My first village quilt

I knew that I wouldn’t be making quite so many charity quilts this year (after all one a month is quite a lot!) but I didn’t think it would take until now for me to finish my first charity quilt of the year. I guess that’s partly down to life, but also not having the defined structure that I had last year with the mystery block of the month.

Earlier in the year I decided to try and use as many scraps as I could for these charity quilts, and this cute ‘village’ pattern by Sherri from A Quilting Life looked like it could be just the thing, as I mentioned when I posted my quilt plans for this year.

And with my tin of scraps I’ve been diligently making little scrappy houses, thoroughly loving the process of matching fabrics together.

I’ve taken the tin of scraps to a few sewing and patchwork group sessions and my houses were starting to accumulate. Which got me to wondering how many houses make a small village.

There was one way to find out, and as I’m a visual person (no surprises there!) I laid them out on top of my last charity quilt to gauge my progress. Well it worked for me!

And it gave me the spur to complete the last five or so I needed to equal(ish) the size of my previous quilts.

It wasn’t long before my village assembled, and acquired additional borders.

While I still love the look and process for straight line quilting, I wanted to try something different for this quilt. Partly because I’m wondering how straight line quilting would work for my larger mystery block of the month quilt, both practically and design-wise, or if something with more curves would be better suited to the mostly log cabin quilt.

But anyway without knowing more about wavy quilting I didn’t feel informed enough to make that decision, so I’ve wavy quilted this village using one of the preset stitches on my machine.

And I quite like how the wavy quilting turned out.

I also love how the scrappy houses have come together to form the perfect little village and I know that this design was the right choice for my charity quilts for this year. Isn’t it cute?

You can see my other quilts I’ve made to donate to Project Linus - a charity whose mission is to provide love, a sense of security, warmth and comfort to children, who are sick, disabled, disadvantaged or distressed through the donation of new, homemade, washable quilts and blankets.

A week of finishing up projects

Some weeks are more industrious than others aren’t they? And that’s been the case here, unwittingly it has been a week of finishing up projects, some of which have been ‘on the go’, even though some may not necessarily have been verbalised previously, for a while.

And it feels good.

I’ve plenty more projects to start, but it’s so good to get some over the line, or in one case over the line as it is now. I could be a perpetual project starter - I have plenty to start, and the materials to start many of those - but there’s something about finishing and achieving isn’t there that’s equally as rewarding. The ‘glow’ of making it happen, making the change you planned and seeing just how well it turned out too.

I don’t know if it’s coincidence or all part of life, but this week I’ve also completed my dental treatment plan. Since my crown fell out earlier in the summer, and subsequent infection, a root filling and a new crown or two I’ve been a regular visitor to the dentist practice just up the road from us. I found them one night while I was kept awake with excruciating pain from that infection - tooth ache is not a good pain, but it certainly sharpens the mind when you need it sorted, I’d been meaning to get the crown looked at and nature said right now please!

I’m hoping that my troublesome toe takes some hints and also continues to behave and get itself completely healed. The x-ray results I was waiting on showed no breaks, no fractures, no infection and nothing really of concern, which is good and a little frustrating. I was hoping that it would provide the answers, but no. It is less troublesome than it has been, and in the most recent appointment the doctor said my body needs time to heal. So it’s got some more time, but is on a watching brief!

But back to my industrious week.

My Great Granny quilt top

It was only in August that I wrote about the deliberation that lay ahead, but it turns out that didn’t materialise quite as much, or for as long as I expected. After taking a punt on the sashing between the blocks - I randomly picked the patterned blocks, and randomly placed them - after a fair bit of rearranging and crawling around on the living room floor, I finally worked where they looked best, and sewed them into place before I could change my mind!

I did spend some time deliberating if I should add another border or two, but decided that as I’d already deviated from the pattern by including more blocks, that another deviation wouldn’t harm. I also wasn’t sure that a patterned border would actually be seen, or add much, and so I declared my quilt top finished.

There’s a little way to go before declaring the quilt finished, but I’m ok with that. I need to think about what I’ll use as backing, get some wadding and then assemble it - and then can consider how to quilt it. But a large chunk of this is done, which I’m grateful for - it’s been a long time getting here though, I started it back in 2017, and it’s been one of those projects that I pick up and put down.

New life with a box of dye

Well, two boxes actually. I’d had plans to use the black dye on this tablecloth for a while, but hadn’t quite made it happen. Then recently I found the tablecloth again and remembered just how much I liked it, but how it didn’t work with our redecorated space. The tablecloth originally was bought in Bruges by mum for my oval mahogany table, but since we’ve got our new white glass table the cream and natural coloured lace tablecloth didn’t really work. So (and after checking a long time ago) this was the week the box of dye came out - and it’s turned out brilliantly.

I wasn’t sure if the lace would take the dye, but in fact that’s taken it more strongly than the material which is a slate grey. You’ll also be pleased to see that I haven’t totally ditched my love of colour - the multi-coloured throw and chairs are here to stay, at times now though they’ll be paired with this rather elegant revamped tablecloth.

While I was winning with the dye, I thought I’d try my luck with an older and no longer used duvet set. Again, there was nothing wrong with it but the colour was from a previous iteration of our bedroom’s colour scheme, and somehow this set had never made it into use in our spare bedrooms. For me the colour was just a bit meh, a bit too beige and nothing - or it was. It is now the most glorious olive green, and again I was pleased to see the stitch detailing also take the colour. I know that this will be the perfect foil and show off a future project I have planned - you see, there’s always a project forming somewhere!

You never really know how the box of dye and materials will take, and thankfully I’ve been really pleased with both of these this week and now I have some newly refreshed older items to make use of and bring into use once more.

A new cardy

Like so many of my projects I get to a point where the making is done, and then I put it aside often starting something new before finishing a project completely. And that’s been the case with this cardigan too - for me, the thrill is the crochet part not the putting together part which is mad really as the putting together part is just as important.

And so, another project called to me this week - look, it was so close to being done.

It’s another project where I’ve gone slightly off-piste. The pattern called for bold stripes of alternating colours, but I figured this soft grey was the perfect foil for some artisan yarn I’d bought a while back. I was pretty sure I wouldn’t have enough to continue the pattern to the shoulders though, and so decided to set aside two of the skeins to use for the sleeves and to use the rest for the main body and to see how far I could get. Turns out that was up to the arm holes, and so that worked out quite well, and has become my design feature by default, which I actually quite like.

Once the body was made I decided I wasn’t so keen on a straight edge, and much preferred a deep rib - and so I dug out my knitting needles and added one. That was a bit of trial and error as the first time I realised I hadn’t picked up enough stitches to make it actually wearable, but knowing this meant success the second time round.

Which just left the buttons. I have a stash of buttons which seems to keep growing, so I knew I must have some that would work. And I did, just not enough of the same design, so the lower half will have the round traditional style buttons and in keeping with the ‘doing it my way’ approach the top four buttons will be square.

So a good week getting things done my own way, as usual!

Deliberation lies ahead

If you’ve been here for a while then you’ll know that I’m a fan of scrappy patchwork quilts, and may even know that I had a grand plan to make my own using fabrics from my stash. As it turned out, progress has been slow - it’s been on the go since 2017, but as the saying goes you can’t rush a good thing! Or that’s my excuse anyway.

Over the Christmas break of 20/21 I picked it up again, the delay had been cutting the cream fabric which surrounds the coloured blocks, and once that was done I’ve been plodding through making up the blocks. The pattern says twenty blocks, but I’ve decided to make more i) for practice, ii) because I’d already sewn more when I realised and mostly because iii) so I can make sure the quilt fits a double sized bed.

This week I finally met the target of my forty blocks. Some are better than others, but overall even though I say it myself, they’re pretty good.

So having reached the target, I’ve stepped out of my chain sewing comfort zone and I’ve trimmed all the blocks so the final cream piece can be added on all four sides.

The next few stages are ones which create some offcuts. Hating waste I contemplated what I could do with them, but as I have no need for even more new projects they have gone into the bin.

Now I’m ready to square off the blocks. I’ve practised this next step on my wonkiest blocks, with the ones where the seams were not quite aligned. And I’ve surprised myself - this was my first sewing project for a long time, and since I started putting the blocks together I temporarily broke off to sew masks for both MOH and I during the early stages of Covid.

I’ve got fifteen blocks that are trimmed, so that leaves 25 to go - and then the deliberation and procrastination can start as I’ll need to decide on the layout for the quilt top, and exactly how many blocks I’ll use and the subsequent adjustments needed for the rest of the pattern.

With any luck, and a good wind behind me, I could actually have a quilt top in the not too distant future!