Cassilis Quilters Guild Inaugural Meeting

Today Lea, Kylie, Susan and I met in a little town called Cassilis. We had such a lovely time, in such a great venue that we have decided to do it again. It was decided that we needed a name for our gathering, so......

 today was the inaugural meeting of the Cassilis Quilter's Guild.

We met at The Plough Inn Cafe. The food and service was fabulous and I would highly recommend the slight detour off the Golden Highway if you are in need of refreshments. You can also browse over the art work, antiques and other interesting items for sale.

 Lea was kind enough to drive so I started  stitching in the car on the way there and on the way home (hate to waste an opportunity to get a bit done). I have managed to get another five flannel hexagon flowers completed.

Susan has lots of great photos posted on her blog so pop over there for a look. I'm off to get a few more flowers stitched.

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!!