Cut. Stitch. Press. Repeat

A lovely day yesterday :-)

I came back to working on the Aunt Grace's Flowers jelly roll, and made up strips for 9 patch blocks, and a random alternating-with-white quilt.

I tried to explain my time saving method last time, and certainly confused Hadley, so here it is again with pictures!

Pick up a strip of white, and a strip from the jelly roll.  Cut 8 inches off the end of both.

Stitch together the long lengths that are left.  Then at one end add the short piece of white (so create a section which is white-coloured-white) and at the other end add the short piece from the jelly roll (coloured-white-coloured)

and then trim off the two ends where the triple section is. Press everything. The middle section can be trimmed into 2.5" pairs, and put to one side until there are about a zillion of them

Trim the two triple pieces each into three triple strips each at 2.5".  Now you have enough to make two nine patch blocks, one with white corners, one with coloured corners

Clear as mud?

Anyway, new topic - shopping!!!

I want to start a hand sewing project in grey and red for the sofa, and decided to do log cabin using foundation by the yard.  Good plan, but f-b-t-y log cabin doesn't exist, and I really didn't fancy drawing out each foundation block by hand, so I have switched to court house steps.  The foundation fabric arrived today, along with (well if I was paying P&P I might as well add some more stuff???) some f-b-t-y flying geese for the Fun With Fabric course, and a cutting board that I have been lusting after - one that turns, so it's much easier to always cut away from me.

Now off to a job interviw and then an afternoon shopping with Mum and Lisa :-)

School's Out For Summer ... and Nine Patch blocks

School finished (for me) at 6pm yesterday, so I now have six weeks with almost nothing to do apart from sewing, yippee!

I managed to get to the fabric shop yesterday morning, and got 3m of white cotton for the Nine Patch project.  About 3am I woke up thinking that I didn't much like the planned layout.

 I am planning to make two quilts with the fabric, one will be alternating random 2.5" squares of Aunt Grace fabrics with white and I'm happy with that one.  The other is so far equal number of  4 white/5 coloured, and 5 white/4 coloured 9 patches which I was going to arrange randomly

But it doesn't read (to me) as nine patches, but as not-quite-random 2.5 inch block and white

So I thought I might go for a colour wash Irish Chain with the 4xwhite blocks (do these have a proper name?)

and perhaps a diagonal arrangement of the 5xwhite blocks

I have plenty of time to make up my mind, and I have another 17 strips of  white to cut, 17 pairs of white & coloured strips to sew together, 17 hours of ironing and trimming ... good job I don't have to go to work!

9 patches and Block Lotto

I have done ten blocks for the July Block Lotto.  I loved doing the blocks (each pair is done together, and one is the opposite of the other) but the ironing was a pain.

 

Having not done enough squares for the day (!) I then made up a whole load of nine patches.  Lots more summery fabrics waiting to be used as soon as I get a chance to go the the shops

something pretty

Lisa suggested I sew something pretty, just because!

I picked up this jelly roll from Fabric Freedom (Aunt Grace, Circle of Friends, SOOOO pretty! It reminds me of summer dresses from childhood) and pulled out some white to go with it.

Did I want to do nine patch blocks?

Or scatter the patterned squares randomly amongst the white?

I started stitching each strip to white, and then had a brain wave.  I cut 8" off each pair, then stitched the remainder together.  At one end I added the patterned to the white to make an 8" strip of patterned / white  /patterned which I cut off, then I added the white to the other end (making white / patterned / white) so i made enough for two nine patches and left enough for 6 or 7  white / patterned pairs. (Makes sense to me anyway!)

 

Yes Mum, I know I'm supposed to do Hilary's textures first, but I needed some therapy!  I've had to stop with the circle of friends because I ran out of white fabric, so I did this one for Hilary: woven strips.

I think it's just a few more to go, so I think log cabin (maybe uneven log cabin? and maybe ticker tape (raw edge applique)

I'm also doing some liberated sizteen patch for Block Lotto, so I'll show those when they are done.