A life in lists

Sale time!

Want to get your paws on some liberty print? Want to do it at 20% off? I need to clear some space for new stock, so everything in my etsy shop is 20% off for a couple of days, until I've cleared enough space to justify some new Liberty print! Just enter the code RESTOCK20 at checkout for your discount.

So if you're looking for charm packs, a rainbow bundle or a huge selection of fat eighths, just pop on over and get browsing - this sale is only running until I've cleared a bit of stock, and if previous sales are anthing to go by, it won't be on for long!

Seven Days: Six things (because I didn't count when I made the photo collage)

1. Choosing fabric for my month in the Brit Bee
2. Ikea tape = pretty parcels! (Busy month in the shop)
3. Hexie progree (slow and steady)
4. Morning playtime. Is anyone else well into their day by 7am? I'm always pleased that I follow so many Australians on Instagram, as their sewing gives me something to look at when my day starts at 5:30am.
5. Bee block trian run
6. Finally turning last year's Brit Bee blocks into a (double sided) quilt. Thought I'd better crack on since I'm in the midst of preparing this year's blocks to go out.

Baggy

It was my parents' 25th wedding anniversary a couple of weeks ago, and since they are two of the most practical people I have ever met and are therefore completely underwhelmed with non-functional gifts, I thought I'd make a couple of useful bags, which we filled with a couple of chocolate bars and drawings from my children (which are, natually, the finest art one could hope to see).

I actually made three bags, but apparently failed to photograph one of them. In my head they're for taking on camping holidays (am I the only one who always needs an extra bag for something whenever we go camping?), so the third, unphotographed bag is made from a Dear Stella print with lots of tents on (we will gloss over, for the moment, the fact that that they camp in a van, not a tent. It's pretty fabric, so who cares?).

The pattern is Jeni's amazing drawstring bag pattern which pops up an awful lot around the blogosphere. I've used it a couple of times before, but never posted about it, so it seems itabout time that I add my rave review to the consensus. This is a seriously well written, well thought through pattern. Lots of little details like sized bags, a calculate-your-own-pattern-dimensions sheet, and photographs at every single step (I am really visual, I need photographs) make this a pattern I am genuinely looking forward to using again.

The bags (and the chocolate, and the artwork) seemed to go down pretty well - I may have finally found the handmade gift that works for my uber-practical family.

WIP Wednesday

That there is a small portion of my Brit Bee quilt in progress. This is an incredibly precious quilt to me (the women who contributed blocks to it are awesome), and I am terrified of doing something 'wrong' with it, so progress is not exactly speedy, but I have a definite plan now and it's slowly coming together.

I am going to finish this quilt top by the weekend. If I say it enough times it'll become true, right?

Linkning up with WIP Wednesday today, in the hope it will scare me into progress...

Aproning

I made this apron using some denim in my stash and a mini Liberty print charm pack aaaages ago, and have been meaning to blog it ever since.

I always love the way different Liberty prints play together, no matter how random the colour combination.

Pretty, no?

The Finish-along, Q2 list

The good news is, it's not exactly going to be challenging to outdo my own Q1 finish total. Because that was zero.

And so, for Q2, I'm giving myself a very similar (but bigger) list, in the hope that I'll actually manage to complete one or two of the things on it.

1. My Brit Bee quilt.

How amazing are these blocks? It's actually my month for round two in May, so I'm determined to at least have the top finished before I send out a new round of fabric. The top is about 2/3 done, so I'm reasonably optimistic.

2. The Liberty HST quilt.

The top of this is complete, and the backing (which for some unknown reason I have made almost as involved as the top) is about half done, so I should be able to start working out where the hell I'm going to baste it (there aren't that many king-sized patches of floor in my house) in the not-too-distant future.

3. The portholes quilt.

I started this at Fat Quarterly retreat last year, and I have wild ambitions of taking it along this year to show off (because I'm modest like that). It is all of two blocks in, so suffice to say there's a teensy bit still to go.

4. My pink EPP quilt.

Again, I'd like to take this along to retreat, if only to demonstrate to my disbelieving Bee ladies that it is possible to make an entire lap quilt out of 3/4" hexagons without adding a 20" border all the way around (which was their suggestion). If all my plans are successful, of course,  I'll be taking quilts, rather than clothes, with me to retreat this year...

5. My postage stampe quilt.

I've had the blocks I've made so far taped to the wall for about two months now, and I think they are actually fading. I should probably turn them into a quilt before it ceases to be bright and cheerful and becomes a low volume quilt...

Simples.

FAL, Q1 roundup. Or, as I like to call it, The List of Shame

And do you know why I call it The List of Shame? I'll give you a hint. There were only three things on my Q1 list. I have finished precisely, ermmm, well, none of them.

I have, in my defence, turned one of the WIPs into a complete quilt top, and another one into about 2/3 of a completed quilt top (the third remains unopened in a ziplock bag, so let's not talk about that), so all is not lost for Q2.

Also in my defence (excuses, much?), I did make a few other things, from bee blocks to scottie dogs. I made a gift for an awesome friend, and another gift for another awesome friend. Oh, and I slightly started two more quilts (an EPP and a postage stamp one. Because I do like a speedy project...). But lets not dwell on that.

Coming up later on, my Q2 list. And you never know, maybe I'll finish one or two things on it. Miracles happen.

Liberty print HSTs. No, it's not that quilt.

A few of us Brit Bee-ers have been, ermm, inundating one of our number with a slew of pillows, and this was my contribution to the cause.

I sholifted from myself pulled a blue/green charm pack and yellow/orange/pink charm pack from my shop and made a whole bunch of small HSTs (1.5" finished) by cutting each charm square into four 2.5" squares and making HSTs from those little squares, and rearranged them into the world's simplest warm/cool arrangement. I quilted the HST piece onto a piece of batting with some Aurifil pink variagated thread that I have no memory of buying (maybe it came from Fat Quarterly retreat last year? Not sure), and made a simple envelope back from a navy blue Lotta Jansdotter print I had knocking around my stash.

It is the most ridiculously busy cushion you could ever hope to see in your life, but I really kind of like it.

Logical construction

Apologies for the atrocious photos - I've been waiting for a sunny day, and if I continue to wait we'll be in August before I've actually done a blog post.

Those are 3/4" hexagons, a mix of Liberty prints from the shop, fabrics from Karen at Blueberry Park, and a few other random scraps that I liked the look of.

I have vague ambitions of this ending up as a lap quilt, but I'm in no great hurry to finish it off, so expect to see it popping up here and there for a while yet. Incidentally, this is the first hexagon project I've ever sewn that I've attempted some kind of logical construction of:

Working in batches of (I think) a couple of hundred hexagons, I've been cutting papers and fabric, and basting, then sewing into rows of five hexagons, then sewing the rows of five into blocks of five rows. The saturated pink spots are sewing separately and dotted around here and there as the fancy takes me. This is in contrast to my usual method of 'sew hexagons at random and see what happens' and is surprisingly satisfying.

Speaking of hexagons, I've been vaguely thinking of getting a Sizzix and offering precut hexagons in my etsy shop, but it seems like the biggest size hexagon dies are only 1 1/4", and I think 1 1/2" or 2" would be better, really. Any thoughts?

Seven days: Seven things

1. Amazing vintage fabric shopping in the a*$e end of nowhere (Hastings) - last weekend involved a meet up of just over half the Brit Bee ladies and a few welcome extras. Much laughter, cookery instruction, mocking and quilt showing off.
2. Hexagon plotting with the help of Susan (that formica table is part of an amazing holiday cottage, owned by Ceri, which we were fortunate enough to be trusted to stay in after our meet up).
3. I picked up my new (old) bike this week! Much excitement. I have already taken it out a few times, and am awaiting some sunshine to do a full photo shoot.
4. That meet up. It involved lots of snuggling under quilts. The sunshine quilt enjoyed its outing.
5. I asked the man in the bike shop for a helmet to match my fluoro orange lipstick. He did pretty well. In fact, I am generally rather impressed with Exeter Cycles. They are complete cycle geeks, in a good way.
6. The hexagons are being pieced, in between being attached by Jasper (who is two at the end of this month. How did that happen?)
7. Attempting to be healthy. Somewhat negated when I went to the supermarket while suffering from PMT today and came back with three bars of chocolate and a Jamaica ginger cake. Ahem. Diet starts next week?