Focus cutting sewalong 2026 month 10 roundup

Hello Everybody!

A normal 4-week month has come and gone in the Focus Cutting Sewalong. This time our colour has been grey. I'm afraid I have failed to be excited by the colour (grey is not known for it's association with being interesting, after all) but I do at least have a decent sized stash of it thanks to my ongoing Halloween La Passcaglia quilt (of which more soon!).

Unfortunately, I haven't been as productive as I would have hoped, as during our dramatic return from Berlin last month we seem to have brought Covid home with us, which decided to go through the family one at a time and then leave me with a secondary infection of labyrinthitis which has refused to clear up fully. Fun times. Nevertheless, I have made 5 blocks.

Week 37 was identifiable motifs. I made one block.

As you can see, especially if you zoom in a bit, this one very much comes from the Halloween stash! These motifs are identifiable and identified to the point of having labels. I love novelty fabrics.

Week 38 was obscure sections. I made two blocks.

I am quite happy with both the obscurity and the patterns created here. First up, this block with the central hearts.

It's hard to see clearly in the photos, but the design on this is printed in silver. Here's what the original fabric looked like before I cut into it.

This is a fabric by Libs Elliott who is one of my absolute favourite designers. Those hearts are actually the skulls' noses.

Secondly, this very dark grey one.

I love the circle in the middle. I always love when I can make circles through focus cutting on these shapes with very straight edges. And here's the original fabric for this one.

Very much continuing the Halloween theme here with bats and moons. This is a newly acquired fabric that I bought deliberately for its focus cutting potential.

I didn't make any blocks for week 39 (pattern matching) so let's move on to week 40, freestyle, for which I made two blocks.

First up, trees.

Half green and half orange. Which I'm pretty sure is what the trees outside are meant to be looking like by this point of October, but they seem to be taking their time about getting there.

And secondly, going very freestyle.

Just abstract shapes here (and not my best photography - sorry about that). Because it's so geometrically abstract I think it's hard to tell how this is actually focus cut, but the original fabric has the oval shapes looking dominant, and I think this design really brings out the diamonds.

So that's it for grey month! Next month is black, which again, due to the whole Halloween thing, I'm fairly well-provided for at the moment. However, now that I've decided how to join these together, I already have 4 blocks from White month in January, and arguably the bats one from this Grey month that  already are black blocks. I think I might end up making some with the black prompt that will actually end up in the white section of the quilt to get the numbers right.

Believe it or not I made these when the theme was White.

I've also run out of predictions for what Naomi is going to do for the last two months. Black is the last one I was expecting, so months 12-13 are going to be more of a surprise!

Thanks for reading!