Jennie's Threads

I still love sitting with this hoop every evening and I love this week's additions. Here is the hoop at the end of Week 4. 23rd January: Purple long stitches. Time was tight on Monday night, so this was a great little section to cill in with some long stitch. 24th January: Pink chain stitch. I just went for it and added a huge long swirl of chain stitch to create some spaces round the area I had been working on, which I can go back and infill, and all the way up to the centre of the hoop - I'm looking for my next focus stitch to go in the hook of that swirl! 25th January: Lavendar chain stitch - I'm loving chain stitch at the moment. I used it to circle the raised Spider Web and divide up the space created last week. 26th January: French knots in very pale pink. I infilled one of the spaces created by yesterday's purple chain stitch. I love the texture you get from tightly stitched French knots. 27th January: Palestrina stitch in green to frame the swirls:...

As you may be aware, I'm a bit of a sucker for a quilt along. Don't say a word, Helen (@Archiewonderdog). Well Angie (@gnomeangel) has been rabble-rousing again and is leading us in #52weekswiththequiltersplanner quilt along. The quilters planner is a truly beautifully designed planner with space for everything - and quilting. It is a lovely, ring bound planner with some really nice quilt designs, a weekly block and free motion quilting design, inspirational quotes, and useful information. The dowside is that I don't need it as a planer as I have a very comfy bullet journal type system that I've used for a few years. And as such, I'm slightly uncomfortable that I spent a lot of money to get it from the States. I'll get over it! And the pretty blocks I've made so far are definitely helping. We're four weeks into the year and thus four blocks in. This is "unnamed": I confess I didn't really have a plan when I started. I had picked up ...

I am still thoroughly enjoying this project, but it is becoming increasingly difficult to stop at just "one" stitch - I can see the next few steps and I'm desparate to keep going. So far, I have mostly controlled myself! Here is how my hoop looks at the end of week 3 - I'm not sure this is going to last 52 weeks! 16th January: French knots: I added small green French knots in the gaps left by the blanket stitch already completed. 17th January: A simple line of purple backstitch. 18th January: A peach bullion knot wheel. I've only atempted bullion knots once before and they were a total disaster, so I was very pleased with how these went! 19th January: I added pink button-hole stitch around the endge of the bullion-knot circle - mostly it looks quite neat... I also added a few pink French knots to the centre of the circle. 20th January: a yellow chain stitch swirl to link the bullion knot circle to the existing sweep of stitches. 21 January: More ...

9th January: A combination of chain stitch in peach and blanket stitch in blue (bottom right) 10th January: Satin stitch in yellow 11th January: Stem stitch in green, snuggled up against the chain and blanket stitch combination. 12th January: Danish knots in two shades of purple. This is a totally new stitch for me, so I used this tutorial . It makes little triangular knots, that would be perfect for animals noses in the right embroidery! I had a bit of play with scale with this stitch and I will definitely be using it again! (top left) 13th January: Hungarian Braid Stitch (left hand side). This turned out heavier than I expected and needs some softening... 14th January:...so I added some pale blue chain stitch along one side. 15th January: And them some pink blanket stitch whipped with pale pink. You can follow daily progress on my Instagram account: @jenniesthreads

2017 will be my sixth year participating in the Finish Along. I find that absolutely incredible. And scrolling through my blog posts I count 112 finishes tagged with the Finish Along! I have no intention of counting how many items I put on the lists that weren't finished though, and I know for a fact that quite a number of those quilts appeared on my lists multiple times! Nevertheless, I find the support from the Finish Along absolutely vital to get me finishing all those projects I love to start! New year, new list. Here are my plans for Q1: My Small World is first up for the APQ Resolution project: I still have quite a lot of handquilting to go, but I bought some binding so I'm looking to bring this one to a conclusion. Mia's Big Girl Quilt: I made really good progress on this last quarter, finishing all the blocks and deciding on the next step. But that next step is sashing - which I loathe. Originally I had planned for this to be a Christmas present for her,...

Last year I did quite a lot of embroidery. And I really enjoyed it. Embroidery is where it all started for me - I grew up with cross-stitch, but about 8 years ago I saw a quilt hanging at a show with free embroidery on it. I talked to the stall-holder but decided it would be too complex for me. Two years later I finally bought the pattern and the fabric for the quilt - it just stayed with me, and every time I saw it, I loved it. And that quilt led me into quilting... fast forward to the start of last year. The quilt that started it all... Embroidery was still a constant part of my sewing routine, but, despite trying out some new stitches on Mia's advent calendar, it had got a bit stuck. Backstitch, French knots, chain stitch, lazy daisy stitch. That was pretty much my repertoire. But I didn't realise how stick I was until I stumbled across a new-to-me embroidery designer called Kelly Fletcher. It was one of those moments. I browsed through her Craftsy shop and pinned ...

Whenever Angie @gnomeangel announces a quilt along over on Instagram, you know it's going to be a good one. She's responsible for The Farmers Wife 1930s quilt along, and the #100days100blocks. Of course she has a couple of things kicking off at the start of 2017 and one of them is #snailday #gardensnailsquilt. I wasn't going to join in this one. But as I was browsing Instagram this morning, Mia saw the snails and declared undying love. As we scrolled through the pictures she named each snail she saw after family members. Life with a two-year-old is definitely entertaining. So I thought this could be a project for both of us. Mia loves pressing the buttons on my sewing machine, and helping, so this could be a project to work on together. We started today with the fabric used on her new cushion, a bit of navy and a light background. In the future she can pick out the fabric for the snail's shell, and I'll choose the body and the background - we're going ...

You may recall, that my original Finish Along list for Q4 was a tad... lengthy. Thirty-three items to be exact. I have a final finish today to bring the total finishes to 18! And the final finish was one that I had been putting off and putting off, but that took about half an hour. The embroidery was done ages ago, I just needed to mount them. Here they are! Here are the finishes, in no particular order: Aunty Carol's log cabin quilt , Orla's quilt and Hugo's quilt : three quilts for a neighbour who was moving away and two of her grandchildren Joy Jelly Roll quilt !!! After goodness knows how many years of ignoring it and its "issues". R2D2 cushion , Darth Vader cushion , Ellie-Jo's unicorn cushion , Mia's twinkle, twinkle cushion , the Jane Austen cushion , the citrus hexie cushion and a Joy cushion to match the quilt. The Bee-utiful Mini quilt - my favourite finish of the quarter. Inside Addition , Henry's quilt , ...

I'm cutting it fine, but here is another Finish Along finish. And this is one that's been hanging around for a while: three and half years ago I started piecing green, yellow, orange and pink hexagons together with no real plan in mind. Every so often, I pulled it out of it's zippy case and added  few more hexies. At the start of this quarter I had quite the blob. Time to make a plan, and a cushion is always a good plan. So I added a few more hexies and got bored again. I pulled it out just after Christmas and squared it up, measured it, added a few more rows. Decided it would be a small cushion! I quilted it up and added the backing this evening. I have to admit that the backing fabric was a major reason to get it finished - I saw this in a local quilt shop and would love to have bought enough to back a whole quilt. But I don't have a quilt in those colours. Just this cushion. Maybe I need to start a quilt to match the backing fabric? And here it is. I stru...