Zigzag heaven or hell?

I have been sewing the minibeasts onto the Learning at Work Day quilt, and it hasn't been all plain sailing. I'm more of a needleturn girl myself, but didn't feel that I wanted to needleturn minibeasts of others' making for a Linus quilt!

On the plus side, it has been a quick and easy way to fix the beasts to the background.

It's also been a good opportunity for fun with all the variegated threads I have succumbed to buying, and then never used.

On the minus side, the fabrics have frayed a bit, and there are lots of threads to cut off (although they make the legs of some beasts look authentically hairy!).

But the biggest problem has been thread tension. The fabric I used for the sky wasn't particularly good quality - it was the biggest piece of blue I could find at the time, and I wish I had sewed some better quality pieces together instead. Even though I used Vilene at the back to stabilise it, the letters in particular are quite puckered. I reduced my thread tension and increased my stictch length for the rest of the applique, which has made it much better.

You can see the problem here, although it looks better in this picture than it looks in actuality.

The question is, do I unpick the letters and resew them, or just keep my fingers crossed that it will 'quilt out'? Your opinion please.

Applique

I have been busy adding applique to improve three quilts. First I have finished the leaves on the houses quilt, and think it links the blue and green sections adequately. It's a bed quilt for a little girl, and I think she will love it. The left hand side is needleturn and since it was going pretty slowly, I decided to try and speed things up by doing the right hand side leaves by the freezer paper and spray starch method. In the end, I made a couple of yo-yo flowers, which looked like screwed up pieces of fabric, but in any case, they were too large to blend with the leaves, so I decided to leave well alone.

By this time I was in applique mood, and decided to add something to the green and yellow baby quilt. These jumping rabbits seemed to be the answer, and definitely improve this quilt. They are Heat and Bonded and zigzagged.

By this time, I was on a roll, and with my Heat and Bond out, decided to continue to embellish. I had had a Linus quilt donated, which was not really in very child-friendly colours. I thought a nice lorry would set it off nicely. This is the result.

The lorry's turned out great, but I don't think it's made much impact on the quilt! Any suggestions?

Old and new

Tonya has posted a photo taken out of her kitchen window. Poor Tonya will be very jealous when she sees the view out of mine, as all she looks at is the side of a building! (OK, I know you're lucky enough to live in fabulous Paris, Tonya, but you can't have everything your own way!)

As you can see, I'm not much of a gardener, although I have quite a lot of tubs on the patio - which is directly in front of the window and out of shot. Once the spring comes, the leaves hide the house at the bottom of the garden and make it quite private and pleasant. The sun comes round from the side of the garden and sets at the back, so we have a lovely mixture of sunshine and shade in the garden at any one time. Perfect! What do you see out of your kitchen window?

As Project Linus co-ordinator I get a lot of donations. Obvoiously they are mainly quilts, tops or quilt blocks, but sometimes it's sewing related stuff people don't want, which I am able to sell to get money to buy wadding (this is the only thing I rarely get donations of). Recently, someone gave me a box which had belonged to a lady who had died. When I opened the box, it was obviously works in progress.

One project is the inevitable hexagon quilt, with a little bag of hexgons precut from all kinds of fabric (including the dreaded Crimplene!) and the other is Cathedral Window, with two long sections joined up, and lots of fabric cut up and put into little packs with their cardboard templates all ready to go. Supplies are in the tin, along with the instructions for the quilt cut from a magazine. It's somehow sad that all that effort and hard work went into starting something which will never now be finished. I'll take the completed pieces to my local group's sales table and see if someone would like to adopt them. The fabric will go into the Linus boxes. Thankyou, fellow quilter, we're all thinking of you.

My works in progress continue to progress. I've made two more blocks for my Blind Man's Fancy quilt, so only two more to go. Then I will sash them, but I haven't decided what colour to go for. I'm tempted to go for lilac or a pale blue, but then green would look very nice too. What do people think?

I've also been getting on with my applique. Poor DH has a stinking cold, so we haven't been out much this weekend, and while he's been slumped on the settee, I've been plying my needle. So far, so good.

Young quilters

A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a teacher at a local school, who wanted to make a quilt for Project Linus with her children during their Art Week. She and her assistant came round to see me, and discussed their ideas. They wanted to do a Noah's Ark theme, with different animals appliqued onto idividual blocks, but weren't sure whether this was possible with Year 5 and 6 (9 and 10 year old) children. I was able to introduce them to the wonders of Heat'n'Bond, and after a rummage in my donated fabric collection, they went away very happy.

On Wednesday, DD and I went over to the school to help out. The children in this group were Year 5s, a mixture of boys and girls.

First they chose their designs, and drew them onto Heat'n'Bond.

Here you can see an octopus, a giraffe and half a butterfly ready to trace. (Unfortunately, due to concerns about abuse, I am not able to take photos including children's faces. Never mind, it's good to see youngsters with needles in their hands, even if we can't see the expressions of concentration on their faces!)

Here are the parts of the butterfly ready to cut out and be ironed onto the background fabric.Lots of effort as everyone (including me!) tries to remember how to do blanket stitch.

It's not as easy as it looks to pull the needles through Heat'n'Bond, even using both hands.
Here's an accident waiting to happen - it was inevitable that someone would sew the block to their trousers, although strangely enough, it was neither of these two boys!

Here are the blocks which the Year 6 group had already worked on, ready to finish the next day. Obviously there will be two of each animal and just one ark. I'll look forward to receiving the finished quilt, and will post pictures when it's ready.