October 1, 2022
It wasn’t until after I had the pattern picked that I realized there was a lot of October to get through before Hallowe’en pumpkins really were the “thing”. So I added a backing that might be mistaken more for a fall and/or Thanksgiving theme.
This was a fun one to make and one of the fancy stitches on my machine took care of the quilting in the border.
In 2016 when I finished I Get By With a Little Help from My Friends I had a few blocks that didn’t fit in. I should have pitched them at the time but they went into a bin of orphan blocks and other things I didn’t really know what to do with. Recently I was digging into the bin for something else and came across these old blocks.
As with the wall hanging I made I had trouble fitting the blocks together in a way that I liked and that still left me with the hexagon shape. I put them together as best I could and then went looking for backing fabric.
I was pleased to find some of the original, uncut fabric that matched the blocks so I did a U-turn and made the pieced blocks the back and put the original fabric on the front.
I’ll use this for the table on the deck on Texada.
September 1, 2022
September was another block in my Calendar series that I wasn’t happy with so I went back to the same designer as I picked for August. This block was much easier to put together and the results are much better.
Imagine Kathryn slicing her chicken dinner on her cutting board with a matching chicken below.
When Stacia, Deloise and I were planning our Panorama trip both of them were going to work on a pattern that would use fabrics from Mum’s stash. I have always planned a second quilt with the scraps of her fabric that I still had. Some time ago I purchased a set of templates for making scrap quilts and I thought I’d make use of them.
I started cutting but it soon became clear that I wasn’t going to have enough variety in the fabric to give me the designs that I was hoping for. But I had enough yardage to use in a 3-Yard quilt so I picked a pattern and finished the top when we were together.
I have tried in the past to do a pieced backing and I was never very happy with the results. But a fellow Guild member had been doing something called crumb quilting where you take the tiniest pieces, stitch them together, stitch them to more tiny pieces and finally, after a long time, you end up with enough fabric to make a block. I started doing that but realized it was going to take forever so I gave up.
I still had a few larger pieces of Mum’s fabric so I started with that and eventually made up enough blocks to do a pieced backing. I’m so pleased with the results; to me it looks so much like the patchwork quilts that Mum made.
I used my go-to star pattern for the squares and the mattress stitch to outline those blocks. I used a wider mattress stitch for the diagonals but they didn’t direct the eye to the diagonal as much as I expected. I used a straight-line spiral in the half of the half-square triangle that was opposite the diagonal.
This purple fabric is my favourite.