September already?

Thankfully it is not yet September otherwise I would have missed my birthday entirely, but as far as the SMQ Bee is concerned August has been skipped over and we have dived straight into September.

Both of the Queen Bee's for August went AWOL so there was a deathly silence when the request for their block preference was made. So instead of August blocks I am now ahead of the game (in my mind anyway!) with the first of the Bee blocks for September done and dusted.

Jennifer asked for 25 blue blocks for the Up,up and away quilt from the book. This was the same block that I asked my Bee mates for back in May, so it was fun to have a go at them again in a different colourway. The blocks went together in such quick time that I was encouraged to keep on making them to add to my own pile.

In May I asked the Bees to send two strips of 10 2.5" white squares with a triangle in the corner, and all but three of them have come through so far, so with an extra strip sent by a Bee member I had 270 blocks. The quilt needs 589 blocks! You can see why I asked for strips, I can only admire Jennifer's fortitude in asking for the blocks to be sent individually!

Here are my 270 blocks in all of their glory.

 

The strips for the quilt are set diagonally so I have made a start on the first diagonal rows, 279 blocks down only another 311 to go :)

The instructions in the book call for triangles cut from 2.5" binding strips for the corner triangles but I haven't bound enough quilts to have that many triangles on hand so have been saving triangles wherever I can.

I am hoping that this bag of triangles will get me most of the way there.

So with another Bee block down and a start on my own Bee quilt here is how my WIP list is looking now

• In Color Order HST BOM - quilting started!
• Sunday Morning Quilt Bee blocks received, 2 more to be added by me
• Sunday Morning Quilt2 Bee 279 blocks made, 311 to go!
• Sunday Morning Quilt2 Bee blocks sent (ahead of schedule)
• Star of Africa Bee blocks completed and sent (only 1 month behind schedule!)
• Scrappy Trip Around the World Bee Q2 - no progress yet
•  And Sew On BOM - eight blocks completed (On Schedule!)
• Paris Cushion - no progress
• (Almost) Irish Chain quilt basted  
• 5 blocks of NY Beauty QAL completed and fabric cut for remaining 5 blocks 
• 20 blocks of Craftsy BOM completed

Linking up to

Creating a quilt from a photo - Selecting fabrics with the Palette Builder

The Holiday Memories Mini Quilt Competition is underway

For some prospective entrants (Benta I am thinking of you!) who had the holiday of a lifetime this year picking a memory to choose to represent in a mini quilt is fairly straightforward. For others the memory will choose itself when the photos are viewed.

Either way how do you translate the photo you have into fabrics for a mini quilt? Well, if you haven't come across it before, the help you need is freely available in the Palette Builder available at Play Crafts.

Anne from Play Crafts has this to say about the Palette Builder tool

"At Play Crafts, we're committed to making design tools that are easy,
intuitive, and most of all, fun to use. We feel that every person has
a creative vision, and we want to design tools that help that vision
come to life. Palette Builder is our first tool, and it is designed to
help people find color inspiration from their favorite photos. With
the recent addition of Kona matching, it's now even easier to
integrate your color inspiration into your quilt designs!"

With the Holiday Memories Mini Quilt Competition in mind Anne has written a tutorial for newcomers to the Palette Builder, which is available here

Looking through my Norwegian Cruise photos I came across this one that I had taken to remind me of the wonderful colours of the painted wooden houses.

Uploaded to the Palette Builder I have the palette of colours I need to look for in fabrics and if I am so inclined a shopping list of Kona cottons to boot :)

So what are you waiting for? Look through your photos, check out the tutorial, play about with the Palette Builder and then rummage in your stash or get shopping!

Check the link at the top of the page for all of the details of the Competition, including the great prizes up for grabs

I can't wait to see what you come up with.

Have fun :)

Linking to

Mini Finishes

My birthday is coming up at the end of the month and I may just have a number of sewing and quilting books on my Amazon wish list :)

So, before the anticipated influx of new reading I thought that I ought to get some value out of the books I already have. Before I had even heard of Zakka-style or joined in any Zakka-style SAL's I had Rashida Coleman-Hale's book I (heart) Patchwork. Indeed, the Wedding Ring patchwork tea towel was one of the first projects I ever blogged about, so the book has been on my shelf for a while.

As well as the tea towel I have also made this pincushion

and this apron from this book.

 

So, when I was looking for something quick and straightforward to make as an antidote to all of the seemingly never-ending projects I have on the go at the moment, I knew which book to pull from the shelf. 

This time I thought that I would have a go at the travel sewing wallets, they seemed just the right blend of quick and useful that I was looking for. In addition, I got to play with some of my linen scraps from my linen shopping days in the Baltics :) The wallet only needs a scrap of linen fabric 9.5" by 3.5" for the exterior and three squares 3.5" by 3.5" for the interior, as well as oddments of cotton fabric for the binding and inners so is an ideal scrap buster.

 

 The pincushion in the middle is two 2.5" squares of fabric stitched together, then turned right sides out and stuffed before being hand stitched to the centre of the linen square. Stitching the pincushion to the square was a bit fiddly, and it did make machine sewing the binding quite tricky later, but the pincushion is my favourite bit of the whole wallet. 

I enjoyed putting this one together so much that I immediately made another one!

 

This time with some 50/50 linen and cotton scraps, which will I think be a bit more robust. 

 

I am delighted with these little wallets and, once again, with I (heart) Patchwork. 

Do you have a book that you turn to again and again for projects? There is still time for me to add to my wish list, if  I need to :)

Linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts