Life is a Garden…

I showed you my garden blocks a few weeks ago which I made as part of our friendship group’s 20ll theme and here they are again finally made into a quilt top with a couple of additions.

I decided to make a larger central block using my Go Baby shape cutter for the flower motifs and then machine zig-zagged around them. I was pretty happy with how they turned out and thought I would embroider the names of the group members on the central block to remind me of who contributed to the various block designs.

It meant of course that I had to do a little bit of a calculation to work out how to incorporate the the squares on either side of the middle block (math is not my strong point)! but in the end I was quite happy adding the floral strips to the two squares and putting a couple of narrow blocks that I could embroider on to.

The other pleasing thing for me was the sashing fabric which I bought about 5 years ago from a closing down sale for a bargain price. There it was just waiting for the right opportunity to present itself and now I can feel satisfied that it has been put to good use … at last! The other blocks too were all made from fabric already in my stash so no new fabric purchased – Yay!

Here is the finished quilt top, hope you like it.

If you want to see a close up of the blocks take a look here

Peace, Joy, Lego houses and quilting in the holiday season!

I hope you are all well and have enjoyed a wonderful Christmas with your loved ones.

Our Melbourne Christmas was a fairly relaxed and quiet affair but enjoyable all the same.

We have a street BBQ every Christmas morning and this year it was our turn to host it so there we were at 8.30am cooking up sausages outside our house waiting for neighbours to arrive. Its always a great way to catch up with neighbours you generally only wave at throughout the year and a nice way to welcome and get to know new residents.

We even have a trophy lego house that gets awarded each year to the house with the most noticeable improvements! You then get the honour of keeping the ‘trophy’ (its supposed to take pride of place on the mantle piece) all year and awarding it to whoever you feel most deserving the next Christmas!! Just a bit of fun really but it always creates a lot of laughter.

The rest of the day was spent with friends – eating (way too much), laughing and generally relaxing.

When we got home in the evening (ready to drop) it was time to phone family on the other side of the world and it always feels strange that just as we are coming to the end of our Christmas celebrations, they are just starting theirs. When I first came to Australia this was particularly difficult for me but I have to say that as we have gradually developed our own ‘traditions’ over the years and our children are now teens, it no longer upsets me – so thats a good thing!

What else have I been doing over the last week …. well I managed to finish the small lap quilt I showed off last time – the one I made with the tumbler blocks, cut from the Go Baby, fabric cutter.

I had a go at quilting this one myself as it was quite small and decided just to do wavy lines vertically and horizontally with a variagated pink thread.

I carried on the wavy line quilting in the borders and for the first time had a go at completely machine binding a quilt – sewing onto the reverse of the quilt and then folding it over to the front and machine blanket stitching on the front. One major thing I learned was, always cut your binding strips at least 2″ wide and not 1 3/4″ like I did (it was a struggle to say the least)!

As I mentioned in my last post I didn’t really have a purpose for this quilt when I started it but then of course the tragic events in Connecticut and the comment left on my Mad Cows Day Out post on December 12th by sowninpeace meant this quilt did have a purpose after all. I hope it gets to its destination safely and helps in some small way.

Wishing you all love and happiness for the holiday season.

Having fun with my Baby!

Baby Go!

Don’t you just love getting a new toy to play with? I do and its not even Christmas yet! Anyway here it is – the Go Baby fabric cutter by Accuquilt.

There is a bigger version too but this one is just fine for my needs. I wanted to test out how quickly I could put a small quilt top together so this is what happened:

Cutting out the pieces

I have used a small tumbler die for this quilt (3.5″) and being me, I started cutting at 10pm and cut out 154 tumbler shapes – this took me exactly 1 hour.

Then I laid them all out on the floor to get the colour combination right and stacked them all in their rows – ready for sewing.

After sewing all the tumblers together into their rows – I ironed the seams (alternating them to the left on one row and then to the right on the next etc.)

Then I sewed the rows together (this is where those little labels come in handy).

A bit more ironing and then I put a 3.5″ border on and ……..

One finished quilt top!

This really was a whizz to put together – even though I was doing an hour here and there – It still only took me a couple of days so really good if you had a cot quilt or lap quilt you wanted to put together quickly for a present.

I didn’t have any real plans for this quilt and then its purpose became clear but I’ll tell you about that later.