Patches of Destruxion

Hello everyone! I know October is over, but I really seem to have caught the bug for this quilt, so I have been keeping on, making some steady progress with it. Here's what it looked like when I pulled it out to start work on it again a few weeks ago. And here's where it is now! I am still very much lacking in suitable fabrics that read white, however one of the beauties of English Paper Piecing is that you can sew the pieces together in whatever order you like, so instead of waiting until I have everything I need, I am working with what I've got even if that means leaving weird shaped gaps all over the place. There are still 11 rosettes I haven't started yet, and the diamonds in between the stars are proving a particular challenge to work on What I do have is enough grey to make a decent start on the grey pieces. This has allowed me to join two of the large rosettes together. I also have olenty of black fabrics, including a new pirate one (thanks, Mum, for buying it fo...

Hello everyone! I have been doing a photo challenge on Instagram, #myeppandme with Leela @the_makers_stash in which we share 8 of our English Paper Piecing projects. I pulled out my house blocks from last year's focuscuttingsewalong to photograph them for the challenge and realised I had done less than I thought. As I was still waiting on papers for my Halloween La Passacaglia quilt, I decided to make another couple of blocks for this. You can read more about what I am doing with this quilt here  and here . So for the July block, the theme was Lines. Strong lines are something I have used already in a couple of previous blocks, as they are nice way to create an effect with the corner squares. I did want to make sure this block was different than those ones. I found picking fabrics for this block pretty easy. I wanted something with a clear stripe and I wanted to put the lines 'in the round'. When I put my template over this black and white fabric, it was clear the flowers f...

Hello everyone! I have been very quiet on here recently, and that's mostly because I have stalled a bit on the #focuscuttingsewalong. But I haven't lost my sewjo entirely, and the onset of the spooky season has me pulling out my Halloween La Passacaglia quilt to work on again! It's been a while since I have done anything on this, so the first thing I did was lay out everything I have done so far, as a sort of stock take. It's a bit less than I thought, but not to worry. I am still limited in what I can do on this, due to lack of fabrics, but I think I was putting some more artificial limitations on myself, telling myself I couldn't so certain parts until other parts (that I don't have fabric for) were done. I have taken these limitations away and that has felt incredibly freeing, because now there is a LOT I can do without any further fabric purchases. I started by deciding I needed to join the two large rosettes together with a grey path of stars (there is an o...

 Hello everybody! This will only be a short post, as I only did three blocks for this month.  It was only a 3-week month in the sewalong's calendar, and having the kids off school affords me very little spare time for sewing, so I didn't do any extras. Here are my three blocks. The theme was Human, which I found quite hard with my stash, as I don't have a lot of fabric featuring humans. Week 1 was identifiable motifs. Here is my block. Little cowboys. I got really stumped for what to put in the middle of this, I ended up asking for suggestions on Instagram. I got several suggestions for bandanas (I don't have any bandana fabric) and a couple for cows or horses (the few I do have don't work well) but otherwise people suggested solids. I ended up going for this spotty orangey-yellow to evoke the colour of wheat, based on one suggestion I received. The second week was obscure motifs. This was very difficult to find an appropriate fabric for, I ended up settling on this...

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 ani...

Hello everybody! Today I want to talk to you about this!  When I got married 16 years ago, my Mum organised for a quilt to be made with half the blocks coming from my side of the family and the other half coming from my husband's. Here we are with the quilt they made us. So, with my sister getting married, my Mum organised the same thing for Vanessa and Jon-Frode. This was done unbeknownst to them, in complete secret and I had the privilege to be one of the people asked to make a block for the quilt. It took me a long time to come up with my concept for this. I wanted to do something that was special to me and Vanessa, that wasn't musical (because I thought music was a bit too obvious). I watched the other people in the secret group posting their blocks, but even though they were all awesome and thoughtful blocks, I remained uninspired.  Eventually, the idea hit me. As children my sister and I had a game we would play, where I was the Fairy of Stilts, and she was the Fairy of ...