FNSI and Finish It Up Friday

Well it's been a while since my last post. So I must warn you this post is a little longer than usual. So just to prove I have actually been sewing here is a picture of my Life Is Beautiful BOM finished! Ta Daaaa!
So here is a finish for OPAM and Finish it up Friday at Crazy Mom Quilts.

I'm sorry the lighting is so poor. It's really windy today, not good quilt photographing weather. Here are a few closeups for you.

 This QAYG project is my first of this kind and definitely my last. I spent a lot of time trying to get a good finish on the sashings and just couldn't get these as neat as sewing a quilt the conventional way. 

I am also annoyed that a very important instruction was left out of the pattern. Below is a picture of the back of the quilt. A tip for anyone thinking of making this one. When you piece a four patch for the front, make an identical one for the back. That way you can have identical blocks on the front AND back when you quilt each individual block. When laying out the blocks to be sewn into rows, you can be sure that none of the fabrics on the front OR the back will be sitting next to the exact same fabric.

Unfortunately I have several fabrics sitting next to each other. Anyway... you live and learn....Moving on....

Last night I participated in Handmade by Heidi's Friday Night Sew In. I worked on my EPP flannel hexagon quilt. It is now starting to grow....fast. With hexagon flowers on steroids (hexagon papers are two and half inches), these completed flowers are bigger than your average dinner plate!

With Son No.1 away at Uni, I decided to make better use of his room and spread it out on his bed as I work on it. I have about seven more flowers to make. This quilt has been made with the combined flannel scraps of mine and my friend Julie. I did buy just a couple of new flannels last week to make sure  this will be a really big quilt to fit down the sides of a queen bed. I need more blankets for when we have visitors. But I decided that it would be much more fun making flannel quilts than buying boring blankets.

I had this many together as of bed time last night. I can't wait to finish this as I will hand quilt it so that the flannel maintains it's warm snuggly softness. With the weather becoming so cold, there is no better place to be than under a quilt. Hope you got some sewing done last night as well.

FNWF Life Is Beautiful BOM-More Progress

Friday Night With Friends motivated me to make some more progress on this quilt. First I had to fix a little problem I noticed just recently.

Hmmm... definitely didn't use a quarter inch seam allowance there. 

This is a 'quilt as you go' project and it has been a little challenging to get the same finish on this quilt that you can achieve when sewing a quilt the regular way.

The quilt was in four sections and tonight I sewed the sashing on to join all of these sections so that all of the rows are now together.

Tomorrow night's job is to slip stitch the three new rows of sashing on the back of the quilt.

Then make about 19 more of these and appliqué them onto the intersection of the new sashing pieces. Then I will be up to my favourite part....the binding. I'm excited to be so close to finishing this project.

Off to bed for me now, I'm soccer mum tomorrow and we have an away game. Driving to Warner's Bay for the match. Should Google to see if there are any nice quilt stores in the area before I go to bed. Any suggestions?

Click here to join in on Friday Night With Friends or to see what some other people got up to.

Hope you had a chance to get a little sewing done too.

Two OPAM Finishes For May

Sorry to bore you with photos of projects you have seen, but I just dropped my latest birth sampler into the framers and to my surprise there were two projects for me to collect.

After all of the sewing I did during April, my OPAM tally totalled a pathetic 1 completed project!!

So now I have doubled my tally for April and May's tally stands at 2. Yay!!

Perfect Circles With A Few Tools Of The Trade

I do love having little tools that help you to achieve the best quality finish you can on your projects. 

I have already shown you these little row markers that have a different letter of the alphabet on each one.

Cardygirl got me onto these little beauties a while ago. You can get them from here. They are called 'Perfect Circles' and 'Bigger Perfect Circles'. The smallest circle has a diameter of half an inch and the biggest one a diameter of 4 and a half inches.

I love to do needle turn appliqué and for a beginner I'm OK at straights and curves. But, I am HOPELESS when it comes to forming a full circle. This is how I use them.

Start by making a Suffolk puff with your circle.

Once you have stitched most of the way around, place the Perfect Circle that is the required finished size inside, gather the thread up and keep stitching until you get to the spot you started.

If you have a seam like I do for these circles I start off and end there so that the thread doesn't pull through as easily when you gather the thread up.

I bought this little ruler recently and it is great to quickly measure the distance to make sure the centre of the pieces are in the centre of the circle.

Then carefully use the point of your iron to press the circle. Yes they are made of plastic, but you can put the iron right on top of them and they don't melt. I have my iron set on the hottest setting and I haven't melted one yet. I have also been using spray starch on these circles to get a nice crisp edge.

Then let your circle cool a little, loosen the stitching slightly and ease the Perfect Circle out. Pull the thread up gently and finish the thread off to keep all of the raw edges in.

Then a few dots of appliqué glue to hold it in place and you only have to slip stitch around the edge. No pins in the way for your thread to get caught up on. Now I know it sounds like a lot of preparation right?

But, I find this is the fastest way for me because I end up undoing my circle so many times because I am unhappy with all of the pointy bits. I can never get a nice curve all the way around. I end up with the quarter inch seam fraying away to nothing and have to make another circle and start again.

It is probably cheating a little bit because you aren't actually turning fabric under with your needle, but I don't care. Unfortunately the embroidered circles were just slightly bigger than the biggest Bigger Perfect Circles and so I made one out of cardboard. My cardboard circle was not 'perfect' and so those circles are little bumpy in places. But still better than going freehand.

I am so close to finishing my Life Is Beautiful BOM I have decided to get stuck in and finish it up. I have pairs of rows together. I decided to appliqué the circles over the intersection of the sashing while it is in a more manageable size. Then I'll join the pairs of rows up and keep appliquéing circles as I go.

If you're on holidays, I hope you are enjoying your last day before we head back to work and school.

A Very Productive Night

 At midnight I had one row of blocks to join together. Unfortunately, I had to do just a little bit of reverse sewing on the eighth row, so decided to finish the last row in the morning.

                      

 One of my favourite haberdashery items are these Row Marking Safety Pins. It is SO easy to keep track of the placement of each row if you have to pack up and then want to lay the rows out again later. Each pin has a different letter of the alphabet and is so much easier than writing on pieces of paper and pinning it to the block like I used to do to.

So here a are few rows laid out. There are nine in total.

Now I have lots of hand sewing to do while I slip stitch each piece of sashing  on the back of the quilt by hand before I can join the rows together. 

Life is Beautiful

I just LOVE French General fabric. This BOM I started a few years ago called "Life Is Beautiful" is a 'quilt as you go' project. I had never tried 'quilt as you go' before, thought I'd give it a go.

This is one of my favourite block. 

Progress report: I have quilted all 32 embroidered blocks, cut the circle of patchwork out from behind them and appliquéd those circles onto 32 four patch blocks. These are now quilted as well. Before quilting these, I cut a circle out from behind the appliquéd circle and this will be appliquéd over the intersection of the sashing once the rows are sewn together. Got it?

This afternoon I cut out the sashing fabric and laid out the blocks to work out placement.

So here it is laid out on my lounge. A few family members are out tonight and so I pushed the Ottoman up to the chaise and have taken over. The race is on to get the blocks attached into rows before tomorrow night when we are all home again.

Better get sewing.