Jennie's Threads

Another quarter means another overly-long and highly-ambitious Finish Along List... I've left it to the last minute to write this list, so apologies for the lack of photos! 1. Long Time Gone: this quilt is the result of Gnome Angel's latest quilt along, and it's so nearly finished! I just need to add the binding. 2. Foxy Quilt - all of the blocks are pieced and next I need to cut the sashing. 3.Baby Stars quilt: we'll be meeting the little lady later this month, so need to get this finished. 4. Another owl quilt for another baby. I ordered the backing and I'm taking my colour scheme from that. 5. Mixed Up City is yet another version of the Tula Pink City Sampler and has to be finished before the end of July. 6. Snail day quilt. All of the snails Mia and I have been making will be a picnic blanket for out holiday - so that's an end of July deadline for this quilt too! 7. and 8. I'm going to use the Garland City blocks to make 2 q...

Hard to believe we're half way through the year already - time is flying. But that means it's time to see how I did with the Finish Along in the last quarter. My original list was its normal ambitious self, and I have a final finish tonight. These hoops required very little effort and yet have sat on my desk for literally months, waiting for me to get to them. They took less than an hour on Thursday evening! I had planned to add more sewing - quilting or embroidery. But the reality is that the fabrics are so pretty, I didn't need to do much - on one of the horse hoops I've actually added nothing. These are for Jess and Mia for their bedroom walls. As for the rest of the list, I do have one monster finish. The 365 Quilt Challenge 2016 quilt is finished!! And I couldn't be more chuffed of what I achieved - read all about it here . And I finished three baby quilts, all using the Fancy Forest pattern by Elizabeth Hartman - you'll be seeing more like ...

This is a quilt that came out of my love of all things sew-along. I made the blocks - armchair, sofa, side table with lamp and pot plant last November along with a fair few others, and then wondered what on earth I was going to with them! The pattern for the pieced strip is by Pen and Paper Patterns (who also created the snail pattern I've been sewing up each week) and is a dream to follow. There's nothing tricky - it's all rotary cut and it goes together like a dream. I had just received some of the Les Fleurs fabrics from Cotton and Steel, and I just knew I had to have a Les Fleurs sofa! The original pattern is completed with a quilt ladder, but that is something I will likely never ever have room for, so I replaced it with the just as unlikely, pot plant (I can't keep plants alive). The pot is pieced, but the leaves were free motioned on as I quilted. I had a sudden brainwave that I could add some of the large floral print from Les Fleurs to complete is as a ...

Time for the final rush of finishes for the quarter! This is just one of the many baby quilts I'll be making this year and it's for a friend who had her second child, a boy, back in March. I made Preppy the Whale for his older sister, so it felt right to return to an Elizabeth Hartman pattern for him. As I said in my earlier posts about quilts, using this pattern - I'm getting my money out of it - I think this is just the first such baby quilt! I used a grey with stars on for the background - it's from To the Moon and Back by Lewis and Irene and I need to buy more! All of the animals are made from solids, mostly Kona. I quilted a 3" cross hatch in pale grey. I showed the girls this quilt yesterday morning. Mia loved it and gave it a hug, and Jess kept saying "Wow". It's just as well I've picked up some fabric to make us the full size quilt very soon! This is a Finish Along finish. You can find my original list here .

I can't believe I've just typed that heading! When I made the block for January 1st 2016 I could not have imagined the journey this quilt would have taken me on. So make yourselves comfortable and grab a cup of tea, because this blog post may get lengthy! I'd seen the 365 Quilt Challenge on Facebook. I think every quilter on Facebook must have been aware of it. Loads of my friends had signed up and it kept popping up as a "Page you might like" thing. In the end, in November 2015, I joined the group, had a poke round. Decided it wasn't for me. One of the things that really put me off were the fabric requirements: you needed x amount of dark dark fabric, x amount of medium dark fabric, x amount of dark medium, medium, light medium, light, background.... I just couldn't get my head round those requirements. I'd looked at the mock ups on the wesbite and couldn't bring myself to pick a colour. I put it to the back of my mind. But I had obvious...

Well this week was the week. The Pineapple log cabin blocks. When I first got this pattern, and was contemplating joining in the sew along, this was the week that scared me. Sixteen, foundation-pieced, five-inch-finished pinapple log cabins. These are the last real blocks - just some checquerboards next week and then constructing the complete top. I knew that if I wanted to have a finished quilt by the deadline of the end of the quilt along, some forward planning would be required. So as I was cutting the many many many pieces of fabric for the other blocks in the qquilt, I made sure to cut strips to use for these blocks too. I've then been piecing them here and there throughout the project so I didn't have 16 to do all at once. By last weekend I had 8 done - less than I had hoped. But I've ploughed through the final 8 and I'm pretty pleased with how they look! I can see the end now!

This week is equilateral triangles. In the pattern, this unit (all 30 odd of them) is designed to be template pieced. I do not like templates. I find my accuracy, which is normally pretty hot, goes totally out of the window when I use templates. So I created my own foundation pattern, and these units went together remarkably quickly. They create two "blocks" for the final quilt and I am starting to think about putting this beast together....