SBChallenge Finished!

Quilt number 20 from my personal Stash Busting Challenge is finished and I am also going to declare this the end of my Challenge. Since July last year I have made twenty quilts from the original unloved stash which is almost all used up. I still have the Kaffe Fassett charms squares and the Thimbleberry fabrics, but I'm sure they will become donation quilts at some point in the future. Now I want to focus on using some of the fabrics I DO still love!!

Here's a shot of the little preemie quilts finished too. I have 3 incubator covers and 4 preemie quilts ready to hand in at my next Guild meeting ... be ready Shirley :)

SBChallenge - Flimsey 20 quilting ...

The sample I used for the Quiltathon was acutally the 20th quilt to be made with my Stash Busting challenge fabrics. I've been working on the quilting today.

I decided to make a focus of the centre 'butterfly' motif, stitching some feathers in the 'wings' and trying out continuous circles in the 'body'.







As it isn't very easy to see the detail when it's stitched out on the quilt, here's my sketch of the idea too.











The rest of the quilt has an all over butterfly meander from the Pajama Quilter's 2nd DVD. It was fun to do :)

Quiltathon ...

The Quiltathon was yesterday and Nine Patches were disappearing left, right and centre!! I was incredibly nervous about presenting, but everyone was very attentive and supportive and I think a great time was had by all. Most of the ladies chose to do the smaller (36" square) size and everyone left with at least their top finished, a few had started their quilting and two ladies just had the binding left to do!! We did a show and tell photo at the end (that's me on the far right hand size holding up someone else's work so they could take a photo) ...

... and here's a couple who escaped before the group picture ...

... and here's the ladies all working away industriously :)

Preparation ...

My local Guild is holding it's annual Quiltathon this Saturday. I will be showing 12 members how to piece the Disappearing Nine Patch for donation quilts. So there's been no sewing this week as I've been concentrating on the preparation and making sure I have everything I need and know what I'm going to say. I've never done this before and I'm really nervous about it, so please wish me luck :)

Oops ...

Why is it that things always go wrong when it is important that they don't?!?

I'm working on the last of my Stash Busting Challenge fabrics and making another Disappearing Nine Patch incubator cover. This one is going to be the samples for a step-by-step demo for my Quilt Guild in just over a week's time. I had put the fabrics to one side a few weeks ago - 2 FQs of dark peach, 2 FQs of cream TOT and 1 of grey for the accent and these all coordinated with the border fabric. When I came to pressing and cutting the fabrics, I realised that one of the cream fabrics wasn't a FQ so I would be a bit short of the 6" squares needed. No worries, I found a light grey that would work nicely for the additional squares ... but I miscut ... twice!!!!


How to save it? ... by cheating slightly! I ended up with not enough light 6" squares, but enough fabric to cut a 3" strip instead. Which is why I ended up with a nine patch that actually has 12 pieces of fabric involved!! Luckily this is the block that is demonstrating already being cut into pieces, so noone will ever know - it will be our little secret :)

Dinosaur Finished.

Here's the dinosaur quilt bound and finished. I quilted in the ditch around the footprints and the blocks they were in. Over the rest of the quilt I did a random zig-zag which was inspired by a Laura Lee Fritz design in "Mindful Meandering". Quick and easy :)

More feathers ...

Ever since I discovered I could do feather quilting, I've been trying to dream up ways of getting more chances to practice!

Here is a little preemie quilt that is made from a few orphan bowtie blocks left over from a swap after I had made a twin sized quilt for myself. I thought the red blocks were a bit too dominant to use in the larger quilt, but they go very well together.

The white spaces were calling out for feathers, so I did some of Patsy Thompson's 'circling the element' motifs. They are far from perfect, but I think they are pretty :)

Dinosaur flimsey ...

What fun I've had with those dinosaur fabrics!!

Coming up with the design was tricky because there were so many limitations on how wide or long I could cut the strips, how many of each strip I had, wanting to keep the large dinosaurs upright, etc. With all that to think about I never even gave assembling the top a thought. However, when I wrote my last blog post I suddenly realised that it would be problematic. Luckily, apart from having to use several partial seams, it went together much more smoothly than I feared - phew!

The worst bit was having to make eight dinosaur footprints with paper-piecing - it was so VERY time consuming and reminded me why I rarely do PPing :)