Sajou Mini Top Finished!

I've been working on the final borders for days but the top is finally finished!  Most of these triangles have been sewn at least twice and the beginning ones five or six times.  I went through two full   bobbins on my machine and this is only 18x18".  About halfway through I decided to ditch the triangles and do something clever with HST's but I used up all my matching fabric cutting triangles 

so I persevered.

If you are a beginner, you are probably wondering what the problem was.  When you lay out two triangles like these and sew them together, they are out of alignment. The first two went together fine but adding the third caused either the base or the point to be too high or too low. I'd read that you are supposed to place one higher than the other but I never got it right the first time around.  I'm sure there is some trick to getting it perfect on the first try but I haven't discovered it!

Overall, I'm pleased with the colors and this was a fun design to do.  Now to quilt it. Thanx to Lori at Humble Quilts for another fun project.  You can go to Humble Quilts for the Linky Party and see all the finished ones.

Linking with Humble Quilts, Monday Making. and Moving it Forward

July Mini Quilt

I've been doing the monthly mini quilt sew along from the Sew Can She blog.  The patterns are free and I'm enjoying seeing the new one for each month.  But I'm behind for various reasons...didn't really like the pattern, not the right fabrics on hand and basic procrastination are some of the answers. I'll probably be doing last month's sunflower (or daisy) in Fall colors!.

This month's is a cute red. white and blue design.  Since I didn't get to it before the fourth, I changed the colors somewhat..

after all, a ladybug needs some flowers to lit on!

The binding came out better than usual, but the corners are still a struggle.  I've got the mitering down but folding the corners out correctly is still iffy. More mini's will be coming up until I can get the process correct.

Linking with Busy Hands Quilts for Finished or Not Friday

OBW Progress

This is a rough layout of my One Block Wonder experiment.  I still have about 5 or 6 hexagons to  assemble and the ones above are pinned at the middle, which is why the sizes look a little off.  I'm still not sure if this was the best fabric choice.  I think I need more contrast color.  This kind of just blends altogether.  What do you all think?

Meanwhile, I'm behind two rows of the In My Neighborhood row by row quilt and I do want to do this month's Mini quilt from Sew She Can.. I'll finish those off while I decide where I want to go with the OBW project.

Linking up with Busy Hands Quilts for Finished or Not Friday

Sunshine-April Mini of the Month

This is my version of  the Sew Can She blog's Mini Quilt of the month.  This one was designed by Jennifer Heynen and is available as a free pattern on Craftsy.  This is the first one that has been an applique quilt instead of pieced which presented some problems.  I don't have a working printer so I traced the templates from my computer screen.  This method worked well for some of the Splendid Sampler blocks as they had the inch scale printed on the pattern and I could enlarge as needed.  There was no scale on this pattern so mine is slightly larger.  It measures 15 x 13 with the binding instead of the 11 inch square of the pattern.  Part of this was intentional on my part as I wanted more of the sun's rays to show.   Overall, I'm happy with it except for the binding.  My skills seem to deteriorate with each quilt!  I'll probably take it off later and resew hoping for better results on the corners.  I did add triangles for hanging and with the heatbond, layers of fabric and batting that was a lot of layers to sew through.

For the fusible, I used Heat n Bond in the red package.  It was after I had the whole thing laid out and ready to sew did I read the section that said not to sew!  Since it didn't bond very well at all, I don't know how they expect a finished project to last.  I used some scraps and tested using a topstitch needle.  My machine sewed it very well and I had no problems.  I quilted with freehand arcs using a gold thread after sewing down all the shapes.

I used a grey fabric for the background so I'm calling this "Sunset".  I'm out of blue sky fabrics.In fact, I'm now out of a lot of basics.  My stash that I thought would last so long now consists of mostly smaller scraps.  Do you buy fabrics for the current project only or do you have a stash?  How do you choose prints to add to your stash?

Linking up with Em's Scrapbag for Moving it Forward Monday  andLove Laugh Quilt

So Behind!

These are my February circles from the Quilty 365-2017 project.  As you can see, I've gotten behind on sewing them up.  They are all there, even if halfway sewed and I am choosing March's every day.  I am running out of scraps...never thought that I'd say that!  Most of my scraps seem to be too small, the wrong color or just not speaking to me.  Looking at other;s blogs, I have a severe case of fabric and scrap envy!

I'm still working on the Bear Claw quilt and always seem to be ripping out a section as I've sewn the hst's on backwards.  My backing fabric for the diamond quilt hasn't shown up yet...big mixup at the vendor resulting in lots of emails, phone calls etc.  My camera program seems to have stopped working and informs me that it can't create the files??????? It's also dating every picture as 2009! I think it's trying to tell it's time for a new camera.  The pictures seem to be going somewhere although I had a hard time finding them.. After on year, I still don't like windows 10!

On the brighter side, I'll be taking part in a mini quilt blog hop on Friday March 10 and have been working on that quilt.  I like to work on different projects at the same time so I've started another quilt.  Hopefully some pix will be coming soon.  And the new monthly mini quilt was released this morning!

February Mini Quilt

I took a break today from my Splendid Sampler blocks and worked on my monthly mini quilt fromSew Can She.  It's called Candygram and a great Valentine project.  Very easy to put together and a great use of small scraps. Most of the scraps are batiks and came from my Diamond quilt. It finished at 4"x 10".  I'm thinking of enlarging it for a pillow cover.

monthly mini quilt sew along

Carolyn of sewshecan  has started a mini quilt along.  Instead of a block a month, you end up with a finished quilt.  So, I have an 8″ finished quilt, but finished is finished!!  It does make me feel better about the unfinished Splendid Sampler blocks and the quilt started in 2013 that is now on my design floor.  Here is my January 2017 effort…..the quilting isn’t showing at all…maybe a new camera would help...