview of a block that I am 8 months late in posting (yes, that sentence makes sense, really).

And secondly, these spooky creatures.

This is a Lewis and Irene fabric. I had meant for the cats to be the 'identifiable' aspect of this block, but the spider's web in the centre turned out to be much more dominant once the pieces were put together.

Week 40 was a break from the main theme of the month for World Mental Health Day. This is not a theme I am a fan of. While it is important to raise money for mental health charities and services, and some find crafting to be therapeutic, others find being faced with wall-to-wall messages about it to be triggering and to cause creative blocks. I fall into that second category of people. Here is my one block on this theme.

So, let us move swiftly on to week 41, which was back to the Freestyle theme, with the prompt of obscure motifs. I went back to purple, and made one block.

The effect I was going for was 'white rose' but I do worry that the 90 degree angles mean that you can pick out a swastika in it, which would not be good. Any way, this was the original fabric:

It's Buzz Lightyear's legs! Did you guess?

Week 42 was pattern matching. I actually only got around to making this block a couple of days ago.

I think these monsters are adorably cute! I had just watched Bobbi Gentili's trunk show in which she talked about her pattern matching technique, which she uses primarily on machine pieced squares and rectangles. I tried to adapt it to EPP honeycombs. I am not sure it was particularly successful, but it is something I will experiment with again.

And lastly, week 43 was freestyle freestyle! I did one block for this week.

This is an Aldi Little Mermaid licensed fabric. I like the effect of the cross shape in the centre.

So that was October! For November, the theme is Blue, and to be honest, I will probably be a bit late posting about that as I have missed a couple of weeks and I don't expect to catch them back in the next few days. But I might be suddenly inspired, so we will see!

In exciting news, Naomi has announced the new shape for 2024 - it's going to be the Equilateral Triangle. We will be putting 6 triangles together to make a hexagon shaped block. It will create similar effects to when we did kites in 2022 and the inner diamonds in 2019. The only triangle papers I have are the tiny 1-inch papers I have been using for my Fussy Cutting Forest quilt which are way too small for these purposes, so I will have to investigate some other sizes. I might choose ones that give me blocks that are compatible with the kites from last year, as I still haven't decided how I am piecing those together.

Thanks for reading!