BLOG 541

 

Blog 541

 

Over the last couple of weeks, I have been driving a lot. My husband has had facial surgery to remove a cancerous sore just below his eye and this has necessitated numerous journeys to a specialist unit in St Helen’s, about 35 miles from home. I was quite fascinated by the MOHS technique which took 3 surgeries and 3 lab tests (to make sure all the affected tissue had been removed) and an 11 ½ hour day in outpatients. With all the dressings on his face he looked like he was auditioning for the Phantom of the Opera! A few days of convalescing was followed by a 3 day stay in the plastic surgery unit in Whiston hospital to make good the damaged area. Instead of a reconstruction using a skin graft, the surgeons utilised his loose skin and wrinkles (we could all do with a bit of this!) and that will result I him eventually looking ten years younger on that side of his face! The scar, starting at his collar line, goes up his neck, round his ear, up the side of his face and under his eye. There are masses of tiny regular stitches along the length and I would have been very proud to have done them myself!! He’s still very battered and bloodied but in no immediate pain or discomfort and thankfully the process of recovery has started.

Now that the weather is warming up, I have noticed that the long tailed tits are still coming mob-handed to the garden feeders. These pictures show the contrast in seasons and it reminds me that we all need a bit of colour in our lives!

 

Winter feeder

 

Spring feeder

 

As far as sewing is concerned, I have continued to make progress on Linus quilt #4. Using the prepared blocks, I have added a 1 ½” strip of calico, rotating half the blocks. A string piecing technique was used and the design wall helped to show progress.

 

Building blocks

 

Conveyor belt

 

Design wall

 

Blocks and lattice (in progress)

 

Lattice strips

 

Design wall

 

Constructing the lines

 

Final seam

 

Finished top (without borders)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

BLOG 540

 

Blog 540

 

What a lovely week it has been! Although cold, the sun has been shining most days and it has really lifted the spirits (particularly the gin which I am rather partial to!!). It’s the first day of Spring today and Mother Nature is doing her best to confirm it. There’s lots of bird song in the air and the buds and wild flowers are starting to make an appearance and the feeling all-round is that we have got through another winter unscathed. It’s just over a year ago this week that we became aware of the devastating effects of the Covid pandemic and the restrictions it was going to place on our lives. From ‘not having time to do things’ we moved to ‘having all the time in the world to do what we wanted’ and yet I wonder how many took advantage of this situation. Now weekly walks with family or friends have become much anticipated and really precious because nothing can take the place of just being together and having a chat, it’s as simple as that!

My indoor creative time has been spent (almost) completing the scrap quilt which I started at the beginning of lockdown. I used a walking foot and let the sewing machine do the work. All I had to do was battle the bulk of it under the needle. It became less of a fight when I started to roll the edges in. I cut the binding from the same fabric as the back of the quilt and added that. It warms me of an evening when I am hand sewing it down.

 

Machine quilting

 

Walking foot

 

Rolled quilt

 

Adding the border

 

Almost finished

 

On the design wall, I have been playing with the remaining rectangles. I decided to sew two together to make a square with one light and one dark. I set up a production line by my sewing machine with lights on one side and darks on the other and just fed them through using a string piecing method.

 

Rectangles

 

Production line

 

String piecing

 

As I was separating them I placed them in piles with the dark fabric on top. This made it easier to place the squares under the iron and press them from light to dark. I shall carry on doing a few each time I go into my room. The piles of rectangles will diminish and the piles of squares will increase and be ready to use as building blocks for the next Linus quilt(s)

 

Pressing

 

Squares

 

BLOG 539

 

Blog 539

 

You will probably have registered that I wasn’t that enamoured with the design wall layout that I had prepared last week. I decided that, as I don’t like unpicking (calling it ‘reverse sewing’ makes it less painful!), I was not going to continue to make these rectangles into a large quilt. Instead I made the decision to use up the prepared blocks and the remainder of the rectangles on Linus quilts. I haven’t made any this year so now I have inadvertently provided myself with the ideal opportunity! The individual blocks remain the same; the only difference is that I have used lights to balance the darks.  This has given me a block with many more possibilities rather like the log cabin block.

 

Alternative layout: 1 block

 

I started to play with layouts and it wasn’t long before I got into my stride and started mass producing quilts … well three quilt tops so far! Adding black between the blocks gave a sense of relief and a line of definition.

 

4 Blocks together

 

2 Linus quilt ideas

 

Linus 1 with black

 

Linus 2 with black

 

Here’s the progress on the Linus 3 quilt.

 

Linus quilt 3

 

Progress 1

 

Progress 2

 

Progress 3

 

Progress 4

 

Remaining palette

This week we celebrated our 49^th wedding anniversary. We were married on a remote island in the middle of the South Pacific where we were both working all that time ago, and I would do it all again in a heartbeat! One of our daughters made us laugh with her choice of card. As a special gift, the family treated us to a Rick Stein 3-course gourmet meal delivered by a white van. It was a novel idea, well presented with a menu and cooking instructions and there was even a YouTube video if you felt the need to watch it. It tasted delicious and the wine slipped down a bit too easily!

Anniversary card

 

Rick Stein meal

BLOG 538

 

Blog 538

 

This week I decided to battle on with the current scrap quilt project. I’m not usually so focused on advancing one project at a time but for some reason this project provided enough creative interest to motivate me! Part of it was the prospect of using up the remaining bulk of my fabric stash which has been my abiding aim for the past few years. This will be the final scrap quilt I think … (I hope!) The ready prepared rectangles are 2 ½” x 4 ½” and as such they are a versatile shape for many a tile pattern.

The proposed simple lay-out was shown on the blog last week and this is the start of the logical construction. As usual, I laid out a couple of blocks at a time beside my sewing machine and worked using a string-piecing method.

 

Layout 1

 

String piecing

 

Part sewn

 

Outer borders 1

 

Outer borders 2

 

Conveyor belt

 

As usual, my design wall is an integral part of the progress and, as each block was completed, it was pinned there for an over-all impression. And it was at this point that I realised that, if I was intending to do a shaded quilt from dark in the centre to light round the outside, the block was too big for the fabrics that I had to work with. The blocks shown below are in a blended sequence but I didn’t have sufficient in the medium/dark range to go all around the dark centre. It’s time to rethink my method and to assess what I can do with the remaining rectangles.

 

Progress

 

Remaining rectangles