BLOG 469

Blog 469

My thanks to those who sent emails to say which poppy they preferred; it’s always good to receive feed-back on these occasions. As it happened (and perhaps fortunately for me!) everyone said they preferred the pansies made out of strips and that is the method I have chosen to proceed with! This will be an on-going winter project, fitted in between other items I have to make. Now that the decision is definitely made, I can pursue this at my leisure and post pictures when there is something different to see and progress has been made.

 

 

             Painterly pansies

 

 

And in the spirit of ‘waste-not, want-not’, I cut up the fabric created with circles and created smaller pansies for a cushion front. I chose to appliqué them on a slap-in-the-face fabric for impact and I was delighted with the effect. Decorative free-motion stitching was added to hold down the small pieces of fabric and to complete the over-all effect. This will be one of four I have made for someone who ordered some ‘art’ cushions from me.

 

                Recycled pansies

 

             With stitch

 

 

Now that the pansies are underway, I decided to assess the progress I had made on the foundation pieced scrap quilt, yet another project in progress! It’s all very well slamming fabric under your sewing machine, but it helps to know where you are going with it. This visual feed-back helps to keep you going and gives you some idea of how far you have still to go! And just to remind you, I am sewing random width strips onto a foundation paper. No preparation is needed; all you need is one straight edge which helps to straighten the previous seam allowance as you sew. Once the excess fabric is trimmed away from around the outside edge of the paper, the paper (perforated by using a small stitch) pulls easily away.

 

               Foundation piecing

 

 

As my strips got smaller, I cut the papers in half vertically so I could carry on using them! This gives me more scope with the lay-out too.

 

             Review on design wall

 

 

I thought I had come to the end of my scraps and so I tidied up the remaining ones in bags, the short ones seen on the left and the longer ones on the right. I really thought I had finished and certainly didn’t want to cut any more fabric because that would have defeated the object of using scraps.

 

             Left overs

 

And then, when I was searching for other fabric, I found my ‘dump’ drawer! This is where I dump fabric after any project and forget about it until I have time to sort it out. I had obviously forgotten about it almost forever! So there is more fabric to use up although a lot of it is on the light side and I try to stick to mediums and darks. This is another on-going on-going on-going project!

 

 

            Dump drawer

 

And finally, I am delighted to show a picture of Marion Hughes’s box which was shared with me by a mutual friend. Marion, who is in her mid-eighties, made the box from scratch as part of her City and Guilds course. It is really lovely, and the applique on the top and sides is splendid. Well done Marion!

 

 

            Marion’s box