The Squirrel Came Back.

I was a little worried the other day to read that the squirrel had hopped over to Kiwikid Sues place, to distract help her out. As I had only half a plan for finishing the HSTs. But I set off yesterday, hopefully sewing them together. As I suspected, there were issues with lost points and varying block sizes. That is the nature of 11 year old scraps. Well that's what I told myself.

That little group at the top was about half an inch narrower than the others! EEK!

What now?

I turned both pieces this way and that and discovered that my rearranging had reduced the difference to a quarter inch, then inspiration, or the squirrel struck and I popped a piece of Jelly roll in there, which helped to disguise the difference.

Perfect.

I kept on adding a few more pieces of jelly roll log cabin style.

I'll call this a completed top. It's a nice size for a bassinet or a small crib, or even a wall hanging.

I have some lovely chocolate brown slices of Jelly roll that I will use for binding, but first I must quilt it.

There were a few rejected blocks and some left over  HSTs, they went into the crumb basket.

I'll address them another day.

Next I pulled out the floral scraps again, maybe this time they will get their chance to shine.

You can see right at the top of the photo the cutting guide for what I hope to do with them.

I just need to dig out a suitable fabric to use for sashing.

I hope to start cutting today.

And finally, I completed the wash cloth I was knitting during the zoom session.

If you have never tried using these cute little hand knitted cloths you should.

They are lovely to use. I have some for cleaning the house and some that I keep especially for cleaning me and my grand children.

That's all of my news, now I'm off to do chores, before I play. 

 

That Pesky Squirrel.

Before I went off to work on Monday, I had sewn all of the bindings on to the Frankenmats, then pinned all of the bindings to their backs. Usually I enjoy closing bindings by hand, but I thought that as these mats are already such experimental pieces, why not try another new method and close the bindings on the machine?

Yesterday, (Tuesday) I set about doing just that.

The results, are not perfect, but the bindings were successfully closed.

I worked from the front, using my ditch foot as a guide.

And I'm really rather pleased with how that worked out.

One table runner.

And six placemats.

Does that mean that I have seven finishes for April?

LOL

And here are five more finishes.

To add yet more to the monstrousness nature to these mats, I used up several odd bits of bobbin thread and finished off five odd spools of thread. 

One more thing I did on Tuesday was to have another play with the floral scraps. I laid them all out on the floor, in no particular order, I just wanted to be sure that they would all play nicely together.

I went off to work and left them that way.

Hmm, it looks like a fight broke out and some of them disagreed.......

Or maybe Belle decided to have a little play?

LOL

When I went into my room this morning and found them like that, I picked them all up and put them back on to the table, then the squirrel appeared and I found myself playing with some completely different scraps!

I've had these tiny little HST off cuts for many years.

You can see their donor quilt here.

Try as I have, I cannot find the beginnings of that project. I thought there may have been another project that had also donated triangles, but I cannot find evidence of that either.

So anyway, .....

following the squirrel on some historic date I had sewn some of the squares together and then abandoned what ever I had planned. Something else I can find no record of!  They have lain tucked away in my Fig Tree Fabrics drawer, for quite some time. I have pulled them out occasionally, fiddled with them, then put them away again on more than one occasion.

Today the squirrel led me to join more of the squares together and create flying geese units.

Some are tidier then others and I know that where ever this wee project goes, I'm going to end up losing a lot of points, which is I'm sure, why they have been repeatedly returned to the drawer, but today I carried on anyway.

I stopped here when Tony came home for his lunch.

I'm really not sure where this is going.

But right now I am sure that I'm going to make a cuppa, then I'll sit n sip while I unsew some that were on one of their previous outings sewn up in a different way.

Do you have scraps that behave like this?

Frankenmats.

Do you recall, before I got ill, way back to February? 

I was playing about with crumbs.

Well today, they finally got some more attention. I had gone into my room to have another look at those florals to see if I could come up with a solid plan for them. But I was distracted by the crumbs. I have played about making up blocks here and there and had even gotten some of them sewn into good sized pieces for placemats. One was even quilted, using the templates which Tony gave to me at Christmas. Today I found myself making Frankenbats for the rest of the pile..

Some have not only frankenbats, but also Frankenbacks. LOL

Some are more scrappy than others, but that's ok, these are just utility mats for my table, and I wanted to use them to practice using my quilting templates.

In hindsight, all of those tiny little crumbs and the multitude of seams was probably the wrong project for a first try at using my templates.

I struggled at times to move my sandwich and the template in unison.

A close inspection will reveal many little mistakes.

But I can live with the errors and to be honest, the fronts are so busy, even I'm hard pressed to find the wobbles and I'm easily distracted by all of the happy memories of other quilts and projects all sewn together to create these Frankenmats.

And here they all are.

Six Frankenmats and a frankenrunner.

Not only will those very busy tops hide my first attempts, I think they might hide a few spills too.

Now, I just need to find a suitable binding fabric. I think I may have enough of the blue grey that I used for the backings. Hmm, where is my tape measure?

*

While I sewed in my room, Tony fiddled in his room and visited the kitchen to bake bread.

He made a pretty good looking loaf.

*

ANZAC Day tomorrow.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old;

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of he sun, and in the morning

We will remember them.

Oh Crumbs, another squirrel.

 My growing collection of scrap fabrics all needs to be sorted, pressed, tidied up and put away, which has meant that my baskets of crumbs were filling up fast. So over the weekend I've sat down at my machine and started to sew.

I wonder where all this little girls friends are? 

She's not really a crumb, but as she is alone I popped her in to the basket.

I'm not sure which bundle she arrived in but I do know she was the only one.

I made sure that she has good company.

It really does not take long to make up these crumb blocks.

I started to put them together in to placemat sized blocks, thinking they would be good for practising using my rulers, but as I laid them out on the floor a squirrel planted another idea in my head. LOL

If I just turn one this way, and one that way, add a little sashing, where is my tape measure.......?

LOL

There are plenty of crumbs left, so that particular squirrel may just happen.

*

How was your weekend?

I'm tired, I've done three extra shifts over the weekend, this evening and tomorrow evening with be 6 and 7 shifts without a day off, I'm looking forward to Wednesday.

Right now I'm off to prepare a very special Valentines lunch for Tony, to make up for the fact that I'm working this evening. 

Happy Valentines day.