Raindrops on roses...

....and whiskers on kittens! (Don't you love that song!)

After I started quilting, and before I prioritised quilting, I did a bit of scrapbooking. My sister still does, she makes beautiful cards for us for birthdays and Christmas and Easter. They're exquisite. Anyway, I digress! When I was a keen scrapbooker probably my favourite company was one called Basic Grey. Imagine how thrilled I was when I discovered that Moda (creators of all wonderful pre-cuts!) had teamed with Basic Grey to make FABRIC!!! Sadly, I discovered this after they had already released two of my favourite paper lines as fabric. With the help of a LOT of internet searching, I did manage to pick up some Urban Couture and some Sultry, and they are definitely a few of my favourite things!
This is the quilt using Sultry.



Displayed care of my new "design wall" (usually known as the really ugly green curtains in my unit!)

It doesn't have a name yet, although I'm open to suggestions. It's a disappearing nine patch, and went together super fast.






I really want to machine quilt it myself, as it's not huge, and it feels like it might be a managable size for my first machine quilting experience. I have visions of a large twirly flower in each of the large squares with trailing swirls to join them together, but first I have to baste it and I hate basting. I really HATE basting!




In the meantime I have 9 metres (or so) of binding to sew on to a secret project!

Back again!

So I've spent the last week or so making a fancy dress costume for a Bollywood themed birthday party. For a woman it's not so bad, you get a sari, which is really just 5.5 metres of fabric that needs to be wrapped around you (and in my case very carefully safety pinned!) But for a guy, not so easy! So last week I made pants, a satin vest, a 6 metre long sash, and a very stylish blue satin turban! The party was on Saturday, and Sir Pinky-ing and I looked very theme appropriate, and had an excellent time. I will confess that I remember now a number of things:
1) I really don't like sewing satin!
2) I would much rather be quilting
3) hot glue is not always a good thing
4) did I mention that I really intensely dislike sewing satin?

Tonight I did a little something for myself. I've long been bothered by the plain boring strap that's on my camera. It's got the camera brand emblazened all over it in bright writing, and it's boring!! A quick google search revealed this tutorial by a blogger called Petchy (who I only discovered today!) I got right to it tonight and it's already done!! Here is the finished result




I really like the way it turned out. Of the whole process it took far longer to thread the strap back onto the camera than it took for me to make the strap! The only change that I made to the way Petchy did her tutorial is that I slip stitched mine closed. It will be easy enough to take it off again when (if) I get sick of the fabric. But for now I LOVE the oriental print, and it is in my favourite colour!

Candied Hexagons

Today I thought I would share with you a little bit of what I'm working on at the moment. My main project at the moment is Candied Hexagons by Kerry Dear. I was inspired by a number of ladies from the Sydney Scquilters group who have made different versions of the quilt. Di over at Snippets 'n' Scraps has a great summary of the history of this quilt, and you can see fantastic close ups of Janet's version at Quiltsalott.

The design by Kerry Dear was published in Quilter's Companion magazine, but the edition is now sold out. I was lucky and Kerry herself forwarded me a copy of the original pattern. The feature fabric used for the individual flower blocks in Kerry's version is a Kaffe Fassett print called Flower Lattice, which is also no longer available (or at least I couldn't find any!!) Instead I am using a Kaffe Fassett print called Bekah in Orange.

The pattern by Kerry Dear is machine pieced, but I was really looking for a portable project that I could take with, so I decided that I would hand piece the quilt. I should 'fess up at this point that I've never hand pieced a quilt before. Never. Ever. Oh, and I decided to do it by the English Paper Piecing method!

I have to say that I'm enjoying the whole process, I really love the paper piecing, and I'm managing to do a couple of blocks a week. Here is a sample of my blocks so far


Much to my surprise, I'm enjoying the process so much that I already know what my next paper pieced project will be, but I've promised myself that I'm going to finish this quilt before I move onto another hand project. There are 104 hexagons in the quilt, and including the "whole flower" blocks, I've made about 40 so far, so I'm nearly halfway there!

Until next time... Happy Quilting!