Jennie's Threads

Well that was a pretty efficient quarter! I started out with 34 items on my #ridiculouslylongfinishalonglist and I have finished 14! Here's my customary last minute finish! This post is linking up for the second of the two Garland City quilts I shared in the last post! Finished at lunch time today! And here are the other finishes from the last 3 months: Long Time Gone Toby's Foxes Alba's Stars Mixed Up City #Snailday Far Beyond the Edge of the World there lived Flamingos (Fussy Cut Sampler) Coral Queen of the Sea (mermaid doll) Little Red Riding Hood (doll) #1yearofstitches hoop Fox Cushion Pineapple Cushion Steph's Travel Pouch And the other Garland City Quilt !

Earlier this year, @Gnomeangel hosted another round of #100days100blocks - 100 blocks in Tula Pink's City Sampler block in 100 days. And last Christmas I'd collected together a bundle of Garland fabrics from Cotton and Steel. A match made in heaven! Half way through the quilt along I decided that rather than make one large quilt - we already have quite a few Christmas quilts - I would make two smaller quilts and give them to the girls at the start of advent. We do advent books, where each day the girls unwrap one Christmas-themed book from under the tree. My romanticized vision is that we can snuggle up with the advent quilts and read the advent books! Obviously that's unlikely with two toddlers.... but a girl can dream. Each quilt is 43" x 57" and made up of 48 blocks. I sashed those blocks with Kona pepper and swore lots - I hate sashing. The backing is an Asda duvet cover, and when I realised it wasn't big enough to back both quilts I swore so...

Of course I joined in with @Gnomeangel's latest quilt along. But this one is a little different. It's slow, just a single block a week for nearly a year, and it's all EPP (with a bit of applique for the finish). The pattern is by Sue Daley and is called Round We Go. Each block is an EPP star block, finished with curved edges resulting in a 7" diameter circle block. I was stumped for a colour scheme on this. I had originally thought all low volumne, then I saw some of the coloured mock-ups and decided I wanted to use colour too. So I went towards my standard rainbow. Until I noticed this washi tape in amongst the other (many) washi tapes in my drawer, and the colours just drew me in (you can see it along the bottom of the pattern booklet in the photo below). So here's my fabric pull: peach, coral, pink, purple and aqua, with grey-tone low volumes to finish it off. The original plan was a royal blue background (maybe darker than the blue in the photos below...

To say I am chuffed with this finish would be an understatement! It became one of those projects that always loomed in the background and I dreaded tackling it. Of course, I built it up out of all proportion and left myself just 7 hours of stitching time to get it finished. Which it turned out was exactly what it needed. In May 2016 I made my not-quite-a-sister-in-law-but-she-seems-pretty-permanent, Saika, a scrappy pouch  (nicknamed the Baby Brain pouch as I made such a bloody mess of it) as a birthday present. Her partner, my sister-in-law, then requested the same style as a travel pouch for their trip to the States. I had 18 months! No problem. She had certain requirements: it had to be big enough to fit a flat sheet of A4 paper inside, and it had to have space for passports. I added the requirement that it should be a zipped closure so nothing could get lost, and that was where I stumbled. I couldn't think of how to do it. Until 3 weeks ago when someone posted a wa...

It had to be this quilt for the Bloggers Quilt Festival hosted by Amy . This is my finished 365 quilt.  Eighteen months from first stitch to last, and a baby along the way - this was most definitely a challenge! A block a day for a year - it totally took over my life! I started piecing tiny, deceptively straightforward, 3" blocks in January 2016 - that first inner dark border. The blocks became increasingly complex through January and into February as Kathy, the designer, walked us through new techniques each week/10 days. By the end of March, we had the centre and the first dark border complete. Then I gave birth to Jessica. And fell behind. It was most inopportune timing, as the blocks for May and June were the 6" blocks that made up that first light border. They combined all the skills we'd learned to far with some of the smallest pieces of fabric I've ever worked with! But each individual block was a stunner. At one point I was over 80 blocks behind...

This is the last of the finishes I've been saving up and waiting to share with you. It's a baby quilt I made for a friend's little boy, Toby, and although it's really a "welcome to the world" present, the delay in getting it finished, meant that I only gave it to the family this weekend, when he was christened (and Mum and Dad got married!). The pattern is the fox block from Elizabeth Hartman's Fancy Forest quilt - I told you I was getting my money's worth out of this quilt. I picked a fun rainbow of colours and a navy background that I already had in my stash. The backing had to be foxy too, though I ended up buying two foxy backings, so now I need to make another one! Quilting this was a challenge. I'd always planned to do a cross hatch but what colour thread: navy would blend well on the background but be stark on the fix faces, grey would show everywhere, but not be as stark on the foxes... in the end I picked a mid grey and it...

Good friends of our got married this weekend. Holly, the bride, likes foxes (i.e. "For Fox Sake!") so when I saw the Sleepy Fox pattern by @3rdstoryworkshop I knew it was perfect. The fox is foundation pieced and went together very easily, though the Art Gallery fabrics I used were very unforgiving. I use freezer paper to foundation piece and I've never had a problem before, but this time, I struggled to get the fabric to feed evenly though the machine. There are a couple of places where I'm not totally happy, but once washed you won't ever know. I quilted it up with some matchstick quilting in the background on the diagonal. This inevitably led to quite a bit of distortion, however, the finished cushion would have been larger had I not been an idiot when trimming.... I added the eyes with a small amount of hand embroidery and a cushion back using the same tutorial I turn to every time by Adrianne @adrianneonthewindyside. It is foolproof and magical and g...

You know when you see something on line and just have to drop everything and make it. This was one of those things. The Pineapple block was part of Fabric.com's summer block party. I had no intention of joining in, but you see things pop up in your feed... and this pineapple did just that. I have a bit of a thing for pineapples at the moment, so I stopped, took a look, and before I knew it I'd made a block. I taped it to the wall for a bit and enjoyed looking at, until it fell down and got lost in the rubble of my sewing desk. So when it came to writing up my quarter 3 Finish Along list, I decided it was time to do something with it, rather than let it become just another orphan block. Both girls had expressed a liking for it, and the best way to have something to be shared is a cushion on the sofa. Popular with all the family except my husband. He's so tall he doesn't need or like cushions. I added some more background to the original 12" block - making...

So in my last post, you will have read about how I found a Little Red Riding Hood doll panel, but by the time I cam e to stitch it, I had two daughters who needed dollies. I went on a hunt online and found a mermaid doll - perfect for Mia. And it turned out that the panel was in stock at the fabric shop just a few minutes drive from where my dad use to work. I rang the shop, and they put one aside for me. I warned them it was my Dad coming in to pick it up. He's a good-un so he popped in on his way home from work one night and the ladies in the shop immediately knew who he was!  It still took a few months for me to get round to making her. The pressure of a million things to do before we went on holiday seemed the perfect time to add this to the mix - wouldn't it be great for the girls to have new dollies when we go camping. Thank goodness she only took a few hours one evening to make up. Mia loved her in her little suitcase, and she certainly helped entertain the kids...