Busy, busy

This week has been incredibly busy, as I have been out every night. There has been a committee meeting, belly dancing, quilting group, rehearsal, Poems and Pints evening, where I read two poems (and drank alcohol!) and then a hen night for a friend who will be getting married for the second time in a couple of weeks. Add to this teaching a workshop on 'Sizzling Strips' and you'll see why I've not kept up with my blogging - neither posting nor reading. Never mind. This week will be very quiet. Only dancing is on the cards, so I should be able to catch up with myself.

I was inspired by Cheryl's posting of a gorgeous stripey animal, to make a string dog. Here he is.

DH thinks his legs are a bit strange (AND that he looks like a cat!) but I don't care. My dogs are all a bit experimental, and I've learned lots by making them.

Here is Stripey with all his friends. He stands out a bit, but there we are, it's tough being an individual! I will make some more dogs before I start to join them together.

The class I taught for Piecemakers went very well. It's really a colour exploration and everyone felt that they had learned more about how colours went together, and the uses of light, medium and dark, so I was happy. In the afternoon, I realised we were short of milk, so nipped out to the local garage to get more.

On the way back I noticed this house having its roof rethatched, and thought it was interesting. Thatched roofs are so pretty, but I'm glad we're under slate!

One down, four to go!

I have finished the first of my challenge quilts! OK, it was a cheat really, as most of the quilting was done, it only had to be finished off, the border quilted and binding put on, but at least it's now finished and not languishing in my UFO box (where it has been since the end of 2006!).

The blocks were made by the members of a quilting group I belong to called 'Flutterwheels' and are from Margaret Miller's fabulous book 'Strips that Sizzle'. Everyone made six blocks and then we had great fun playing with them, and trying out different arrangements and combinations. At the end of the meeting they were raffled, and I won! This is one quilt I will definitely be keeping!

The quilting posed a bit of a problem, as I wanted to keep the sizzle and the colour changes obvious. In the end I meander quilted it with four different colours - light blue, dark blue, yellow and gold, to enhance the colors rather than mask them.

The borders were filled with my all-time favourite - feathers! I love doing these, as they are easy, very forgiving and look great.

A left over block became the label, and it's all done. Hooray!Now I have an apology to make. For some reason I thought it was Jacquie who had set this challenge, but it wasn't - it was Peg. I'm really sorry for that blunder and still amazed not only that I have accepted this challenge, but that there are 65 other people who have too! have a look at their progress by following the links on Peg's blog.

Confession time

I belong to several quilting groups, but my favourite is called 'Flutterwheels' (well, we had to call it something!). This is an informal group of nine quilters who want to push their skills a bit. We meet 6 times a year in each others' houses, and have a great time. Some people had been on an unsatisfactory City & Guilds course, so as an alternative to this, and the fact that they had ended up with lots of little samples of things which were neither use nor ornament and certainly wouldn't go together to make anything at all, we decided on a raffle format. Each member makes one block (or more, depending) and then the blocks are raffled at the next meeting.

This year's theme is stars and I was the lucky winner of some lovely purple stars from Nancy Johnson Srebro's book 'Stars by Magic'.

Don't they look fabulous? It's lucky that there are nine members of the group, because it makes a perfect quilt arrangement.

Now comes the confession. The only rule of the group is that you must make the blocks up within a year of winning them. This is to stop people getting burdened with UFOs, but didn't work in my case. In November 2006 I won some sizzling strips blocks, and although I put the blocks themselves together, I have only just finished the top!

I was really hoping to do something clever with the border - extend the top into the border or something, but this week I decided enough was enough and I needed to finish it. I'm quite plesed with the border treatment (although, as usual, I didn't have enough of the light blue border fabric to do the whole thing). I'm just quilting it at the moment, so don't let the other memebrs of Flutterwheels know that I'm so tardy, will you?!

Strips that sizzle!

I have been quilting DD's sofa quilt this week, but ran out of thread. Machine quilting is great but you can certainly get through miles of thread! I can't get any YLI variegated thread locally, so have sent off for more. In the meanwhile I was inspired by Wanda's gorgeous sizzling strips (go back to January 11th, but be prepared for serious inspiration on the way!) and Elaine's to rummage round in my UFO box to find a set of blocks I won in a raffle at a local quilt group which had been waiting to be joined together. There were 45 of them, so I made a few more to make 49 and then played around with them a bit to see how I wanted to arrange them.


The top bit is the part where you can see the sizzling of the dark and light stripes going on, but I thought the zigzag added interest. Now I can't decided whether to just add a border and make it into a Linus/lap quilt, or whether to do something more interesting (like add some more blocks but change the colour gradually to yellow and green). Maybe it'd be better to experiment on a whole new quilt than try to mess about with this one. Any ideas out there?