January - March #focuscuttingsewalong roundup

Hello everybody!

Well clearly I've not made a good start of actually keeping on top of this blog month-by-month this year. Last year I was working on the basis that I couldn't write my monthly blog post until I had finished all the prompts for that month. This left me in the patently absurd situation of writing round-ups for months early in the year very late in the year, and still have some months trailing into 2024. I started this year on the same principle, but now having got to the end of March, without having completed any of the months, I'm calling a halt to this ridiculous system. It's not making me happy, or encouraging me to actually stay on top of the sewalong, it's just giving me another excuse to procrastinate. Instead I will just round up at the end of each month with as much, or as a little, as I have completed in the month, plus any stragglers from previous months going forward. So this is my round-up for the first quarter of 2024.

Here are my all of my blocks so far!

The shape for 2024 is the equilateral triangle. We are cutting 6 of them and arranging them in a hexie shape.  Because I already owned a plastic template for them, I am doing 1.5 inch triangles. These are quite small.  They are, however, the right size for making hexies that match the kite-hexie blocks I made in 2022. So the plan is to put all the blocks from both years together to make one big quilt. I haven't worked out more detail than that about it yet.

Also this year, instead of the month-by-month themes Naomi (our host) has done previously, our themes are the letters of alphabet. Each one lasts two weeks, and we still have the same series of prompts (identifiable motifs, obscure sections, pattern matching, freestyle) distributed as Naomi sees fit and announced on a week-by-week basis. So let's move on to the blocks!

A - identifiable motifs

I made two blocks to kick off the year.

Starting with this very obvious choice

A is for Apple!

And secondly, this quite delicate pattern.

A is for anchors. I have used this fabric quite a bit in previous years of the sewalong,.you can see other examples here.

A - obscure sections

I made two blocks, one more obscure than the other, in my opinion.

First up, the less obscure one.

A is for Aliens. This is a licensed Toy Story fabric. Here's what it looks like uncut.

And secondly, this block.

Can you work out what the section is taken from?  Here's the full fabric and section.

A is for Ariel, from the Little Mermaid. It's a section of her tail.

B - identifiable motifs

Three blocks for this one.

Firstly,

B is for Boats. I can't remember where I got this fabric from, it's been hanging around in my stash for ages and I seem to have quite a bit of it.

Next up,

B is for bears. This is an old fabric of my mother's, from when my siblings and I were little. I also have some of it in pink.

And finally,

B is for Boo! Seeing as we are doing letters of the alphabet I am going to have to break out some of my word fabrics. This is from my Halloween collection for my Halloween La Passacaglia quilt, you can see it in action here.

That's as many as I did for January. I'm still missing a block for B - pattern matching (you'll see a pattern in the ones I haven't done soon enough!). Moving on to February.

C - identifiable motifs

Two blocks here.

First up, meow!

C is for cat. I have loads of this fabric, so I am trying to use it every chance I get. I like the secondary flower pattern created here by their legs.

And secondly, Christmas in February.

C is for Candy Canes.

C - obscure sections

Again, I made two blocks. I think I did quite well with the obscurity.

First up, this flower shape.

Here's the original fabric. C is for Cars.

Secondly I went a bit more obscure.

Here's the original fabric and section.

C is for Cheshire Cat! I debated a couple of different ways of doing the section on this one, but I realised that this one would make the tails into moustache shapes, so obviously I had to go with the tail moustaches.

D - identifiable motifs

Only the one block here.

D is for Daredevil! This is a licensed Marvel fabric from Aldi.

And that's as far as I got for February. The one week I didn't manage was D - pattern matching. Moving on to March.

E - identifiable motifs

I may have gone slightly overboard with this week. I made 4 blocks

First up, this springtime one.

E is for eggs. This is left over from some fabric I won from Naomi (the sewalong's host) during the first couple of years of the sewalong, when she was doing monthly giveaways.

The next three are all on a theme...

E is for eyes! I have quite a large selection of fabric eyes, mainly in my Halloween collection. I am drawn towards them for some reason, probably because I personally find eyes quite scary.  My favourite of these three is the one with the orange surround, because it has a great secondary pattern in the middle.

E - obscure sections

Just the one this time.

I thought this was quite obscure, but my 6-year-old identified it instantly. Here's the original fabric.

E is for elephants! See, I do have things other than eyes that begin with E.

F- identifiable motifs

Two blocks for this prompt.

First up, ribbit ribbit.

F is for frogs. I like this block, it's happy and cheerful.

And finally, this one.

F is for Feathers! Arranging them in this star shape does make them a little hard to identify, but the entire motif is inside each piece of the block. Because I'd used this fabric before in the 2022 sewalong, I wanted to make sure that this block was clearly different, so they can be mixed into the same quilt and still be distinct.  Here's the 2022 version.

And that's as far as I've got! The one I'm missing for March is F - pattern matching.  I've yet to do a pattern matched block with this new shape. While that is my least favourite of the prompts, I do intend to catch these back up. I'm certainly not planning to go through the whole year avoiding pattern matching.

So that's where 2024 is at the moment.  I have also been slowly piecing together the top for 2023. It's not moving as fast as I would like, but it is getting somewhere. Here's a quick pic of how it's getting on.

So plenty of sewing has been happening here, even if I haven't been blogging about it. Hopefully it will be less than three months before I get around to updating you all again.

Thanks for reading!