Happy remaining 11/12ths!

Where has January gone?  I have been wanting to get back to writing my blog for ages, but all my good resolutions have evaporated in a blur of admin - house admin, kids' admin (even though they are sort-of grown-up) and village admin.

So not much sewing till a few days ago when I did a class at my LQS, Patchwork Cabin, which will shortly be closing its doors after ten years.  Now I am all fired up to make 2019 a productive sewing year, so let's start with a recap on the last quarter of 2018:

Going backwards in time, I made some Christmas decorations with mt patchwork girls, Miriam and Sophie, using this tutorial from Mr Domestic.  They were a lot of fun and didn't take long, so bookmark them for next year to decorate your tree.  No sewing involved so good to make with youngsters too - and you could use sparkly paper instead of fabric.

We also made 3D fabric snowflake stars with Jennifer of Shabby Fabrics using this tutorial but I don't seem to have taken a photograph - sorry.  I can also recommend this video as the instructions are clear and precise and the snowflakes worked out perfectly.  I will try and add a photo tomorrow.

Apart from Christmas decorations, my recollection was that I didn't do much sewing between September and December, but looking back I did make progress on my Karen Styles project, Robin's Nest, which I last blogged about here.





The nice thing about this project, I have decided, is that preparing the different components will fit into small spaces of time in the way that knitting or embroidery/cross-stitch does.  When I only have ten minutes or half an hour I can cover a few hexagon papers or stitch a few shapes together by hand, whereas I probably wouldn't bother to sit down at the sewing machine if I only had such a short amount of time available.



There are some elements which can be chain pieced too, so I am not abandoning my machine altogether in favour of slow sewing; a reasonable amount of progress has been made over the past few months, though I will still need a good stretch of time to lay out all the elements and start putting the medallion borders together.




My other achievement in the latter part of 2018 was to complete a quilt in an altogether different style and palette for a friend who was married a little over a year ago.  This was a joint project with my friend Chris - we all met in antenatal classes a long time ago - and although I have known Chris for thirty years and we both sew a lot, we have never made a quilt together..

Here are the fabrics our friend picked as her starting point and this is the pattern she found on Pinterest (Star Jewels by Chasing Cottons, better photo on the blog here, scroll down).  Fortunately I have a lot of Kaffe Fassett fabrics in my stash and love the colour palette she chose.

And here is the finished quilt, pieced jointly by Chris and me and longarm quilted by Chris at the Quilt Room.  We chose a wavy modern linear pattern with a soft pink/purple variegated thread.

The backing fabric I ordered from Hancock's of Paducah as I couldn't source it in the UK and we only had a small piece.  I don't usually order fabric from overseas but it just seemed the perfect choice (it is Wind Song in Turquoise from Amy Butler's Night Music collection).

By the time I had paid VAT and handling charges on arrival in UK it worked out about the same price as it would have done here, but at least I was able to get it. The binding is by Alison Glass.  We made the final border a little wider so I think the quilt finished at 78" square, a really good size for snuggling up on the sofa.

I love the quilt so much (and so does our friend, fortunately!) that I really want to make one for me - but it will have to join the end of a very long list of projects.  It was a great pattern and went together really well.  And making for someone else, and making with someone else, setting time aside specifically for that purpose, certainly kept the momentum going.

I must finish on a slightly sad note and say how sorry I am that two of the blogs I have followed for several years are no more: Rita at Red Pepper Quilts has stepped back, certainly from posting regularly, and Amanda Jean of Crazy Mom Quilts has retired after 12 years of blogging.  I loved both these blogs and have been tremendously inspired by their posts: I wish them well in the future, whatever it holds.

But here are some lovely photos of the woods taken today: who can be sad when the sun is shining and the sky is blue for the first time, it seems, in weeks?!  Tomorrow is a new month with lots of possiblities, and maybe I will even find time for some sewing?