Patches of Destruxion

Hello everyone! My April Tula Palooza sewalong block is done. This month we are doing Wildwood, a free pattern from the Fat Quarter Shop, available here . Using the block size in the pattern would have meant I could have fitted in 4 squares to create a single block. I decided that wasn't enough, so I shrunk the dimensions a bit to make a 9-patch. For fabric choices, I was sure very early on that I wanted to do an orange to pink gradient, but I was completely stumped over the background choice. I auditioned several possibilities before settling on the purple De La Luna. Then on to cutting and piecing. Other than the series of mistakes mentioned here , this went together quickly and smoothly. So here it is finished! I like it. Hubby says he likes the colours, even though he can't see the gradient effect I was going for. It runs through the block diagonally from bottom right to top left. So, onwards to May! Thanks for reading!

Now that it has finally found a home, I can share the story of this mini quilt with you all. This is my first finish of 2019, Springtime Cabin! I made this for a swap. It was a secret swap, meaning we didn't know who was making for us. I did some sketches here after I first signed up for the swap. However when the rules and partner info came through from the host, they specified a minimum of 9 log cabin blocks, and none of those ideas really matched my partner's mosaic of things she liked. I used these two pics from my partner's mosaic as my starting point (these are obviously not my work or photos - happy to give proper credit to the artists if anyone recognizes them). Here's my sketch of the new design. This got positive feedback from the swap group on IG, although the person it was intended for didn't comment. So I decided to stick with this design, and made a test block. After a very brief, disastrous attempt at machine FPP, I elected trad...

Bernie at Needle and Foot  is doing a blog-along this week, in which we talk about our imperfections. It is intended as a counterpoint to the polished images of apparent perfection that are all over IG and Pinterest. Thanks to Wendy's Pieceful Thoughts blog for telling me about this. First up, I know my sewing is a long way from perfect and I generally do mention mistakes and difficulties. But I still edit, downplay problems and leave things out. I take at least half a dozen photos of everything and usually only one or two are even usable, due to poor focus or shadows of the phone. Most of them look like this. Admittedly my camera focus has improved since I got new glasses a couple of weeks ago. So, sewing mistakes. My general policy is to unpick as little as possible. Make it a feature, quilt it so it doesn't show, accept that the finished item will be less than perfect. But that's not always possible.  Let's look at the mistakes I was making/fixing on Monday...

Another month of the #fussycuttingsewalong finished! The theme for March was vintage/retro. I will be honest, I didn't love this theme. I don't really go for vintage/retro fabrics, and those I do have don't lend themselves well to fussy cutting. So this month I did 5 star flowers, as compared to the 11 I did in February. The first week of the month was a Freestyle Special for International Women's Day. This made me realise just how sexist some of my fabrics are. I have Avengers fabric that doesn't feature Black Widow. I have a fabric of athletes running in a race that's all men. So rather than represent women directly, I chose a great woman, the fossil hunter Mary Anning, and represented her contribution to science and paleontology. Here's the pic I put on IG. I chose the dino bones most like the fossils she dug up and colours that felt like the beach at Lyme Regis where she worked. The words are carefully chosen as the best matches to he...

Hello everyone! My lovely husband has a problem. He is starting a new job soon, for which he has to dress very formally.  Unfortunately, due to all the bodybuilding he has been doing, he can't find shirts that fit - anything big enough for his chest is too big for his neck and waist.  Here he is attempting to try on a shirt: You can see the problem. So today I have been altering two of his shirts to fit him properly.  I have never done alterations like this before, although I did already have a good idea in principle of how it needed to be done.  The first shirt was the simpler of the two - the collar fit quite nicely so it just needed darts in the back to fit his waist.  So I pinned (only poked him with a pin once!) and sewed and here is the result. A nice fit! Not the neatest sewing in the world, but it will mostly be covered by his waistcoat (I told you this was going to be formal wear) so that doesn't matter too much right now. The seco...

I made really good progress on a rosette for this yesterday, so I thought this would be a good time to share some details of this work in progress with you. La Passacaglia is a quilt designed and published by Willyne Hammerstein in her book, Millefiore Quilts. La Passacaglia is the cover quilt. It's a massive, complicated quilt with lots of tiny pieces. The design is made up of a series of rosettes of pentagons, diamonds and triangles. The pattern is based on Penrose tilings, which the maths geek in me finds very cool. While the original quilt was made using traditional hand piecing, I, and most others who have made the quilt since, am using English Paper Piecing. When I was first getting into blogs and the social media side of the patchwork community in 2016, one of the first blogs I followed was Wendy's Quilts and More, and at the time she was working on hand quilting her own La Passacaglia . I was absolutely blown away by her use of colour, and the intricate ...