The Guild had a demonstration on a new technique for making half-square triangles (HSTs). I wasn’t able to attend the demo and when I tried it out on my own I couldn’t “get it”. In the meantime I had a number of squares cut for HSTs so I stitched them up the traditional way.

I chose a pattern from the book Patchwork Essentials: The Half-Square Triangle (Jeni Baker) but one day I was reading a blog I follow (maryquilts.com) and she had a setting for HSTs that I liked better. I more or less combined the two patterns into something of my own.

This project was both my April and May UFO Challenge and once I decided on the setting it went together quite quickly.

I did some straight-line quilting along with some stitch-in-the-ditch. I’ve always wanted to try quilting e’s and l’s and intended to do that for this quilt. I started out with the e’s and found my mind didn’t switch easily to the l’s so it ended up being only e’s.

I debated whether the quilt was good enough to donate as a Community Quilt but I have decided that’s where it will go.

My records show that I started this in 2017 and considering this was a Leader and Ender project I didn’t do too badly. Of course my records are not always accurate.

My original plan called for a lot more blocks. The blocks finish at 3″ so it would have taken forever to follow through on that plan. This project was my UFO Challenge for May so I began taking the completed blocks to my Thursday sewing sessions and it moved along quickly.

I put a black border around the centre but I wasn’t happy with it, and neither was one of my Thursday people. We came up with the plan to add the red flange and all of a sudden I really liked it.

I did some straight-line quilting on the blocks and used one of my “fancy” stitches in the black borders.

The quilt was intended as a Community Quilt but, like so many scrap quilts, the fabrics meant much more to me than they would to anyone else so I’ve decided to keep it.

UPDATE: This quilt went to Kathryn

Someone once suggested that when you cut the corners off a Snowball block you should keep them to make something, so as not to waste the fabric. When I made my Eye-Spy quilt I did that exact thing and this is the result.

I will never do it again – some scraps are just scraps and should be used to stuff a dog pillow.

If I ever find someone to give the Eye-Spy quilt to, I’ll add this as a play mat.

I’m not sure how long ago I started this runner but I know it’s been at least three years. This was a Guild class on Invisible Machine Appliqué taught by Susan Sharkey (from Texada).

My machine (Pearl) didn’t work well with the InvisiFil thread so I set it aside to finish on Ruby. Although the appliqué stitching worked better I didn’t care for the technique.

Why it took so long to get the quilting done I have no idea. I enjoyed the different stitches I used and once I got started it didn’t take long to finish.

This is the first project I completed in my new Texada studio.